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Watch JEZEBEL on NETFLIX

the script.

the stories.

I kept hearing a voice telling me to make my movie — make it - do it now. This is your window. Just do it.

These were not exact audible words but more an urging wave of impulses and intuition telling me that not only was it time, but there may not be another time to make this happen.

My story — Jezebel — is based on my real life. When I was 19 I was living in Las Vegas in a very tiny studio apartment where rent was due every Friday. I lived there with my sister ,our brother, my sisters boyfriend and her two year old son.

Our mother who adopted all of us siblings together at young ages was in hospice care and the end of her life was near. Hospital visits were overwhelming as her transition through death took many weeks. We’d cycle through these visits with the big question looming over us of what would we do when she was gone.

Tiffany (Tiffany Tenille), Juju (Rockwelle), Sabrina (Numa Perrier), Dominic (Stephen Barrington), enroute to Mom's funeral

My sister worked from the apartment as a phone sex operator. When she’d login in for her nightly shift we’d either have to leave the house or stay and hear the explicit sounds of feigned orgasms.

Imagine hearing your own sister smack and coo and pretend to be a white girl with blonde hair while moaning and bringing unseen men to climax after climax. It was quite the intro to the vast palette of where sexual fantasies can go.

After our mother died a bleakness set around us and the patience we had for each other while she was alive dissipated quickly.

I was no longer welcome in our tiny shared home. I needed to find work and start to make my own way. We were all on our own now.

Tiffany/Jezebel (Tiffany Tenille) arriving for her interview at BabeNet

My sister in her effort to show me the way (and the door) suggested I try internet modeling. That’s what they called it in 1998. The internet was this new fascinating portal that was not readily accessible. It was the perfect landscape for illicit desires to be performed and explored. It was the early days of a peep show. They can see you, but you can’t see them. They pay by the minute to keep the curtain open as you play out fantasies that they type to you. We couldn’t see smell hear or feel them. I walked into the office and was hired on the spot.

Jezebel is the story of how through this work I had my own sexual awakening and gained my own sense of Womanhood and autonomy.

I escaped the depths of grief surrounding me and brought myself out of poverty and towards my true dreams to be an actor and filmmaker.

When I left Las Vegas I treated this time in my life as my dirty little secret and never shared it with anyone - my sister and I never spoke of it again.

But I wrote.

I wrote every detail I could remember.

I purged every emotion I felt onto paper and I tucked it away in a drawer that I didn’t open until many years later.

Zoe Tyson & Tiffany Tenille rehearsing a scene

During those years I wrote and directed short films, I acted in plays, I booked my first TV role then eventually my first feature film role. Along the way of that I launched the indie streamer, BLACK&SEXY TV with a team of filmmakers — I also became a mother. With motherhood the voice came.

Director Numa Perrier dressed as Sabrina and Rockwelle dressed as Juju between takes

Jezebel (Tiffany Tenille) looks up to the Las Vegas lights

Make your movie.

I didn’t listen right away.

I gave myself every excuse

I don’t have time.

I don’t know how.

I’m not ready

He said I can’t.

No one cares.

And I told myself more blubbering falsehoods to numb out that voice.

I started to feel depressed and restless.

I was creating so much yet avoiding taking that larger step.

Finally full circle — speaking to my sister on the phone one day she said she wanted to give me money to invest in a creative project of mine.

I carefully suggested that I wanted to make the movie about our time together in Las Vegas. She immediately said, yes let’s do it.

Now her voice had joined the one in my head saying to do it now. That first chunk of money she gave me ($30K) Paid for the majority of our first week of filming in Las Vegas.

I returned to the same building we used to live in to find that nothing had changed except for flat screen TVs now versus the humpbacks from those years ago.

The place even smelled the same.

My daughter who was 6 at the timed slept in that room with me at night and we’d film Jezebel there during the day. This time around I played my older sister and she played my daughter.

Instead of my family it was now my tiny crew crammed into the studio apartment—re-creating, reconstructing, reimagining the memories, bringing life to the script and that moment in time.

This was pure indie filmmaking. We were sweaty every day in the 110 degree Vegas heat —blasting the AC in between takes.

It was important to me to depict the two very distinct worlds within the film.

One was the shadowy claustrophobic apartment where we lived & grieved versus the hyper fantasy of the chat rooms where I created a sensual escapism - a playground far away from the trappings of the “Budget Suites.”

There’s no’s music or score in the apartment scenes as I wanted that to be along the lines of cinema vert and close to the dogme movie manifesto of natural lighting.

When we leave the apartment we are confronted with the garish glare of the Las Vegas sun and the fluorescent lighting of the office. Here I introduce music and the tones of purple and pink accentuating femininity and the 90’s time period.

I wanted the audience to feel like they are logged into the chat themselves, reading along and joining the surprise and arousal like any paying client did.

For this we used special lenses with a slight fish eye angle and created a graphic true to the look and sound of early chat rooms like AOL. Much love to our cinematographer Brent Johnson and our post production supervisor Tangier Clarke.

I did all of the production design myself gathering fabrics from my closet and taking a fun trip with the team to a sex shop. Wardrobe was pulled from Goodwills in Miami and LA as well as the actors own closets.

Every detail was important and the entire team was on board with adhering to the specifics. This was a form of explicitness that lended itself well to the story.

Once filming was complete post production was handled the same way. The sculpt of the edit took careful time both working on it and backing off from it — letting it breathe. It was important to me to have a Black woman (Brittany Lyles) delivering the first cut to me which I liken to creative surgery. I brought in a second editor (Bobby Field) to polish and shave off about 15 minutes as I always envisioned the film to run in the 80 minute window.

Our final cut is at 88 minutes and now and can be seen on Netflix! Deep thank you to Ava DuVernay, Tilane Jones and the distribution team at ARRAY Filmworks.