In HBO’s “About Face: Supermodels Then and Now,” documentarian and celebrated portrait photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders employs his trademark intimate portrait style of framing images to reveal never before seen interviews with some of the best-known models of all time. Through intimate conversations with world-renown supermodels, including Carmen Dell’Orefice, Beverly Johnson, China Machado, Paulina Porizkova, Isabella Rossellini, Bethann Hardison, Pat Cleveland, Jerry Hall, Carol Alt, Marisa Berenson, Karen Bjornson, Christie Brinkley, Lisa Taylor and Cheryl Tiegs, Greenfield-Saunders explores the triumphs and challenges each woman faced as she ascended the ladder to social and financial independence.
What is sure to be revelatory for some viewers, the women sportingly recall a time when modeling was once considered improper, and certainly not a viable career. Bethann Hardison explains that her mother suspected she was a prostitute until she saw her in a TV commercial. “Nowadays, everybody wants their child to model,” she states. “Back in the day, nobody wanted anybody to be a model!” China Machado offers that she was paid $100 a month when she started modeling in the early 1950s, observing, “I was the highest-paid model in Europe.”
Lisa Taylor, a wealthy shy girl who entered modeling as an under-aged teen, candidly recalls life in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Designers such as Halston and she would playfully taunt her social class when setting up equestrian scenes, she says. Taylor also speaks of a saccharine time including wild parties with the likes of Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali, when some models compensated for shyness and insecurity with cocaine. Drugs, she says, “changed the look of models.” “You could see track marks on their arms.” Indeed, after drugs entered the scene, models assumed a harsher look and in some cases bore visible track marks on their arms. AIDS began to gut, and therefore change, the fashion industry.
The women share many more equally engaging stories about their experiences in fashion — the racism for example, which results in only a hand full of women of color, Beverly Johnson, Pat Cleveland, Bethann Hardison and China Machado, gracing the covers of top fashion magazines – is examined, though not as thoroughly as it should have been given the lack of improvement in the industry in this matter.
Before turning to the serious topics of drugs and racism, Greenfield-Sanders opens “About Face” with lighter fare. He introduces Carmen Dell’Orefice, who muses on plastic surgery in the industry. When Greenfield-Sanders asks her view of cosmetic surgery, Dell’Orefice replies, “That’s a very polite way of asking me, I’m sure, ‘Have you had a facelift?’ Well, if you had the ceiling falling down in your living room, would you not go and have a repair?” Model and actress Isabella Rossellini later offers a different perspective, wondering, “Is this the new foot binding? Is this a new way to be misogynist? Is this a new way to tell women that you are ugly?”
Model turned actress Paulina Porizkova, whose family escaped the Warsaw Pact Invasion of 1968, examines how the industry affects young girls. She explains how self-esteem is measured very differently in the industry. She recalls feeling like an unattractive fat fraud when she was young model, but looks back at her photos now and can hardly believe how great she looked. “Working off your looks makes you pretty much the opposite of self-confident,” Porizkova says. “Still, I don’t think any 15-year-old girl will turn down the chance to be called beautiful. You don’t realize at that point that you are also going to be called ugly.”
Porizkova also recalls what many rarely discuss in the business: sexual harassment and abuse. “What people called sexual harassment we called compliments,” she says, referring to instances when girls would think it a compliment when an older man would expose himself to them.
How did these women prevail in such a cancerous industry? How did they become financially independent businesswomen, or survivors, as China Machado defines herself? They did other things that enriched themselves. Machado, one of the first Afro-Latin-American models to hit the mainstream, became a fashion editor, TV producer and merchant. “When you get older, you build something else in your core, which goes beyond the physical, because it has to,” says Marisa Berenson.
Greenfield-Sanders does an excellent job of getting these powerful women to open up about sensitive topics. In an interview with Desiree T. Washington of popdecay.us during the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival, he said that he got “great interviews because the subject is dear.” The women knew his work as a photographer and trusted his ability to portray them in a visually appealing light – while they supplied the juicy substantive content. The project, which originated as a photo shoot for Vanity Fair, could be mined, he suspected, for something more. “These women were still out there, after all,” he said.
“I am very, very tuned into people,” he added. “If something’s wrong, I can sense it from the moment they walk in the studio.” It is a skill he picked up early, explaining that as a 20-something upstart, he was once commissioned to shoot Orson Welles. Attempting to break the ice, he asking Welles “What’s your favorite film?” to which he tersely replied “I don’t play games like that.” “What I learned is that I wasn’t there as a tourist,” Greenfield-Sanders explained. “I was there to make him comfortable.” “People will tell you their stories if you give them a chance,” he added.
As with many documentaries about fashion folk (“Unzipped” and “The September Issue” both come to mind), though, a certain antiseptic quality is always present, making it difficult for the narrative to arrive at a solid theme: Is the fashion world a wonderful thing or a cultural travesty? Is this a movie about the rigors of modeling? A lost era? The emptiness of a life lived in front of the camera? The false promises (and rejuvenating hopes) of plastic surgery?
“About Face” features brief appearances by Kim Alexis, Nancy Donahue, Esmé, Eileen Ford, Dayle Haddon, Christy Turlington Burns and Calvin Klein. It culminates in a bi-coastal group photo shoot featuring more than a dozen of the world’s top fashion models in New York and Los Angeles.
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders is a filmmaker and photographer known for his strikingly intimate portraits of world leaders and major cultural figures, which can be found in museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum and National Portrait Gallery. He won a Grammy for his 1998 documentary “Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart.” His 2008-2010 multimedia project “The Black List” featured three HBO documentaries, a book and a national museum tour, and won an NAACP Image award. In 2011, he created “The Latino List,” which included the HBO documentary, a Brooklyn Museum exhibition and a bilingual book.
“About Face: Supermodels Then and Now”
HBO, Monday July 30, 2012 9PM ET/PT 8PM CT
Produced by Perfect Day Films. Directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Tommy Walker and Michael Slap Sloane, executive producers; Mr. Greenfield-Sanders and Chad Thompson, producers; original music by Neal Evans, Sebastian Blanck and M. L. Perlman; Benjamin Gray, editor; title paintings and animation by Mr. Blanck. For HBO: Sheila Nevins, executive producer; Lisa Heller, supervising producer.