A photo of Joyce McKinney, the subject of Tabloid, a documentary by Academy-award winner Errol Morris.
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Who wants to be the subject of a documentary? The same sort of person who goes on reality TV: an exhibitionist. In that sense, Tabloid is like an episode of Jerry Springer or Maury, except that the tattler on-camera is not confronted halfway through the show by her adversary. (Anderson prudently declined to be interviewed; May died in 2004.) For almost 35 years, McKinney has planned to write a book about herself and Kirk, called A Very Special Love Story, but never quite finished it. Tabloid will do: it's Joyce's heavily edited autobiography, with her testimony occasionally challenged by one of the tabloid staffers — Peter Tory of the Daily Express, Kent Gavin of the Mirror — or by Jackson Shaw, a pilot who flew McKinney and May to a California nude beach before the big London caper.
Morris larkishly ornaments the narrative with clips from old TV shows, industrial films and movies like Caged and Brother Sun, Sister Moon. He also italicizes certain words of her testimony in sans-serif capital letters, like cheap-sheet headlines. Clearly, he is impressed by McKinney as a film subject with endless exploits: her escape from England disguised as an Indian woman in pancake makeup and a sari, and her reemergence into the tabs a few years ago, when she had her late pit bull Booger cloned into five puppies by a Korean doctor. "I mean, worms crawl out of the woodwork when you become famous," she says of her early notoriety. "Worms! Cockroaches!" After seeing the film she may put Morris in the cockroach category: at a Manhattan screening last November she popped up and stormed the stage to denounce the director and the movie.
Chalk that up to another difference of opinion on the elusive nature of truth. McKinney calls herself "a normal, all-American kid." Tory of the Express pegs Joyce as "just a bit crazy, eccentric, self-obsessed and self-involved and manipulative, and barking mad, probably." One of those characterizations, or both, or neither, may be true. But people don't go to a movie, even a documentary, for the truth, whatever that is. They want entertainment, diversion, the playful spin of a born storyteller. That's Joyce, even if her stories are whoppers. Of Kirk, she says, "You can tell a lie long enough, 'til you believe it." Does that judgment apply to McKinney as well?
For moviegoers, the question shouldn't matter. She's a great character — a fair-haired,Tarheel Megan Mullally imagining herself as Scarlett O'Hara — who deserves to share in the profits of this deadpan-delirious, funny-peculiar movie. Hell, let her host her own TV show, now that Oprah's gone. She could offer the members of her audience a free car, then drive them to a Motel 6 and give them all a three-day honeymoon.