A Quote by Chris Roberson

I grew up in the '70s and '80s, at a time that I'd argue was the absolute golden age of American popular culture. Because not only did we have all of the fantastic new stuff in print and on screens, but we had a constant supply of everything that came before, as well.
My childhood was pretty colorful; I like to use the word turbulent. But it was a great time to grow up, the '70s and '80s in Brooklyn, East Flatbush. It was culturally diverse: You had Italian culture, American culture, the Caribbean West Indian culture, the Hasidic Jewish culture. Everything was kind of like right there in your face. A lot of violence, you know, especially toward the '80s the neighborhood got really violent, but it made me who I am, it made me strong.
We were just trying to make the films that we could get made, and to push the envelope. We didn't realize how far we had pushed the envelope. That all came later. That all came from books and articles about the golden age of the '70s. Believe me, to a lot of us, it was no golden age. The studio heads were very powerful then. They would fire guys right and left. They would look at your dailies and tell you what was wrong with them... a lot of stuff that doesn't go on today. Young filmmakers who are successful today, they don't often have that to put up with.
My brother and sister had a much worse childhood, I think, because they were older, and they had to deal with a lot more racism because they grew up in the '70s and I grew up more in the '80s. So they had to deal with crosses being burned on their lawn and their dogs being poisoned.
Mid-'80s in New York was fantastic. I remember my first Gay Pride parade in the city. Where I grew up was very sheltered, so when I got to the city, there was this freedom and so much happening. At the same time, there was this pressure of AIDS and everything else. New York is so different today.
I don't, really a fashionable person. I'm an actor, so I like costumes. But fashion is very popular now. Really overly popular. It's like New Age music in the '80s, or art. And then independent film. Now everyone's a fashion designer. It's had a big effect in New York, in our culture.
I think the fact that I grew up in show business had a real effect on my personality. If you were born in New York during the golden age of television, and you grew up on Broadway, that marks you.
The '70s just seemed dirty, honestly, and not in an interesting way. It's not the '80s. In fact, it's 10 less. I grew up in the '80s, so that's more of an interesting time to me.
When you grow up, some areas of the world are out of your knowledge - especially when I grew up, in the '70s and '80s. Now, you have access to everything, but back then you did not because of the way the media was, and society imposed more directions, structures, and restrictions. It's not like art was prohibited, but art was not something that the people around me presented. So I developed it very much on my own growing up.
It got to the point in the late 70s and early 80s that I was spending so much money buying golden age comics that I could only justify it if I got work in the media.
I did not grow up in the 70s but in the 80s in the Bay Area, the child of hippies in Berkeley, so I felt connected to the place and the legendary things that had come before me historically that I'd missed.
I grew up on the old EC comic books before the Comics Code in North American and with all sort of good-natured fun. I never had nightmares I think because all of the old horror stuff that I was exposed to was well meaning in a certain sense.
Well, I think one of the reasons Chicago became so popular as a filmmaker location is because New York had been used so many times that Chicago, I think, was rediscovered maybe in the late '60s, early '70s for a long time as a new location.
I grew up in the American South and came of age in the 1960s, an incredibly turbulent time. It was as if the seams of American life were being ripped apart with riots and protests.
I grew up in uptown Jamaica; I went to a rich school. I was raised by my mother and my stepfather; they made sure education came before anything. I had a good childhood, grew up spending time with my bigger brothers and sisters. My people are good people. I was exposed to a lot of different kinds of people and culture.
I don't really talk about this because it seems indulgent, but I lost my hair, I'm bald, I had alopecia in my teens. That was back in the late '80s, well before people shaved their heads. So it's probably one of the reasons why I have been obsessed with that age, because it's locked in time where I feel like I had this personal loss that so affected my vanity, and I don't really feel like I handled it well. I'm so much older now, so it's not a big deal, but when I think back at it, I can conjure up how I felt then.
For me, the stamp that I impose on stuff comes from the fact that in the '80s, when I was starting to write movies, I looked back to the '70s. So the films I enjoyed as a kid were the thrillers that came out of the '70s. Back then, you didn't have action movies; you had adventure films or thrillers.
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