Marjoe
| Marjoe | |
|---|---|
Theatrical poster
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| Directed by |
Howard Smith Sarah Kernochan |
| Produced by | Howard Smith Sarah Kernochan |
| Starring | Marjoe Gortner |
| Edited by | Lawrence Silk |
| Distributed by | Cinema 5 Distributing |
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Release date
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July 24, 1972 |
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Running time
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88 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Marjoe is a 1972 American documentary film produced and directed by Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan about the life of evangelist Marjoe Gortner. It won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Marjoe was a precocious child preacher with extraordinary talents, who was immensely popular in the American South. His parents earned large sums of money off of his earnings until the point he outgrew the novelty of his youthfulness.
Marjoe rejoined the ministry as a young adult solely as a means of earning a living, not as a believer. He spent the next several years using his fame and status as an evangelist to earn a living from both tent revivals and televangelism. Eventually, Gortner suffered a crisis of conscience and decided to give up the revival circuit. He offered a documentary film crew unrestricted access to him during his final revival tour, which took place in 1971.
The film contains scenes from revival meetings showing Gortner preaching and praying for people in Los Angeles, Fort Worth, Detroit, and Anaheim. This is interspersed with footage of Gortner admitting on camera that he was a non-believer and revealing the tactics that he and other evangelists used to manipulate people and to move them during revivals. Some of the evangelists even revealed where they bought properties kept secret and gave him advice to follow. Gortner said he studied Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, as a model for his routine.
At the time of the film's release, it generated considerable press, but the movie was not shown widely in theaters in the Southern United States. The distributor feared adverse reaction to the film in the Bible Belt so it was not shown any farther south than Des Moines, Iowa.
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