Follows the much stranger-than-fiction adventures of Joyce McKinney, a former “beauty queen” whose single-minded devotion to the man of her dreams leads her across the globe and directly onto the front pages of the British tabloid newspapers.
Academy Award-winner Errol Morris’ TABLOID follows the much stranger-than-fiction adventures of Joyce McKinney, a former “beauty queen” whose single-minded devotion to the man of her dreams leads her across the globe and directly onto the front pages of the British tabloid newspapers. Joyce’s crusade for love and personal vindication, as illustrated by Morris, takes her through a surreal world of gunpoint abduction, manacled Mormons, oddball accomplices, bondage modeling, magic underwear and dreams of celestial unions. This notorious affair is barking mad. Equal parts love story, film noir, brainy B-movie and demented fairy tale, TABLOID is a delirious meditation on hysteria – both public and personal – from a filmmaker who continues to break down and blow open the documentary genre with his penetrating portraits of eccentric and profoundly complex characters. In TABLOID, Morris concocts another jaw-dropping portrayal, this time of a phenomenally driven woman whose romantic obsessions and delusions catapult her over the edge into scandal-sheet notoriety and an unimaginable life. Long before the days of Lindsay, Britney and the 24-hour news cycle, Joyce McKinney reigned as the ensnaring Femme Fatale accused of sexual defiance. In TABLOID, she is back, and Morris offers up his best guilty treasure.
Back in high school, Joyce McKinney read a short story by Theodore Dreiser, “The Second Choice.” In Dreiser's story the young woman asks: “Should I wait for the man of my dreams or should I marry the man who loves me?” A conundrum posed by countless young women, but Joyce McKinney wasn't just any young women—she was a beauty pageant queen with an IQ of 168. She didn’t want just any guy. She wanted a special guy. And so she did what any normal American girl would do—she went after him. TABLOID is a return to my favorite genre—sick, sad and funny. It is a meditation on how we are shaped by the media and even more powerfully, by ourselves – by the narratives we construct in our minds that may or may not have anything to do with reality. As a young woman, Joyce made a decision never to settle, to find true love at any cost, and that’s what makes her an enduring romantic heroine. She’s bound up in a dreamscape that she has created for herself, and very little can penetrate that protective bubble. In a sense, Joyce has always been living in a movie, long before she came to star in my film.
IF YOU LIKE TABLOID