Nearly a quarter century after his 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line reinvented the genre, Errol Morris’ latest effort doesn’t disappoint. Tabloid tells the amazing, but true, story of Joyce McKinney, a former small town beauty queen with an IQ of 168 whose obsessive love for a Mormon missionary stationed in England caused a tabloid scandal that took Britain by storm in late 1977 and ’78. What transpired during those feverish weeks and months must be seen to be believed, and is told with a level of skill and wit that only a filmmaker of Errol Morris’ caliber could pull off. The film opened in select U.S. cities and on Video-on-demand service Sundance Selects July 15. Errol Morris visited Los Angeles recently for a conversation about Tabloid. Here’s what transpired. The most obvious question is how did you first stumble upon this crazy story? From an AP wire service story in The Boston Globe. This was very recently. I knew nothing about it years ago. It concluded with a paragraph that the dog cloning case being addressed in the article might be somehow related to this thirty year-old sex in chains story. The dog cloning and the sex in chains aspects got my attention. Originally I was thinking about it almost as a “First Person” story. I called Joyce, but she wasn’t interested. She was living in North Carolina at the time. Then the good part of a year later I was offered a deal to do a series for Showtime, and I thought that this could be the pilot of the series. We contacted Joyce again. She was now in Southern California, as was I, and she came in for an interview. That’s the interview you see in the movie, which took six hours or so. I really only had two days with Joyce McKinney, the first being shooting the interview, and I was on stage with her in New York much later after a screening of Tabloid. What was her reaction to the film? Well, she has complained about the film, that the film was not completely oriented against the Mormon Church, as if that was the reason I was making Tabloid, to attack Mormonism, which is not the reason I made the movie. Anytime you make a story about a real person, there’s bound to be trouble, as in any human relationship, except in this case you have the public thrown in, as well. People have their expectations of what they’d like the movie to be, as opposed to what it actually is. When you’re dealing with a factual matter, you’re dealing with a claim about the way something happened, or didn’t happen. Is it that sort of duality that attracted you to this story? There’s so much ambiguity in this story, which is one reason I like it. My job as a filmmaker, if I can uncover some underlying truth or reality that is essential to the story, I go after it. In The Thin Blue Line, in S.O.P., in Mr. Death, I went after it. This is a different kind of story in the sense that what really fascinated me here were these competing narratives that were at war with each other: you had these various tabloid journalists who had a need to tell their own version of reality. You had Joyce, who had one more version. And the ongoing uncertainty about what really transpired during all this. It’s casting a net around that, making sure that the ambiguities are in the movie, and people can think about them. It’s a mystery, and mysteries are what still obsess me. Given the thirty-plus years that’s transpired between the Joyce McKinney story and where we are now, what kept striking me was how innocent the whole affair seems by today’s standards. It is! I agree. In the mid-late seventies, the line between tabloid journalism and hard news was very clear, while today it’s become hopelessly blurred. Given what’s happening in the UK now, with the implosion of tabloid culture from the News of the World scandal, do you think this implosion was inevitable? I think it would be wrong to conclude that all tabloid journalism is bad. Tabloid journalism is a kind of journalism that focuses on stories that grab ahold of us. I like to think of the Bible as an extended tabloid story. Tabloids clearly played a destructive role for Joyce in her life, and I wouldn’t argue otherwise. And that pull of journalism to try and create narratives is part of a deeper problem of journalism per se; I don’t think it’s just true of tabloid journalism. The News of the World story seems extreme, is extreme, because here you have parents that are worried their daughter is dead, and they start monkeying around with the evidence as the police are trying to find out what happened to this girl. It doesn’t seem at all defensible. It seems to have crossed deeply some kind of line. Is that true of the story of Joyce McKinney? It’s much harder for me to make that claim. You can decide for yourself, but Joyce was not an unwilling participant in this. Joyce came over to the UK with the chloroform, and the handcuffs, and the fake gun. Maybe it got out of hand, but I don’t think that she can simply claim total innocence in what happened. She provided a story for the tabloids that was just too good to be true. It was irresistible.
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on July 18, 2011. Filed under News.
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Posted by
on July 18, 2011. Filed under