V. Love on the Run
A Local Production History
“Love on the Run: A Local Production History” chronicles the making of Everson’s film It Seems to Hang On (2015) through photographs, ephemera, production stills, and props. Filmed in the MCFF borderland of Windsor–Detroit, it was based on the serial killing spree of a young Black couple, Alton Coleman and Debra Brown, across the Midwest in 1984 and titled after the Ashford & Simpson disco love song from 1978. Everson’s “Bonnie and Clyde film”1 encapsulates the allusive abstraction of his narrative recreations, rhythmic structures and musical inspirations, accompanied by a keen attention to historical and gestural movement.
Kevin Jerome Everson’s It Seems to Hang On (2015) is inspired by the true story of Alton Coleman (Ricky Goldman) and Debra Brown (Lynnette R. Freeman), a young Black couple whose two-month killing spree unfolded across Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Kentucky before their eventual capture in Evanston, Illinois, on July 20, 1984.
Filmed entirely in the Windsor–Detroit borderlands, It Seems to Hang On draws on the region’s layered geography while reimagining the couple’s crime spree that unfolded largely across the American Midwest. The film’s dialogue draws from Ashford & Simpson’s 1978 soul hit of the same title, a meditation on love, endurance, and the struggle to remain together despite adversity. Through this lyrical framework, Everson reimagines Coleman and Brown as a desperate, violent, yet inseparable couple fleeing the law. The result transforms a notorious true-crime narrative into an experimental meditation on intimacy, movement, memory, and violence through Everson’s characteristically restrained cinematic language.
Coleman and Brown’s crimes were brutal. Most of their victims were Black, though the murder of Marlen Walters, a white woman in Norwood, Ohio, ultimately led to Coleman’s conviction and death sentence. Both born in Waukegan, Illinois, Alton Coleman (1956–2002) and Debra Brown (1962–) were convicted for their crimes; Coleman was executed in Ohio in 2002, while Brown is currently serving a life sentence in Indiana. Little is publicly documented about how they met.
Commissioned by Media City Film Festival, It Seems to Hang On had its world premiere at the 71st Venice International Film Festival. It was later exhibited as part of “Sonic Rebellion: Music as Resistance” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) September 2017–January 2018, alongside works by Cauleen Smith, Glenn Ligon, and other leading contemporary artists exploring music’s capacity to incite political resistance and inspire social transformation.
Endnotes
1. Claudrena Harold, “A Conversation with Kevin Jerome Everson.” Callaloo, vol. 37, no. 4, 2014, 807.
Fig. 1, 3-6, 10–14, It Seems to Hang On, 2015 © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 2, 7–9, 15–17, On the set of It Seems to Hang On, 2014, courtesy and © Oona Mosna.
Fig. 18, Wall at Venice Film Festival displaying “Wanted” poster prop by Kevin Jerome Everson from It Seems to Hang On, 2015, courtesy and © Madeleine Molyneaux.
Back to “Clocking Time: A Dossier on Kevin Jerome Everson”