Our bodies beautiful

Four years ago, Darryl Roberts attended L.A. Fashion Week to shoot some footage for his documentary "America the Beautiful," which premiered in March at AFI Dallas International Film Festival and is slated to screen Thursday at the youth-oriented Giffoni Hollywood Film Festival. On a tip from designer Lotta Stensson, Roberts made a point of looking for a 12-year-old model named Gerren, who was becoming the talk of the fashion industry.

When Gerren was thrust onto the runway in a wedding gown that, in her rush, a dresser had put on the young model backward, a story line for Roberts' documentary began to emerge. Trying to navigate the runway, Gerren tripped twice on the gown's 20-foot-long train. Finally carrying it to finish her walk, she tried to stay composed as the audience, belatedly realizing her distress, gave her a standing ovation. Backstage, the tears flowed but Gerren had won the hearts of all attending.

"I didn't think too much about it," Roberts says. "About six weeks later, a friend called and said, 'Remember that model girl you were talking about? She's on the cover of the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times.' " Intrigued, Roberts called Gerren's mother, whom he'd met at the show, to see where things were heading. He spent the next two years following Gerren, whose career became central to his 110-minute documentary -- an alternately serious and humorous look at what Americans call beauty.

Roberts says he came up with the idea for "America the Beautiful" after seeing a news report about a photographer who murdered a beautiful model because "if he couldn't have her, nobody could." After reading about a similar killing in Philadelphia, he began thinking about the obsessive extremes people go to in the quest to attain or possess beauty. Extremes that Roberts, who produced the independent film "How U Like Me Now?" on relationships in the '90s, admits to knowing about firsthand: He once bought two Jaguars so a beautiful woman he wanted to impress could choose her favorite color for their date.

"That was the impetus to send me on this journey, to find out why we are so obsessed with beauty," he says.