Tabloid

Thirty years before the antics of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears were regular gossip fodder, Miss Wyoming Joyce McKinney made her mark as a tabloid staple ne plus ultra. Errol Morris follows the salacious adventures of this beauty queen with an IQ of 168 whose single-minded devotion to the man of her dreams leads her across the globe, into jail, and onto the front page. Joyce’s labyrinthine crusade for love takes her through a surreal world of kidnapping, manacled Mormons, risqué photography, magic underwear, and celestial sex—until her dream is finally realized in a cloning laboratory in Seoul, South Korea.

By turns funny, strange, and disturbing, TABLOID is a vivid portrayal of a phenomenally driven woman whose romantic obsessions and delusions catapult her over the edge into scandal sheet notoriety and an unimaginable life.

Winner of the "Best Documentary" award in the indieWIRE Toronto Film Critics Poll at the Toronto International Film Festival and an official selection of the Telluride Film Festival, TABLOID is an, "enthralling and humorous true crime story and salacious tale of sex, religion and obsession" (Daily Film Dose). Variety has hailed TABLOID as "bonkers in all the best possible ways."

FESTIVALS
2010 TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL
2010 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
2010 DOC NYC
2011 SXSW FILM FESTIVAL
2011 FULL FRAME DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL
2011 SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

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—but of course, it’s more than that. It is a meditation on how we are shaped by the media and even more powerfully, by ourselves. Joyce is a woman profoundly influenced by her dreams and, in a sense, she was living in a movie long before she came to star in my film. – Errol Morris