The Morris tribunal

Errol Morris's new documentary, Tabloid, has it all: a beauty queen, a kidnapped Mormon, controversial statements about marshmallows. The film-maker tells TARA BRADYwhy he's being sued – again

LIKE MANY of his subjects, Errol Morris seems to march to his own unique beat. There was no such thing as a theatrical documentary until Gates of Heaven, his warm, witty, weepie 1978 portrait of a pet cemetery, was given a limited release in 1981. The film has made Roger Ebert's all-time top 10 list every year since. A movie buff's movie-maker, the Academy Award-winning director of The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamarais the winning answer in a pub argument: yes, a movie can save someone's life.

In 1988, Morris released The Thin Blue Line, a thrilling documentary account of the murder of Dallas police officer Robert W Wood in 1976 and the wrongful subsequent conviction of drifter Randall Dale Adams.

Morris’s investigation turned up five possible perjuries and a confession. Adams, a former Death Row inmate, was released one year after the film.

"The Thin Blue Linewas just the first of a whole series of movies that appeared to unveil miscarriages of justice, in Texas in particular," recalls the film-maker. "Just recently we've seen those Republican debates where Senator Rick Perry received an enormous cheer for mentioning how many executions he's been involved with. I've never understood that appetite for the death penalty. And with The Thin Blue Linethere was a clear miscarriage of justice: the man who had been sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer was completely innocent and one of the witnesses who had testified against him – a 16-year-old kid – was the killer. And then I get the kid to confess."

Confession is a far more complicated business in Tabloid. The director's 11th film sees Morris take on the mystery of the Manacled Mormon, a nine-day red-top wonder dating from 1977. It was, as the Daily Expresswriter Peter Tory recounts to Morris, a story that had everything.

Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, flies to England with a gun, paid accomplices and a bottle of chloroform. Their mission is to remove Kirk Anderson, a US Mormon, from his missionary post in Surrey, so that McKinney might be reunited with the love of her life.

By McKinney’s account, Anderson came willingly to their “love cottage”, where she seduced him with cinnamon oil and fried chicken, resulting in an experience she tenderly likens to a putting “marshmallow in a parking metre”.

Days after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints first reported Anderson missing, he turned up at a police station claiming he had been abducted, driven to Devon, imprisoned against his will, chained to a bed in a cottage, and then raped by the former US beauty queen.

“I think it was ropes,” recalls Peter Tory, who reported on the scandal at the time, “but chains sounds better.” McKinney and her accomplices quickly fled to the US, and the UK authorities never bothered with extradition.

But had Kirk Anderson been coerced into betraying his girlfriend? “We’ll never know what happened in that love cottage,” says Morris. “We wrote letters to Kirk Anderson and to the head of the missionary group that Kirk was part of outside London, but never received a response. I’m not sure that interviewing them would have brought us any closer to the truth anyway. It’s such a strange, bizarre story. I do believe the church played some kind of role in all this. Do I buy Joyce’s claim that a woman can’t physically rape a man? Call me a sexist, but I do kind of buy it. Her image of the marshmallow in a parking metre is kind of compelling.”

Most of the film's running time is given over to McKinney's testimony, yet Tabloid'sheroine is unhappy with the finished film. She wanted an exposé of the Mormon church and has travelled across the US and beyond to heckle at various premieres and events. She's also suing Morris.

“I suppose it was remarkably stupid of me not to see that coming. Joyce is incredibly litigious. She threatens lawsuits constantly and has sued people her entire life. It’s self-serving of me to say so, but I think it’s a complex, interesting, respectful portrait. I think she might have been very badly served by another film-maker. She’s incredibly annoyed that I interviewed other people. And I’m sorry she’s unhappy. I think in me she found a sympathetic listener. If I have not served as her publicist then what can I say?”

McKinney's extensive heckling tour brings us back to one of Tabloid'sgreatest mysteries. A private aircraft to England? The strange, elaborate 1977 expedition? Where did all the money come from? The tabloids had a field day when they discovered that she had a career in bondage flicks. But McKinney, who at the end of Morris's film generates more headlines when she has five puppies cloned from her late bulldog, appears to have unlimited resources.

“Where did she get the money? I don’t really know. I’ve asked her about the money. She says she worked in modelling and acting. I know she had an accident years ago and got a financial settlement. But it’s a mystery. The movie has played at all these festivals in the United States and Joyce has appeared again and again and again. She was in Seattle, in LA, in New York, in Florida. Who pays for all this? And how? It’s not at all clear.”

Morris doesn't often fall out with his subjects, but he has been down this road before. Randall Adams, the man released in the aftermath of The Thin Blue Line, also took legal action against Morris.

“It was a little hurtful. If I hadn’t stumbled on the case and pursued it in the way that I did, then Randall would still be in jail. But he was a wronged man and when he got out I suppose he felt as though something had been stolen from him. I don’t know. You’re dealing with real people. You’re dealing with the real world. It’s all very complex. With Joyce it’s different, but it’s just as complicated.”

For all McKinney’s protests, her Mormon-snatching and Bulldog-cloning antics almost seem to invite tabloid headlines.

“Joyce raises all kinds of questions for me,” says Morris. “It’s as if she’s living this oddly scripted life, like she’s concocted this odd story about herself and is seeing it through. She’s larger than life. She’s ahead of her time. The film is bookended by a strange set of clips made long ago by a Utah film-maker, Trent Harris. I still find that footage very strange, because basically it contains an account of the next 30 years of her life as if it’s been foreordained, as if she’s scripted her life and then re-enacted it.”

“In it she describes this great love story and compares herself to Narcissus. Now if memory serves me correctly the Narcissus story doesn’t involve two people.”

But she does say she’s skied down Mount Everest naked with a carnation in her nose for the “love of that man”? Is it just an obsession? Is it all in her mind? “Who can say where one ends and the other begins? Here you have a central heroine and a protagonist that I still really can’t even begin to understand. Here’s an entire group of men who were obsessed with her and willing to do her bidding, and I suppose I should include myself among them. I’m just one more man drawn into the Joyce McKinney story.”

Looking back over his career, he does seem to most at home with obsessives. “If I’ve always been at home with obsessives that’s probably because I am one.”

Tabloid

is at QFT, Belfast, from November 25