Product Details

• Actors: Marjoe Gortner, Sarah Kernochan, S.K. Thoth
• Directors: Sarah Kernochan, Howard Smith
• Producers: Sarah Kernochan, Howard Smith, Curt Johnson, Lynn Appelle
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Language: English (Unknown)
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: New Video Group
• DVD Release Date: January 31, 2006
• Run Time: 128 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000CCW2VG
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #24,845 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

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• For more information about "Marjoe / Thoth" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
There's more to Marjoe than the exposure of an evangelical fraud. Directed by Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan, this Oscar®-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 Oscar®-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

Product Description
The Academy-Award®-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 Oscar®-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 Biographies

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Praise the Lord, Marjoe is back!, February 24, 2006

By	Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews

I have waited and waited and waited and waited for this release on DVD. Marjoe won the Oscar in 1972 for best documentary and rightfully so. He went out on a limb, admitting he was a fraud and an entertainer, and brought a film crew to capture it all. I love this film, the way he shows traveling evangelists are mainly cons who make off with a lot of money from people who don't have any to begin with. The segment with the preacher woman who breathes into her mic is crippling--telling her congregation she knows they have bills to pay and have set aside money for a winter coat but the church needs that money more. Ugh... It's incredible to watch him perform and preach the word at these revivals--he's very much a rock star--and even though he's taking this money, it's easy to sympathize with him. He was thrust into preaching at the age of four by parents who exploited and abused him to make money for the family--and ultimately, the film itself is his confession and he's genuinely sorry. I needed this movie when I saw it ten years ago. May it find more viewers who are in a bad way. Marjoe is the court jester of evangelists, and I thank him for doing this film and tarnishing his name on the Pentecostal circuit by doing so. He's helped some of us decades after he took that leap.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best ever version of this classic, December 17, 2005

By	Jim Quist (Richland Center, WI USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I concur with all the other enthusiastic reviews of this documentary. What you need to know is that this film has been restored, literally transformed compared to the old VHS version of this. The colors are bright, the picture clear, the sound is crisp. What I like most about this movie is the way it messes with your mind, delightfully. Or as others have noted, the truth sure is strange, and you've got an all areas pass to this here travelin' show.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating look at the waning days of the tent revival, January 19, 2007

By	chefdevergue (Spokane, WA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.