He pauses. “The use of backdrops, for example. [For Tabloid] everybody’s shot on the same painted canvas (even though the lighting changes). I developed this technique where I would digitally move a person around on the screen. So for example, you could have the person on the right hand side of the screen, and you could cut and paste; you could move the person to the left, and paste in the background on the right. It’s a way of editing interviews, and it actually works.”
     It’s not the first time Morris has toyed with such innovations. His famous “Interrotron,” a modified Teleprompter allowing subjects to look directly into the lens of the camera while viewing his image on the screen, was a major inroad in “anti documentary” filmmaking. Rejecting prior methods of the 1950s “vérité” school, this device ultimately intensifies the first person experience for viewers.
     There is something uniquely addictive about Tabloid, too. In the idea of the press and Joyce, both machines of fabrication relentlessly churning out myths and “dreamscapes.” If Joyce’s transgressions weren’t obsessive enough, they were doomed to repeat themselves in the hands of the shameless British media, itself like a cautionary tale about the dangers of unfettered emotion.
     What’s striking about the film is the art of assemblage Morris has employed, creating a kind of pastiche of Joyce McKinney’s life. The font he uses (called “impact”) underpins the film’s thematic pathos (i.e. collisions between Joyce and Kirk, herself, etc.). Also “re-purposed media,” including material from the BBC, still photographs, even a home video of Joyce circa 1984, superimpose the heroine’s narrative, lending her story a rather hysterical tragicomic tint.