Catching Up With... America the Beautiful's Darryl Roberts

[Above: Model Gerren Taylor as featured in America the Beautiful.]

Paste: Do you think that women are aware of the dangers that the media paints for them, as far as taking measures too far?
Roberts: I think in general women know, but what’s really bad is it’s so ingrained in women as far as women have tied their physicality and how they look to who they are as a person—they’re kind of intertwined.

I had a woman tell me once that she would rather somebody stab her in the heart than make her go in public without makeup on. She said, “I can’t do it.” I met a woman who was in the hospital and she had to have on makeup for the doctors and people to come into the room. I don’t care how many stories women see on television about some women dying from having plastic surgery. Hundreds of thousands of them will still keep doing it because it’s just that important to them.

Paste: Initially, why did you become interested in the subject?
Roberts: I was reflecting back, and I had these two relationships. Both of them were five-year relationships, and they were with these two really beautiful women, and I say beautiful meaning beautiful on the inside, as far as the kind of human beings that they were. I didn’t marry either one of them because I was under the misguided notion that I could find somebody just like them that looked like the models in the magazines, and of course it never happened. I started thinking, “Why are we so obsessed with beauty in the first place?” And that question is what set me into doing this documentary, actually.

Paste: Did you anticipate a project of this size? Tell me how it evolved.
Roberts: No, I thought it would take six months to do it. I had planned on really just interviewing some women and editing it together to show it to my friends at my house. It was supposed to be a home video that was supposed to take six months. What happened was the first thing I did was I interviewed 200 women, and one of the questions that I asked them was, "Do you feel attractive?," or, "Do you feel beautiful?" and only two said yes. I thought, “Huh. Could 99 percent of women be walking the streets not feeling good about themselves?” And one of the things they blamed for feeling bad was the image of the skinny models in magazines. So with that I flew to New York to interview these editors, and a lot of it’s in the movie of the fashion magazines and these photographers, to tell them what I found. They said they were not social workers—it’s all about the money.

I think it was that insensitivity from the industry in New York that made me see this as a bigger issue. It became bigger than the whole movie. I felt like I was helping women, actually. As I was doing this, I was getting so much support, and hearing from so many women, I felt like I was helping them to give them a voice.

Paste: As far as scientific research, you mentioned you started out polling 200 women. Were there any particular studies beyond this that resonated with you?
Roberts: Actually, Dr. Anne Becker, a sociologist at Harvard University was doing a study in Fiji. During her study she heard that Fiji was about to get electricity and television for the first time in 1995, believe it or not. Can you imagine in the 80’s and early 90’s they were still without electricity and television? So she heard they were about to get television, and she became curious about how that would affect their culture. She went there from ’95 to ’98 to see what effect television would have on them, because for the Fijians being big was what was considered being beautiful. She didn’t think that there would be any effect on them, because remember their traditions are hundreds of years old. Within three years from ’95 to ’98, they went from teenage girls having zero percent eating disorders to 11 percent, which she says is about the same as the state of Massachusetts. Kids had become disrespectful, too, and at three years she says it had wiped out their cultural traditions.  

Paste: Who would you consider your audience for the film? Is it these young girls? Is it their families? Is it the industry?
Roberts: The audience for the film is men and women. The reason I say both men and women is because both are victims: women because they want to look like the images in the magazine and men are still brainwashed because they want to date women who look like women in the magazines. So they’re both victims.

Paste: What’s the solution we’re working toward here. Is there an end in sight?
Roberts: The industry—you can forget it. There’s no way they are going to stop what they are doing. They are making billions. To assume they are going to develop some kind of corporate responsibility and turn around and start making less money. For me, the solution is we have to start loving ourselves the way that we are, and we have to find that unique and beautiful thing about us—because everyone living has that—and make that our value system. Not whether we have a six-pack like some guy in Men’s Health. I think if we do that, it will empower us to get our self-esteem back so that we can resist the advertisers and the images that are bombarding us. I believe that we need to make the changes ourselves as a civilization because the industry won’t.

Paste: Any future projects coming up? You said you have a lot of footage; any chance for a follow up?
Roberts: No, five years is enough for now. I’m going to do a feature film next year in Chicago, sort of like a romantic comedy. It will be nice and quick. [smiles] 

America the Beautiful will play for one last showing tonight at the Landmark Midtown Art Cinema at 7 p.m., with a Q&A session with Darryl Roberts following.