Could there be a better time for director Errol Morris’ “Tabloid”? Instead of feeding readers juicy bits of gossip as news, the British tabloid, “News of the World,” is news with allegations of serious wrongdoing that includes telephone hacking and bribery. “Tabloid” opened yesterday in Pasadena at the Laemmle Playhouse 7.

These allegations have shuttered the “News of the World” and seriously threatened Australian-born Rupert Murdoch’s influence in the UK and perhaps in other places. Murdoch is a naturalized U.S. citizen and owns Fox. The CEO and chairman of News Corporation seems like a person ripe for some juicy expose if only there were someone willing to write about it. His current wife, the Chinese-born businesswoman Wendi Deng is the same age as Murdoch’s eldest daughter by his second marriage,  Elisabeth and younger than his fist child, Prudence, born in 1958 to his first wife.

The phone hacking scandal began after Prince William noted some personal information was leaked in a 2005 NOTW article written by its royal editor. He concluded that voice mail belonging to his aides were being hacked. Since 8 July 2009 another newspaper, the broadsheet “The Guardian” had made allegations that the phone hacking went beyond the royals.  By July of this year, NOTW closed with its last edition on 10 July 2011, after 168 years of publishing news to titillate and shock. NOTW has gone out as the center of a large scandal.

Doubtlessly, 30 years ago the NOTW was reporting on a certain former Miss Wyoming World who had with a bouncy bosom, long blonde hair and endless optimism “kidnapped” a Morman missionary named Kirk Anderson from Ewell, Surrey, chained him to a bed and forced to him have sex in a romantic hideaway in Devon. The case was called “The Mormon sex in chains case” and the “Case of the Manacled Mormon.”

That was in 1977.  The woman was Joyce Bernann McKinney. McKinney would slip our of Britain and escape to the U.S.  As rape against a man was not a crime at that point in  time, she was charged with indecent assault and sentence to a year in jail in her absence.

Of the rape charge, that’s “like putting a marshmallow in a parking meter,” McKinney explains in the movie.

Although she had portrayed herself as a wholesome woman searching for a fiance who had been abducted by the Mormon cult, “Daily Mirror” investigators discovered she had a past as a nude model and sex industry workers. All that without the use of phone hacking but not without a bit of falsification:

A reporter tells Morris, “I think it was ropes, but ‘chains’ sounds better.”

McKinney was found to have been stalking the then-married and with children Anderson in 1984, but she’d make a bigger splash in the media in 2008 when as Bernann McKinney, she featured in the media as the woman who had her pet dog cloned in South Korea.

In this documentary, Morris treats McKinney with respect. She’s telling her story as she sees it, but Morris intercuts interviews with Jackson Shaw (the pilot for one part of McKinney’s plan); Peter Tory, a reporter for the “Daily Express”; talking Mormon head Troy Williams, a Salt Lake City Radio Host; Ken Gavin, a photographer for the “Daily Mirror; and Dr. Hong a RNL biologist.

Morris calls this an “anti-documentary” and using no reenactments, but uses archival footage, present-day interviews (Andrews declined to be interviewed and shuns publicity), BBC footage and newspaper clippings. The real star is McKinney from her as a starry-eyed girl reading from her memoir, “Once Upon a Time” before plunging us into the revelation that this romantic 1984 footage is McKinney’s memoir of her part in the 1977 scandal.

This is a story about one smart woman who made some odd choices as if stuck in a high school girl mode of waiting for the man of her dreams, a special guy who she searched for, found and lost and is still hoping for a Harlequin romance ending.

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