Local YWCAs to screen a moving documentary that explores a culture promoting physical perfection and the effect it has on women and body image
Expectations of beauty, and the damage done
Gerren Taylor seemed to have everything. A tall, naturally thin build. Gorgeous skin. A hippy walk that could catch a designer’s eye from across a room. And the sort of face that people remembered –and wanted to see, over and over again.
At 12, she seemed to have all the assets a budding model could hope for.
But it wasn’t enough.
Gerren rose rapidly –by 13, she was booked into major shows for designers like Tommy Hilfiger –but then flamed out just as quickly. New York tired of her. Moving to Paris in search of work, she was told that at size 4 she was too big for the runway. She spiraled into self-doubt and depression, and by her midteens, she had quit modeling for good.
Gerren’s story is the underlying narrative in a new documentary, “America the Beautiful,” set to premiere locally Tuesday at the Riviera Theatre in North Tonawanda, in a showing to benefit local YWCA organizations.
Filmmaker Darryl Roberts, who spent five years on the project, will be in town to attend the screening and a reception.
“Beauty has become a culture,” said Roberts, by phone from his tour with the new film. “It’s in everything. You have all these industries bombarding you with the notion that you’re not perfect.”
Roberts said he expects to find that women in Western New York are much like the 200 women, ages 13 to 64, he interviewed during the making of the film.
“The one question I asked all of them was, ‘Do you feel attractive? Do you feel beautiful?’ ” said Roberts. “And only two women said yes.”
All of this is no surprise to some women in Western New York who make their livings in the beauty and fashion industries. They said that the shocking moments captured by Roberts’ camera are all too true.
“A lot of models are really screwed up,” said Julie Marracino, 19, a Marilla native who graduated from Iroquois High School and now models internationally for IMG, an elite agency. “Some days are good, some days are really bad. Some days when you’re getting treated like a piece of meat, when you’re right in the room –those are the days I think I could be doing something much more valuable with my time.”
At the YWCA organizations in the region, executives said that the messages of “America the Beautiful” are important ones for Buffalo-area women of all ages –and the men who care about them –to hear.
“This film was like a 2-by-4 between the eyes,” said Beverly McDonough, vice president at the YWCA of Niagara, who saw a preview of the film in April at a national meeting of the YWCA in Washington, D.C. “I guess I was an idealist. I raised two sons, and I guess I thought the United States had gotten past this, but it hasn’t.
“Nothing has changed in 30 years — and that’s sobering.”
The film’s scope
“America the Beautiful,” the third film and first documentary by Chicago-based Roberts, is a questioning, broad-ranging look at the culture of beauty and physical perfection in the United States.
Roberts’ goal, as he describes it, was simple. He wanted to find out why Americans have become beauty-obsessed. And he wasn’t excluding himself from that diagnosis; in fact, Roberts decided to make the film partly because he noticed that he was judging the women he dated according to how physically good-looking they were.
“I thought I was supposed to have a woman who looked like Cindy Crawford,” he said. “And I didn’t. I was in two five-year relationships, and because I thought I could meet someone more beautiful, I never married them.
“So I was a victim, too.”
Besides interviewing 200 typical women about their body images, Roberts interviewed men –ranging from preteen boys to adults –about what they consider attractive in women, and why.
Beyond that, the documentary looks at the big business of beauty in the United States. Fashion designers and the models that wear their clothes come under inspection, as do plastic surgeons and cosmetics companies. Roberts also examines health care policies related to eating disorders, and looks at how deaths from eating disorders are not tracked in an official way by the government.
Perhaps most troublingly, the film includes frank interviews with editors and photographers for fashion magazines who defend their practices of promoting stick-thin models because they pay off financially.
“What I do is art,” said Jill Ishkanian, then an employee of US Weekly magazine, in an interview taped by Roberts. “We’re corrupting more and more people to be interested in this stuff.”
Another editor, Atoosa Rubenstein, founder of Cosmogirl magazine and former editor of Seventeen, told Roberts this: “At the end of the day, I don’t run a nonprofit organization. If I don’t attract advertisers, I don’t have a job.”
The model’s tale
The film follows the story of Gerren Taylor from age 12 to 15.
Roberts said he met Gerren at a fashion show in Los Angeles when she was just starting her career, and was astonished to learn she was only 12. He taped her for three years, following her as her career gained momentum and then burned out.
“She was an amateur model ... all of a sudden she’s on the ‘Oprah’ show,” said Roberts. “When the smoke cleared, you were left with just this 14-year-old girl.”
Marracino, the Marilla teenager who works as a model, said that Gerren left an impression on her after they met at a casting call in New York a few years ago.
“When I first started, I was 16, and it was right when she was getting very big,” said Marracino of Gerren. “She was nice — really sweet. You could tell she was young, though. You can always tell the girls who are young; they are kind of shy. The girls who have been doing it for a long time are sort of affected.”
Marracino said she felt sorry for Gerren’s bad exit from the modeling world –after failing to get New York bookings and being rejected in Paris –but said she can understand the feeling of wanting to get out of the business.
That’s something Marracino is planning to do herself, possibly as soon as next year, so she can attend college.
She said modeling has given her some great moments: she’s traveled a lot, she’s been in big-name magazines like Glamour and Teen Vogue, and she once almost made the final pick by Maybelline for a cosmetics campaign.
But, she said, modeling takes as much away from you as it gives — even more.
“Modeling is a very superficial industry,” said Marracino, who signed with IMG in New York at 16. “When your job revolves around your appearance, people will say things about you right in front of you. Before modeling, I always was happy with my body. I thought I was fine. But modeling changes you — it changes the way you see things.
“I don’t want to be judged on how I look for the rest of my life.”
Seeing the reality
Local professionals who work with aspiring models and actors in Western New York said that young people here can have positive experiences by learning basic skills and dabbling in the industry.
That’s because modeling in Buffalo is low-pressure, compared to the high-intensity worlds of New York and Los Angeles, said Susan Makai, who started her company, Susan Makai’s Personal Best, in 1989, and has worked with some 6,000 students since then.
“It’s a very small percentage [of models] that actually reach the high, high level of success,” said Makai, sitting in her brightly colored office on Harlem Road. “Everybody can try something like this, but you have to be realistic.”
Makai should know: she has worked with some of the biggest models to come out of Western New York in the past decade, including Marracino and Jessica White, a top African-American model who has done Sports Illustrated magazines and Victoria’s Secret shows.
Makai said that TV shows like “America’s Next Top Model” have brought new attention to the industry, and have showed some of its darker side. But even those shows don’t portray the reality of modeling, which is unglamorous and demanding, she said.
“It’s exhausting. It’s not glamorous. The [models] feet are hurting, they’re taking the bus and subways, they may have 20 auditions and land one job, or no jobs,” Makai said. “It’s a very different kind of life.”
In Buffalo, Makai said, she works with girls in a stress-free way that encourages healthy behaviors –so that even if they never get work as a model, they have a positive experience and learn self-esteem and presentation skills.
“I don’t want to push a girl to be something she’s not,” Makai said. “Because that can be dangerous.”
All about empowerment
Leaders of local YWCA organizations said they felt bringing “America the Beautiful” to the region was a way to educate girls and women here about the pressures that society exerts upon them.
“Our mission is eliminating racism and empowering women,” said Kathy Lwebuga-Mukasa at the YWCA of Western New York. “The theme of this film is that women — young girls — are asked to conform to a body type that is totally unrealistic, and to an image that contributes to an objectification of women.
“It’s absolutely happening here,” she said.
Proceeds from the showing of the film here will benefit the three area YWCAs, in Niagara, the Tonawandas and the Western New York group.
The national YWCA helped fund the making of the documentary, the executives said.
The film will be shown in the Riviera Theatre, 67 Webster St. in North Tonawanda, starting at 7 p.m. Tuesday. Admission is $10. For $50, 100 patrons will gain entrance to a 5:30 p. m. reception before the movie, at which filmmaker Roberts will mingle with guests.
Roberts said he is confident the film will resonate in Buffalo the way it has in other cities around the country.
“In Buffalo, just as everywhere else, teenage girls read fashion magazines, they’re watching a whole bunch of television, they’re seeing billboards, they’re listening to the radio,” he said. “They’re being inundated with the same images that girls are seeing everywhere else.
“There’s no escaping it.”
