Tabloid (2010)

Crazy lady goes to England to save the 'love of her life' from the Morman cultists... Except he doesn't have a clue... She hires people to help and they unwittingly go along for the ride... This documentary is filled with her claims of being sane, smart, good looking, above average which pretty much all fall flat in about 15 minutes of the program...She obviously is a self centered, narcissistic, selfish, drama queen who thinks it's all about her... Met many woman like this kind, except she was allowed to let it all out in the public in 1977 and beyond, much to almost everyone's joy at her silly antics... She is in my opinion a woman who purposely wrecked her own life at the expense of others and is in need of trained professionals and serious medication...The documentary was just trying to show the documented case and she somehow agreed to participate in the portrayal of her madness. So she then sues the filmmaker, what a laugh, she acts, talks and sends the clear message that she is unhinged, then and now...

Joyce McKinney grew up in small town North Carolina. She's smart. She's a former Miss Wyoming. When she moved to Utah, she falls for Kirk Anderson and becomes obsessed with him. He's a Mormon which Joyce considers a cult. She claims that the Mormon church had abducted her fiancé Kirk and sent to England. She, accomplices Keith Joseph May and Gil Parker hire pilot Jackson Shaw to fly to England to rescue Kirk Anderson. Gil and Jackson back out but Joyce and Keith abduct Kirk for three days of sex and fun. They go back to London to get marry. Kirk reads about his own kidnapping. He leaves Joyce and tells the police about the kidnapping. In 1977, he becomes the Manacled Mormon and tabloid fodder after Joyce is charged with abducting and imprisoning Kirk.It's too strange to be true. Director Errol Morris has his classic off-camera voice asking the questions. It's a fascinating true story that the tabloids rightly printed. A couple of things do hold it back slightly. In the end, this is a small story and it's hard to dig deeper than what Joyce allows us to know. This movie needs to have Kirk because he's the only person to counter what she's saying. Is she crazy or is she in love? That's the central question. Maybe she's a bit of both. The story is funny and insane but it's essentially a light weight story.

There's a theory that acting (playing out a role) is something everyone does all the time, and that the artifice is essentially a streamlined version of living. For an actor on stage with a ready script in hand there are clear definitions outlined for his actions, but for regular people who are proceeding with some internally generated script, goals and motivation can seem fuzzy.Joyce McKinney may seem like a lost loony under the inspection of Errol Morris's camera and interviewing skills, but she comes off as someone completely in control of her emotions and someone capable of justifying all of her actions. This woman is speaking years after her incarceration in Great Britain for the kidnapping and sexual violation of Mormon Kirk Anderson and the sense of joy she exudes in accomplishing her task is something the viewer may be surprised at.Joyce McKinney, beauty pageant queen from a wealthy family who moved to Utah met and fell in love with Mormon Kirk Anderson and decided that their love was a divine fate. When Anderson was called by the church to travel to England to minister to the folks there, McKinney followed with bodyguards. Funding her mission with surreptitious money McKinney lured Anderson away to a remote location chained him to a bed and had sex with him for 3 days. McKinney's intention was to seduce Anderson away from the stifling atmosphere of the Church of Latter Day Saints, and restore their union as a couple. The British law saw McKinney's act as one of kidnapping and rape, took her into custody and tried her.Some interesting facts about the woman arise, like her activities as a nude model for top dollar in Britain, and further, her sex-phone franchise that brought in money to fund her stalking and detaining of Anderson. To look at the woman from twenty years back, she is capable of turning heads and certainly capable of earning professional fees as a model, with and without her clothes.What filmmaker Errol Morris uncovers is the "something" about McKinney that makes her stand out, that special light she seems to stand in. What Tabloid shows is articulate, extroverted, and manipulative and not only is confident in her present status as cultural iconic kook, but her acceptance of it and how she understands its power as her ticket to celebrity star.Errol Morris additionally refuses to add any editorializing to structure some sort of rationale or judgment on his subject. What he does well is bring forth others who have know McKinney and allow their comments to create a visual background to the world McKinney inhabited, and today lives in while still crating weird controversy.It would have been great if Kirk Anderson, the Mormon whom McKinney claims shared true love with, allowed himself to be interviewed for the film. Having that side of the story could have given the viewer some real substantial core truths to go away with. Regardless, Tabloid is a fascinating tale, made more shocking because it really happened.

Errol Morris's documentaries fall into two camps: a serious one ("Fog of War") and one of portraits of eccentric individuals dominated by their obsessions who often don't realise they've transgressed the invisible boundaries of what constitutes acceptable behaviour. "Tabloid" falls into the second category. The focus of Morris's scrutiny this time is Joyce McKinney, a former beauty queen who in 1977 became obsessed with a young man she met in Utah; the man, Kirk Anderson, began training as a missionary with the Church of Latter-Day Saints of Jesus Christ to escape her attentions and the Church sent him to England. McKinney pursued and kidnapped Anderson with the help of two men and imprisoned him in a cottage in southwestern England. The incident aroused (ahem) much interest throughout the UK with its combination of conservative religion and its strict morality as regards sexual relations, kidnapping and sexual bondage. McKinney was arrested and charged but managed to jump bail and escape back to the US. Although she and one of her accomplices were later arrested by the FBI, the English courts did not request her extradition and sentenced her to jail for a year. Two tabloid UK newspapers competed for sales with opposed views of McKinney's antics and background based on information and material obtained in often shady ways.McKinney is an entertaining and garrulous interviewee, bright and open to a fault. Her apparently guileless manner may well hide a calculating and shrewd mind intent on getting what she wants no matter what it takes or what obstacles are in her way. Morris' Interrotron technique of interviewing subjects, in which McKinney looks into the camera which projects her face's image onto a two-way mirror positioned in front of the lens of the camera facing Morris, and vice versa for Morris, ensures that viewers are hit with the full force of McKinney's bubbling and sometimes overpowering personality but it also means that Morris himself ends up too close to his subject to be able to show a more objective view of her personality and character and the wider meaning of the 1977 kidnapping and the UK tabloid press's involvement. Morris appears willing to be swept along by McKinney's version of what happened and her insistence that Anderson was being brainwashed by a cult but the veteran interviewer never presses or challenges her opinion and prejudices.Morris also interviews a former Mormon missionary who perhaps is the most objective and sane person in the whole film, and two journalists from the rival tabloids that salivated over McKinney and Anderson, each recounting the newspapers' wildly differing versions of the incident and of McKinney's character and defending their stories and research. Viewers see some of the conflicting opinions and views of two people in the British media towards the story: one is amused, the other is cynical and predatory. Unfortunately the two most significant male characters in the whole saga, Kirk Anderson and Keith Joseph May, are absent from the documentary: Anderson refused to be interviewed and May had already died, so any pretence at "balance" is precluded.The film's presentation milks the whole incident for laughs with insertions of tabloid-style title cards that introduce the interviewees and give something of the flavour of the news coverage of the time. Cartoons and cartoon montages help give a light-hearted and racy feel to the film. Towards the end, after the abduction and its consequences become history, the film slows down with the coverage of an unrelated incident that also attracted news attention: in 2008, when her pet dog died, McKinney had it cloned into a litter of puppies by researchers in South Korea.Though the film is entertaining and sympathetic towards its subject, it missed an opportunity to examine McKinney's upbringing in some detail, in particular the expectations and stereotypes she grew up with and absorbed which fed her beliefs about romantic love and marriage and encouraged her obsession with Anderson. In the end, these notions undid McKinney and derailed her life: she resolved never to love another man and became reclusive. That an obviously intelligent and resourceful woman with great drive and energy who lived for romance, marriage and a brood of many children gave up her dream completely is a tragedy that the film glosses over. Morris's attempt at investigating the media hysteria and celebrity worship surrounding McKinney's abduction of Anderson amounts to very little and says nothing about the kind of media culture that existed in the UK then and the social values that supported it. The best that "Tabloid" does is to show that the truth about the incident remains elusive and that people's memories of it can be wildly different for many reasons, of which self-preservation is the primary one.