Marjoe / Thoth
by Sarah Kernochan, Howard Smith
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Marjoe Gortner, S.K. Thoth, Sarah KernochanDirector: Howard Smith, Sarah Kernochan
Brand: New Video
Producer: Sarah Kernochan
Cinematographer: David Myers
Cinematographer: Don Lenzer
Cinematographer: Ed Lynch
Cinematographer: Jason Summers
Cinematographer: Kate Fix
Cinematographer: Kenneth Van Sickle
Cinematographer: Matthew Deetsch
Cinematographer: Mead Hunt
Cinematographer: Michael Shea
Cinematographer: Richard Pearce
Cinematographer: Thomas Reichman
Producer: Howard Smith
Producer: Curt Johnson
Producer: Lynn Appelle
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Unknown; English (Original Language), Unknown
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 128 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-01-31
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: New Video Group
Product features:
- Thisic Academy Award winner is a remarkable behind-the-scenes expose of Marjoe Gortner, an evangelist child prodigy who grew up to expose himself as a fraud. 2-disc set includes the Oscar-winning film THOTH. MARJOE: The Academy-AwardŽ-winning MARJOE is the ferocious and extraordinary chronicle of a firebrand evangelical preacher who wholeheartedly and humorously exposes himself as a fra
Movie Reviews of Marjoe / Thoth
Movie Review: Fascinating look at the waning days of the tent revival
Summary: 5 Stars
The tent circuit was rapidly heading for extinction by the time this documentary was made, so in addition to being one huckster's self-exposure of his skullduggery, it is also an examination of a subculture which would soon cease to exist (or at the very least be transformed into something wholy unrecognizable from its forebears).
Interestingly, even though the movie depicts the tent revival as being primarily a Southern phenomenon, the revivals shown in the movie took place (if I am recalling correctly) in California & Fort Worth Texas.
Certainly the notion of saving souls for fun & profit is nothing new, but Marjoe Gortner's candor about exactly what he is doing, including the process of exposing himself as a fraud, is a tad unsettling. Both the subject & the filmmaker know that Marjoe's reasons are far from altruistic, and each is using the other for his own purposes. The result is, at times, a rather surreal experience. Marjoe is revealing himself, but in many ways he isn't. We can never really be sure in what he believes, if anything. I suspect it wasn't so much conscience as it was a practical business decision (the tent circuit had been slowly waning since the end of WWII, when the formerly-rural American population once and for all became urbanized)) as he recognized that there were more lucrative media in which he could utilize his talents. Given his upbringing, not as a child but as a gimmick to be exploited, it would be amazing if he has a conscience at all.
Did it make a difference? Apparently not much of one, since Benny Hinn appears to be quite comfortably well-off. People will believe what makes them feel most comfortable. It wouldn't surprise me if some people believed that Marjoe made these outrageous claims of being a fraud only because Beelzebub somehow tricked him into it. For all I know, they may be praying for Marjoe's return to the fold, even today.
Summary of Marjoe / Thoth
The Academy-AwardŽ-winning MARJOE is the ferocious and extraordinary chronicle of a firebrand evangelical preacher who wholeheartedly and humorously exposes himself as a fraud. An evangelist prodigy at the age of four, the film captures an adult Marjoe as he recounts how he discovered the seductions of the 60s counterculture and dropped out of preaching, only to return later, using his swaggering bravado, to woo Pentecostal audiences out of their offerings. Directors Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan follow Marjoe as he embarks on his "farewell to the faith tour," revealing the secrets of religious hucksterism. MARJOE is both a fiery baptism in the cynical waters of faith healing and evangelical fervor and a fascinating profile of a man who went from hellfire to hellraising. DVD Features: Filmmaker Biographies; Interactive Menus; Scene Selection. In the OscarŽ-winning THOTH, director Sarah Kernochan turns to another wonderfully unique personality, a fantastic character who performs one-man operas in a strange language on the streets of New York to amused, befuddled, and awed audiences. DVD Features: THOTH?s Complete Opera; Filmmaker BiographiesThere's more to Marjoe than the exposure of an evangelical fraud. Directed by Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan, this OscarŽ-winning 1972 documentary operates on a number of levels as it follows Marjoe Gortner, a fire-and-brimstone preacher who had been raised, since becoming an ordained minister at the age of 4, to preach the Gospel to a large flock of believers. It didn't matter that young Marjoe was himself a non-believer, or that he would eventually trade his Bible-belt revival tours for the hedonistic pleasures of the 1960s counterculture. What we witness in Marjoe is the power of charisma, and the sheer vitality of a born showman whose fervor--regardless of its falseness--had a profound effect on Christians all around the country, to the extent that Marjoe Gortner achieved a kind of spiritual celebrity by the time he exposed himself as a phony in the early 1970s. Smith and Kernochan capture Gortner's essence with such candor that he emerges as an amiable narcissist, betraying his own selfishness and self-loathing yet honest enough to confess the "business" of harvesting cash donations from his Pentecostal audiences. Gortner succeeded in using this film to launch a modest career in movies (including a role in the 1974 disaster hit Earthquake), and his deceptive preaching was just another form of acting. In exposing himself as a fraud, Gortner deliberately drew attention to himself in the pursuit of celebrity. Ironically, he also succeeded in boosting the faith of his followers, and by acknowledging this, Marjoe adds yet another intriguing facet of truth to its subject.
It makes perfect sense that Marjoe has been paired in this DVD set with Thoth, Sarah Kernochan's OscarŽ-winning 2001 documentary short (40 minutes) profile of S.K. Thoth, a street performer whose persona, like Marjoe Gortner's, is entirely fictional yet genuinely compelling. The former Stephen Kaufman (his father was Jewish, his mother African American) struggled with his ethnic and sexual identity, and Thoth shows how he reinvented himself, renamed after an Egyptian high priest, and developed a one-man opera based entirely on "The Festad," a fantasy world, with its own made-up language, that he's created as a youthful refuge from the racism he endured as a biracial youth in the '60s. A self-described "blessed creature" with a unifying message, the androgynous Thoth (whose gold loincloth costume suggests a hybrid of male/female and ancient Egyptian identities) fascinates his audiences of tourists and Central Park regulars, some regarding him as a charlatan while others accept his ruse a celebration of pan-cultural humanity. Thoth may seem like a New Age phony or simply a loser to some viewers (he barely makes a living, and is largely supported by his mother), but his life, like Kernochan's film, is a fascinating quest for multiple layers of truth. --Jeff Shannon
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