I'm David Anson, artistic director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, and you're listening to The Treatment on KCRW.com.

We're talking today with Errol Morris, whose new film tabloid has just opened.

Errol Morris is the director of such movies as The Thin Blue Line, Gates of Heaven, the Oscar winning the Fog of War, and Standard Operating

Procedure.

Tabloid is in some senses of return to the tone and the subject matter of some of your

earlier films.

The wild, wacky world of Errol Morris.

Exactly.

I mean, this is a pretty wild and very wacky story about a former

beauty queen who became the subject of a great tabloid sensation in England in the 70s, the case of

the manacled Mormon, as it was known, Joyce McKinney. How, let's start at the beginning. How did you get on to this story in the first place?

I am a promiscuous reader.

I think that would be the best way to describe it.

I read a lot of different newspapers.

I get the Boston Globe and the New York Times delivered to the house every morning.

And there was an AP wire service story about a woman Bernan McKinney who had cloned her beloved pit bull named booger and produced, this is her description, five mini-buggers, five clone boogers in a South Korean cloning laboratory.

I'm reading this article, and at the bottom, there's mention made of the possibility that Bernan McKinney is really the same person as Joyce McKinney, the subject of a 30-year-old sex and chain story from Great Britain.

So you tracked Joyce down? Was that your first move?

I'd say absolutely unique. I defy you to find another one like it.

No. Cloning and sex and chants. I don't think so. I haven't looked, but I'm sure you're right.

Was it hard to find, Joyce?

I suspect it wasn't.

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