Return to tiff.’s home page

Tabloid

Tabloid

Errol Morris

  • Country: USA
  • Year: 2010
  • Language: English
  • Producer: Julie Bilson Ahlberg, Mark Lipson
  • Executive Producer: Robert Fernandez, Errol Morris, Angus Wall
  • Runtime: 87
  • Programmes:

The director of The Thin Blue Line and the Academy Award®-winning The Fog of War tells the story of a former Miss Wyoming whose quest for one true love led her across the globe and onto the pages of tabloid newspapers.

Documentary,  Comedy,  Romance,  Non Conformity,  Biography

screening times

    • Sunday September 12
    • 6:30:00 PM
    • Tiff Bell LightBox 2
    • Monday September 13
    • 7:30:00 PM
    • AMC 2
    • Sunday September 19
    • 9:30:00 AM
    • AMC 9

Note: indicates Premium Screening.

official description

Errol Morris has a way with obsessive personalities. In Tabloid, he expands his collection of larger-than-life characters with an absurdist story that starts weird and just gets weirder. When I tell you the director is Errol Morris and the title is Tabloid, what more do you need to know? In this case, the less you know the better. At the center of the story is Joyce, a former beauty pageant queen with an IQ of 168. Her life’s twists and turns shouldn’t be spoiled. Let’s just say her story involves cultish behavior, false identities and lurid sexual acts. You might call the film a love story, Morris’s first since Gates of Heaven.

Within this context, Morris grapples with a serious issue. Fans of his films The Thin Blue Line, about an innocent man on death row, and Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., about a Holocaust denier, will recognize a thematic link: people lie, newspapers lie, documents lie, photographs lie. So how do we uncover the truth? In Tabloid, no one comes off as entirely trustworthy, whether motivated by passion, money, religion or fame. Morris interrogates them using the Interrotron, a customized teleprompter that projects Morris’s face in front of the camera so that his subjects must look simultaneously into his eyes and the lens. It’s one of Morris’s signature touches, along with his exquisite sense of production design and undercurrent of dark humour.

In a director’s statement, Morris writes, “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.”

Thom Powers

director bio

Errol Morris was born in Hewlett, New York and studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley. After directing his first two features, Gates of Heaven (78) and Vernon, Florida (81), he worked in New York City as a private detective. Our perception of the non-fiction film has been indelibly altered by his highly original feature documentaries. They include The Thin Blue Line (88), A Brief History of Time (91), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (97), The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (03), which premiered at the Festival and won the Academy Award® for best documentary feature, Standard Operating Procedure (08) and Tabloid (10).

full credits


Producer: Julie Bilson Ahlberg, Mark Lipson
Executive Producer: Robert Fernandez, Errol Morris, Angus Wall
Cinematographer: Robert Chappell
Editor: Grant Surmi
Sound: Skip Lievsay, David Bach
Music: John Kusiak
Production Designer: Rob Fend, Jeremy Ladman
   
International Sales Agent: Submarine Entertainment
Production Company: Air Loom Enterprises LLC
.
Shopping Cart
 

    Share This

    • Digg
    • Share

    Like This

    film stills and media

     
    Pause Slideshow