Before bashing out emails and text messages by thumb became an accepted form of communication, typing was a fully manual skill. In the 80s, “the office” was an exclusive preserve for freaks who could type 40 words per minute at least. Those too modest or miserly to sign up for brick-and-mortar classes could pick up a software program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for $50. At my Catholic high school, the application was the typing class. The priests just switched on the computers.
Launched in late 1987, Mavis Beacon quickly assumed pride of place on home PC desks amid floppy disks for SimCity and After Dark. Among other features, Mavis gamified typing drills and tracked typing progress in explicit detail. Its defining feature was the elegant Black woman with a cream suit and slicked-back bob marching proudly off to her high-rise job on the cover of the software package. But it would take a few more decades for the bigger lesson in the pitfalls of relinquishing control over your image and likeness to corporate interests.
A new documentary, Seeking Mavis Beacon, not only throws that lesson into sharp relief, it has left the film-makers to wrestle with the irony of even pursuing it. “Now that the movie’s finished,” says the feature director debutante Jazmin Renée Jones, “I’m trying to protect her and her privacy.”
Premiering at Sundance, Seeking Mavis Beacon plays out like another classic PC game – Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Jones and the producer Olivia McKayla Ross set out on a journey to find the woman behind Mavis Beacon, a Haitian-born model named Renée L’Espérance. Back when app stores were still physical spaces, retailers were convinced a software program featuring not just any Black woman, but a dark-skinned Black woman, would turn off potential buyers. But Beacon went on to sell more than 6m copies over the next 11 years, a staggering result at a time when barely a third of American households owned a personal computer. It’s since gone on to become one of the most successful education products of all time.
Early in the film, Beacon is touted as a pioneer among “servile fembot assistants” – the “Aunt Jemima”-like “cyber doula” who midwifed Siri, Alexa and so many others; superfans have gone as far as deepfaking footage of Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey honoring Beacon’s global impact, which notably includes helping to make computer education accessible to people of color. The character’s cultural specificity further extended to the 3in-long acrylic fingernails that overlaid on screen; the clatter they made as Beacon typed in tandem with her users rang especially true to the documentary’s Black female creators. They treat L’Espérance’s decades-long retreat into reclusion like a missing Black woman cold case that was barely investigated. They pass out fliers, open a tip line, call around to former associates.
They set up an office that wouldn’t look out of place in a detective film, complete with a tangled conspiracy board; you might call it a noir if it weren’t for the film’s color palette so delightfully heavy on pastels. When leads dead-end, the film-makers pivot to drawing larger comparisons to modern online identity politics, showing how especially fraught they are in queer culture. “In the beginning, we had this whole ‘the personal is political’ Combahee River Collective idea for the film,” Ross says. “But then as we lived our lives, we started to breathe in larger theories. It just happened that we learned so much from trans femmes, trans women of color about the dangers of hyper-visibility and what it means for pictures of you to go viral. I think it was important to use the documentary as a space to watch those ideas be acted out in the world because you don’t always get to make that connection.”
In one scene, Jones and Ross console each other through an emotional breakdown brought on by a six-year production gestation that began before Covid; the Robot Chicken-style TV array in their office plays one of their biggest inspirations – The Watermelon Woman, a groundbreaking film about a young Black lesbian researching Fae Richards, a Black actor renown for playing stereotypical “mammy” roles in 1930s films. “I’m a maximalist,” Jones says. “There were so many references to shoehorn. I hope someone crosses this film and looks into the history.”
Meanwhile, other scenes that showcase pagan forms of Black spirituality will have viewers recalling another inscrutable Black quasi-personality from the Mavis Beacon era – TV’s Miss Cleo. The paranormal allusions seem intended as much to open up another potential pathway to reaching L’Espérance, as a means for the film-makers to release the building frustration from dealing with so many conflicting witnesses. When one of Beacon’s white guy developers tells Jones: “It’s OK if you never find [L’Espérance],” it takes everything in the director to maintain composure. “People only ever say this about Black women,” she’d say later.
Eventually, Jones and Ross nail down the chronology for L’Espérance: discovered while working at a department store perfume counter, L’Espérance was paid $500 to pose as Mavis Beacon. (Allegedly, she didn’t even know what a computer was.) That single payment bought the rights to photos but not derivatives. When the Software Toolworks, Beacon’s parent company, released the fifth edition of the app with a fresh image of their hero instructor looking as if she had been badly carved from a block of mahogany, L’Espérance sued. The company ultimately replaces her with a number of Black models – but none made nearly as strong an impression.
While the outcome of L’Espérance’s lawsuit isn’t clear, the app’s developers – your typical California garage startup dorks – conspicuously leave that alarming detail out of their carefully crafted folklore. “We had this whole vision of like, ‘We’re gonna do two interviews,’” says Jones recalling Seeking’s initial approach toward the Beacon braintrust. “We were gonna interview them first and let them lie to our faces, and then we’re gonna hold their feet to the flames, bring them back to headquarters and be like, ‘This is what we found.’ But then as we were constructing the film, I was like, I’m actually sick of people that are not Renée or someone close to Renée talking about her. So that was a conscious decision, to be like: I’m going to sacrifice the really satisfying moment of looking these men in the eye and saying ‘I know you lied to me’ in order to prioritize other things.”
After a cross-country dragnet and an exhaustive internet search, the film-makers only get as close as L’Espérance’s son – who politely tells Jones and Ross, despite their years-long vigil, that his mother would prefer to remain unfound. In a more traditional documentary, that ending would have been a project killer. But here, it’s just part of the journey. “Olivia and I learned way more than you ever should about a stranger,” says Jones, who still wrestles with how to celebrate L’Espérance publicly while also respecting her privacy. “So that’s where you see the tradeoff of, well, ‘If we can’t talk to Renee directly, let’s put ourselves in the film and talk to each other about this’ – and also plant this seed for our audience so they don’t feel the need to pick up where we left off.”
Hyperaware of the amateur gumshoes who may be watching, Jones teased the prospect of sequel projects that explore the identities of the women who followed L’Espérance in the Beacon role. “One of them is a life coach,” Ross says. “One of them is an actress. One of them was a Republican politician whose platform was to defund public education. We do want to share all this with the public, but before we could get into that continued history, we had to pay homage to the OG.”
The modern art piece of film she and Ross made unfurls like a bubbly, open-hearted message in a bottle that typeface could never do justice. The hope is that someday the OG teacher sees it and, maybe, smiles a little. “She’s aware the film exists,” Jones says, “and when we got into Sundance, she was aware of that, too. But for right now, from Renee’s standpoint, the vibe still very much: ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you.’”
Seeking Mavis Beacon is out in US cinemas on 30 August with a UK date to be announced
