Interview: Filmmaker Darryl Roberts on ‘America the Beautiful 3’

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CHICAGO – Filmmaker Darryl Roberts has been on an eight-year journey to chronicle the influence of corporations, advertising and images on today’s teenagers. After releasing the first two “America the Beautiful” documentaries, his latest – and potentially most controversial – is “America the Beautiful 3: The Sexualization of Our Youth.”

The subject matter of the latest film is curious, given that Roberts went more specifically after the beauty industry in the first “America the Beautiful” (2007) plus body image and dieting in “America the Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments.” (2011). In the third chapter, which deals with sexual imagery and sexual advertising images in society, the focus is not as clear, and the filmmaker acknowledges the intensity of the subject in the interview below, and even the backlash it had on the production.

America the Beautiful 3
Darryl Robert’s ‘America the Beautiful 3: The Sexualization of Our Youth’
Photo credit: Harley Boy Entertainment/Brainstream Media

HollywoodChicago.com has followed the path of all three films by Darryl Roberts, and you can access his comments on the first two films here and here. He sat down again with his latest chapter, one that perhaps is most personal for the filmmaker.

HollywoodChicago.com: The first “America the Beautiful” documentary was more of an exposé of corporations that catered to beauty. The second was about weight issues, with much of it about your struggles with weight loss. And now the third is about sexualization of youth. How did the first film morph into the subsequent next subjects, and how did your interest in these subjects evolve into ‘America the Beautiful 3’?


Darryl Roberts: From the first film to the second film, I was thinking about issues that affect primarily high school and college kids. After the first film – which was about how this audience feels about how they look – directly related to it was about the weight issues and their bodies, which became the second film. From there, since the first film was about beauty, and the next was about health, the third subject naturally became about sex. And to be honest, it was a lot more intense than I realized.

HollywoodChicago.com: One of the potentially interesting topics – that was not necessarily explored after the initial interview – was with the group of African American girls who had sex and pregnancies at an early age, because they didn’t feel loved. How much, in your opinion, is early sexuality and teen pregnancy a self esteem issue rather than a transition-into-sexuality issue?

Roberts: Teen sex is about low self esteem on one end of it, and when guys start telling a girl that they are beautiful and they are attracted to them, someone with low self esteem can get the feeling that they are craving, and it can turn sexual. The biological/hormonal end of it is about curiosity and the search for ‘mating,’ and when that happens teens will most likely find it. That’s when the advertising comes in, with sexual images that can lead a teen further down that path.

Darryl Roberts
Chicago Filmmaker Darryl Roberts, November 14th, 2014
Photo credit: Harley Boy Entertainment

HollywoodChicago.com: Sex sells, as many of the experts claim in your film. How will the economic engine of pornography and sexual advertising images ever be stopped, if it makes money for people?

Roberts: As long as porn and sexually themed advertising makes money, it will not stop. What can happen is we can change. We can change the way to parent children, and insert more values regarding the issue. Kids have also become too homogenized, dressing and talking the same, and that is catnip to an advertiser. We need to teach more individuality – the more individual a child is, the harder it is for an advertiser to trap them into their commerce.

HollywoodChicago.com: Much of early sexualizing occurs because parents are absent trying to make a living – making it a socio-economic issue – and teens are left to their own devices. One of your main themes is about not failing the children, but our economic structures and need for material success says otherwise. How, in your opinion, can that be compromised?

Roberts: My opinion is about having quality time, even if there is not quantity. I would posit that doing qualitative value-based parenting, the temptations would become less of an issue when parents are not there.

HollywoodChicago.com: When you transitioned into your own sexual identity, how did your success in that transition inform you about the subject matter of this film?

Roberts: It was different, and it wasn’t successful. When I was 16 years old [in the 1970s], I was consumed with finding my place with the opposite sex, so in the context of the film I realize that things today are different for teenagers as in the images and advertising they can access. In figuring it out in those days, I had to do a lot more to get at those images, and I can see how much more difficult it is for kids today because the access is easier.

HollywoodChicago.com: Finally, towards the end of the film we find out that someone on your production staff allegedly sexually harassed one of your interns. Given the subject matter of your film, how did this person react to the allegations when confronted?

Roberts: He didn’t deny it, and his reasoning – even though he’s in his fifties and the intern was 18 years old – is that she engaged in the conversation. I countered that he should have been setting an example as a grown man, and shown some respect. So to have that happen in the midst of doing this film, and the subject matter, did allow me to see how pervasive this attitude is. It was terrible that it happened on my watch.

“America the Beautiful 3: The Sexualization of Our Youth” opens in Chicago on November 21st. Produced, written and directed by Darryl Roberts. Not Rated.

HollywoodChicago.com senior staff writer Patrick McDonald

By PATRICK McDONALD
Writer, Editorial Coordinator
HollywoodChicago.com
pat@hollywoodchicago.com

© 2014 Patrick McDonald, HollywoodChicago.com

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