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Not even an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker like Errol Morris is immune from the allure of a salacious sex scandal.
Morris — who explored the horrors of Vietnam in "The Fog of War" and of Abu Ghraib in "Standard Operating Procedure" — was reading The Boston Globe one morning in 2008 and came across an item about an American woman who had her pit bull cloned in South Korea.
The last paragraph of the Associated Press item noted that the woman, Bernann McKinney, might also be Joyce McKinney, "connected with a 30-year-old 'sex in chains' story. So, yes, it got my attention."
"What is a tabloid story? A story that usually drags us in," Morris said in a phone interview from his Cambridge, Mass., office. "It could be a four- or five-word headline, but it makes us want to find out more."
McKinney's lurid and fascinating — and fascinating because it was lurid — story, of the Wyoming beauty queen and the Mormon missionary she tied to a bed in an English cottage, is the basis of Morris' latest documentary, "Tabloid." The film opens Friday, July 15, at Salt Lake City's Broadway Centre Cinemas.
Here are the known events of McKinney's story: In Ewell, Surrey, in 1977, Kirk Anderson, a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, went missing, reportedly abducted.
A few days later, Anderson was free, and told the police he was held against his will in a cottage in Devon, tied to a bed and raped. McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming World, was arrested and charged with the crime — though she and an accomplice, Keith May, fled Britain and returned to the United States.
To this day, and in Morris' film, McKinney opines that she and Anderson (who lives in Utah and rejected Morris' requests to be in the film) were in love and engaged to be married when his family forced him to accept his mission call. She says he went with her willingly to that Devon cottage. She also argues that it was impossible for her to rape him, using her standard argument, "Did you ever try to shove a marshmallow into a parking meter?"
McKinney turned down Morris' first interview request, and he set the story aside. It was six months later, after Morris had been offered a series with Showtime about tabloid news stories, that he thought "the Case of the Manacled Mormon" would make a good pilot for the series. That's what the British press of the day dubbed the story.
"We called Joyce again, and this time she was interested," Morris said. "She was in California. I was in California. It seemed fortuitous."
Morris interviewed McKinney in a Van Nuys, Calif., studio — one of only two times they were in the same room, the other being when McKinney crashed a Q-and-A session at the New York Film Festival last fall.
"She's such a remarkable interview — so compelling, so driven," said Mark Lipson, the film's producer, adding that McKinney was unfazed by sitting for hours for the interview. "Joyce is a natural performer. Given the opportunity, even casually, Joyce will talk for three hours on the phone."
"Tabloid" largely consists of an extensive interview with McKinney, in which she tells the story of her life. Morris augments her narrative with interviews with one of her accomplices, two reporters who covered the case for the British tabloid and an official from the Korean cloning firm. He also interviews KRCL's Troy Williams — a gay activist who explains the pressures the LDS Church and its belief in premarital chastity might have placed on Anderson's psyche.
"I have this fascination with Joyce — I think everybody does," said Williams, who produces and hosts KRCL's "Radio Active."
When Williams served an LDS mission to England from 1990 to 1992, McKinney's story had taken on the stature of a folk legend — a cautionary tale "to stay away from immoral thoughts and never leave your companion," Williams said.
McKinney sought out Williams several years ago, seeking to use his show to clear her name. But, Williams said, he never put her on the air because she was determined to talk only about her criticisms of the LDS Church.
The producer says Morris' "Tabloid" isn't a standard documentary or "60 Minutes" segment. "The movie, to my thinking, is as much film noir and B-movie," Lipson said.
Ultimately, Morris said, "Tabloid" isn't just about McKinney's sordid story — or the way the British gossip sheets ran with it, seeking out details of McKinney's personal life or the naked photos for which she once posed. It's about the elusive nature of truth.
"There's this idea that people know the truth and are hiding it from you … and that you [the interviewer] are playing a cat-and-mouse game," Morris said. "There is no 'technique' for finding absolute truth. It's a quest, it's a pursuit, it's an investigation. You try to find things out, you hope to find things out, but you may fall short."
Added Williams, about being interviewed by Morris: "He is digging through the truth and getting stories out of you. He is this master of pulling narrative out of you. … He's fearless at asking what people don't want to ask."
Beyond pursing the idea of absolute truth, Morris said he was "really interested in how people see the world. How [Joyce] saw the story, how she saw herself in the story, is a big part of the story for me."
And, as far as the truth about what happened in Devon, there's only McKinney's version available. Anderson's not talking, and May, McKinney's accomplice, died in 2004.
"This is not a claim that there is no such thing as truth," Morris said. "On the contrary, there is such a thing. We may not be able to grab ahold of it, but there is such a thing. Something happened in that love cottage."
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'Tabloid' tale
P Errol Morris' documentary "Tabloid" opens Friday, July 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas, 111 E. 300 South, Salt Lake City.