Errol Morris: The Hollywood Interview

Joyce McKinney, the focal point of Errol Morris' lens in Tabloid.


ERROL MORRIS DIGS THE DIRT WITH TABLOID
By Alex Simon

When Errol Morris’ documentary The Thin Blue Line hit movie screens in 1988, it helped jump-start the rather tired genre back to life again. After a renaissance of the documentary film in the 1960s through the early ‘70s from the likes of The Maysles Brothers (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens), D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back), and Robert Drew (Crisis, Primary), the documentary film seemed relegated to late night spots on local PBS affiliates, narrated by boozy British actors in the downslide of their careers. Morris’ tale of Randall Adams, a man not only wrongly jailed for murdering a Dallas cop in the late ‘70s, but convicted due to the testimony of the man who actually did it, was an intoxicating blend of first-person realism, film noir detective story, and very real moral outrage. Critics and audiences alike realized that documentary films could be just as entertaining, and pulse-pounding, as the Mel Gibson or Arnold Schwarzenegger action epic playing on the screen next door.

Nearly a quarter century later, 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 opens 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.

Filmmaker Errol Morris.

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.

Could we talk about some of your other films?

Sure!

Randall Adams in The Thin Blue Line. The film got him released from prison.

The Thin Blue Line was the first film of yours I saw when it was originally released. I found out that David Ray Harris, who really committed the crime, was executed in 2004, and that Randall Adams, who was wrongly convicted, died last year of a brain tumor. I know Adams sued you not long after the film came out. Did the two of you ever make peace before he passed?

Not really. We didn’t. But, I think that by and large my experience with people and movies has been good. I know that (Robert) MacNamara told his son, Craig, that he really liked Fog of War, but he said “Don’t tell Errol that.” (laughs)

I read MacNamara’s book, In Retrospect, and wasn’t a fan, but then found him, if not entirely sympathetic in your film, at least more accessible. I know you were a student activist in the sixties at University of Wisconsin who protested the war in Vietnam, but it felt to me that you were able to go into making Fog of War with complete objectivity, even though it’s quite clear you feel the Vietnam war was wrong.



I don’t know that I am capable of complete objectivity. I would think not. But I did go into the film with complete equanimity and respect. That I did.

How did MacNamara strike you during the filming?

Endlessly fascinating. It was one of the great opportunities of my life to be able to talk and work with him to make that movie. He was an endlessly complex man. I was reminded again and again, after listening to recorded conversations with Lyndon Johnson taken in the White House, that if you serve the pleasure of the President, what kind of autonomy do you really have, ultimately? Maybe I’ve become an apologist for Robert S. MacNamara, but I doubt it. Since that movie, I have never seen MacNamara as the “architect” of Vietnam. Certainly as Secretary of Defense, he was a principal player, but the escalation of the war wasn’t imposed on Johnson by MacNamara, in my view. It was the other way around.

Let’s talk about your background. You grew up on Long Island. When and how did you fall in love with movies?

Belatedly. I started going to them at University of Wisconsin, but really started to fall in love with them when I was doing post-grad work at Berkeley.

Was there one film that did it for you?

No, I saw, literally, in the space of two or three years, I saw a thousand films. I think it was just a matter of being exposed to all those films in a short amount of time. Then I started programming at the Pacific Film Archive, especially all the great film noir titles.

I found that fascinating that you’re such a noir buff, although when you look back at your body of work, it makes sense. I just made the rather rigid assumption that as a documentary filmmaker, you’d be praying at the temple of the Maysles brothers and Richard Leacock, people like that.

No, I was never interested in verite. I was the anti-verite filmmaker. My first film, Gates of Heaven, was conceived as an anti-verite documentary. No handheld, no available light, people looking into the camera. I was doing everything wrong. It was the anti-Christ version of documentary. (laughs)

The Thin Blue Line was very much a noir picture.

I think so, yes.



I was equally surprised that your favorite movie is Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945), which is also a favorite of mine.

Detour is great. Detour is legendary for being made in a week, or something, for very little money. It’s quite amazing in its own way. I was interviewed by The New York Times a few years back on the fiftieth anniversary of Citizen Kane, and the reporter asked me “Mr. Morris, can you please tell us why you think Citizen Kane is the greatest American movie?” I replied “That’s simple. It isn’t.” They asked me what is, and I said Detour. I don’t even know if they printed it, or not. (laughs)

Tell us a bit about Stephen Hawking and A Brief History of Time.

Well, first of all, I just got the rights to it, because it was never transferred properly (onto VHS or DVD). It’s actually one of the most beautiful films I ever shot. I will restore it and maybe do a follow-up talk with Stephen.



As with Robert MacNamara, I had never found Hawking, or his intellect, accessible before your film.

Well, the book was considered to be unfilmable and, this is an interesting story. When you talk about the tensions between the person making the movie and the person that it’s about, there was tension with Hawking in the beginning. He just wanted the movie to be about science, with no part of his own personal story, his biography, in it. I would explain to Stephen that I have a background in history and philosophy of science, but to make a movie about this subject, it had to be about Stephen Hawking and his science. If you read the book, it is a thinly-disguised autobiography. Hawking constantly makes connections between his life and science. That’s what’s so interesting and cool about the book. He was never happy with how we were making the movie until we had a screening here, in Los Angeles, at the old CAA screening room, on Wilshire. Hawking comes out of the theater, and I’m apprehensive, because I have no idea how he’s going to feel about it and the first thing he says to me is “Thank you for making my mother a star.” So yes, I’m very proud of the film, and think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.

Which brings us back to Tabloid. As with your previous subjects, you’ve taken on a story that’s more than just the sum of its parts. Tabloid is about much more than Joyce McKinney and tabloid journalism, for example. We mentioned earlier what’s happening in the UK as we speak.

Here’s a question for you, because we’ve been talking about this subject for most of the day. Is (the News of the World scandal) really about tabloid journalism, or is it about journalists that simply broke the law? Is it a natural outgrowth?

Joyce McKinney in a classic tabloid pose.

Yes, I think it was a natural outgrowth of the addiction to sensationalism that we’ve acquired over the last decade. Once upon a time, even for a brief moment, I think we were interested in ideas, and discussing them. Now we're addicted to sensation. And that’s what remains as the very dangerous element of this bigger story, that’s happening now, and what happened to Joyce McKinney over thirty years ago.

Yeah, Joyce certainly sees herself as a victim of the tabloid press. If you asked her, I think she would tell you that unequivocally. Do I agree? I agree in part, but I don’t think she is a complete victim or naïve participant in any of this. Was it taken to excess by the British tabloids? Probably, yes.

You use the fairy tale analogy several times in the film, and really tell a story about a little girl who wanted a fairy tale, and her fairy tale came true.

And maybe one of the great tragedies is that the fairy tale came true. Maybe it was a fairy tale that you didn’t want to come true.