Interview: Jazmin Jones

Building a 'Beacon'

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

September 4, 2024—In the new documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon, which opens Friday, September 6 for a week's run at the Roxie Theater, filmmaker Jazmin Jones and her cohort Olivia Ross try to track down the face of the popular 1980s software program Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.

That may not sound like the most compelling idea for a documentary, except for the fact Mavis Beacon did not exist.

"It's like Mavis Beacon was a really helpful role model," says Jones, who sat down with the SF Examiner to discuss her film. "And you see there's a certain point in the film where it's like, this is no longer useful, like I can only do so much with this fictional character. And then our journey spirals out in a way where I have to figure things out for myself."

While currently bi-coastal, Jones considers the Bay Area home. She was raised in Fremont, and was a youth filmmaker at Bay Area Video Coalition for eight years.

She began developing the Mavis Beacon project in 2018, applying for grants. She met her "partner in mischief," video artist Olivia McKayla Ross, who helps Jones in the onscreen hunt and also serves as associate producer on the film, and things really got going.

"She's the best," she says, adding that Ross is recovering from Long COVID and was not able to make the interview.

Jones mentions their eight-year age difference, and says that it was not a problem.

"On the internet, they're always trying to stoke this intergenerational war between Gen Z and millennials," Jones says. "And I'm like, no, we get along perfectly. Olivia is the peanut butter to my jelly."

Together the sleuths uncover the story that the developers of the software spotted a beautiful woman, Renée L'Espérance, working at the perfume counter at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. She was apparently paid $500 for the use of her likeness.

But then L'Espérance vanished, and has never spoken on the record about being Mavis, the face of what is, according to the movie, the #1 selling educational software package of all time.

Making their film, Jones and Ross were heavily influenced by Oakland-based filmmaker Cheryl Dunye, and especially her landmark The Watermelon Woman (1997).

In that, Dunye played a version of herself, embarking upon a video project about a (fictitious) Black film actor from the 1930s, who was not credited under her real name.

"To me, it is the template," says Jones. "It's so ahead of it's time. Cheryl has caught some flack about the personal elements that she included and the fact that it's like, I'm going to talk about what it means to be a queer person doing this as well. That's the fun of it!"

Yet, at some point, Jones and Ross needed to figure out what their film was going to be about, and where it was going.

"I think when people see this movie and see us as black femme queer people, they're like, yeah, 'Watermelon Woman.' And I'm like, no."

Jones and Ross began shooting in the summer of 2020, during the COVID lockdown. At first Jones thought about hiding the evidence of that time, but then decided to embrace it. Both women are seen wearing masks throughout.

"It was such a significant time in our lives as young people, and for Olivia specifically. She's part of a generation where they didn't get to have their high school graduation because of the pandemic," says Jones. "And so to me, it just felt really authentic to Olivia's experience."

To continue with this approach, Jones and Ross decided not to use any markers on the film; no dates or places are mentioned, and certain people are not even introduced.

In one early scene, Jones and an older gentleman are seen going through a storage facility, looking for a "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" CD-Rom. That man is, in fact, Jones's father.

"For someone who likes to talk so much, I don't love exposition," she says. "And so you are kind of forced to go on this journey through osmosis, where it's like, 'I guess that's your sister, 'cause she has your face?'"

Jones also turned to the idea of "trolling," in the style of filmmaker John Wilson and comic Nathan Fielder. The movie even includes "deepfake" moments of President Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Wendy Williams seemingly speaking about the "real" Mavis.

Another inspiration was French New Wave filmmaker Agnes Varda, who, in films like "The Gleaners and I," would suddenly pause her story to fiddle around with the camera, or film her hands.

"It's all a conversation about this weird, self-reflexive, auteur, queer cinema of ours," says Jones, smiling.

Indeed, Seeking Mavis Beacon may not begin, progress, or end like a typical documentary, but it certainly is a journey.

"I think people often don't know what they're going to get from this movie," Jones says. "They'll think, 'I don't know what's going on here.' And I'm like, 'it's a feeling.'"