Errol Morris has made documentaries about pet cemetery owners, a Holocaust denier and execution technician, and eccentric residents of a Florida town. But perhaps none of these subjects has been as strange — or as engaging — as Joyce McKinney. His ninth doc, “Tabloid,” opened this weekend in D.C. It stars — there’s no other word for it — McKinney, an American former beauty queen who (in)famously was charged with abducting and raping a Mormon missionary in England in 1977. The British tabloids, then as now perhaps the most shameless in the world, gave the case front-page headlines and made McKinney a media star.
“My job is to get a great performance in an interview,” Morris says. “She gave me one of the great performances I have ever seen. We used to joke that if she were an actor, she’d get an Oscar.”
In “Tabloid,” McKinney recounts her side of the tale and fills us in on what she’s been up to since — such as cloning dogs in South Korea. Morris interviews other bystanders and experts, but none are as compelling as this still-attractive woman whose life is almost certainly stranger than fiction.
“We like to think that an interview is different from a performance,” the director notes. “It’s kind of this kosher deal, this milk-meat thing, as if you have two separate kitchens that aren’t connected. The dividing line between the two of them is really different than what you might think.” With actors, there’s still “an element of creating something in the moment,” and with doc subjects, there’s always “an element of performance.” He compares working with his subjects to working with actors in advertising — he’s made more than 1,000 ads.
McKinney performs her part, but questions still remain, even after Morris has been through the story. She’s an obsessive who went abroad with at least the possibility in her head of committing a crime: Why else bring heavies and suspicious equipment? But could this petite blonde have committed a violent crime?
Morris begins with a disclaimer: “I can’t tell you for certain.” But he has an educated guess: “Did she rape a 6’4″, 200-pound-plus Mormon? I don’t think so. I don’t think she could have done it even if she wanted.”
The director is a filmmaker, researcher, investigator and interviewer all in one; he worked as a private investigator before and after he began this career. All that “homework,” as Morris calls it, pays off. He gives an example from “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.” “I crammed, I crammed like I was cramming for a test,” he recalls. But he arrived with no list of questions, “open to anything.” He was to get just half an hour; the former defense secretary instead opened up to the filmmaker.
“He launched into a story about the firebombing of Japan,” Morris remembers. “No one had ever written about McNamara and his role in the firebombing of Japan. It was unknown to history.” But Morris had done his homework, and found a memo from 1945 when McNamara was a young lieutenant colonel. Morris isn’t sure why he got the goods. “He did say to me that he was surprised by how much he liked talking to me and how I had actually read his books, I hadn’t pretended to read them.”
Still, “Tabloid” marks a high point in his career. “I like to think that if I’ve done my job correctly — and I do think I’ve done my job correctly — this is my best movie,” he says. “It captures the complexity of the story, one with many, many, many layers. It’s one of the many ironies, and a great pleasure to me as a director, that you take a story that should be shallow for all intents and purposes, you take a garden-variety tabloid story, and find out it is rich as anything.”
He’ll always be an investigator, no matter what comes next — he has two books soon to be released and is working on a fiction film. He was hooked from his first film, “Gates of Heaven.” “Who knew that any of these people would come alive in this kind of way? All I can do is thank them for being so incredibly interesting.”
