Marjoe is an 1972 Academy Award winning documentary film produced and directed by Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan about the life of evangelist Marjoe Gortner. 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 him up until the point he outgrew his novelty. Marjoe rejoined the ministry as a young adult as a means of earning a living part-time, not as a believer, but as a charlatan. The film Marjoe documents his last revivals before coming out publicly as a phony. At the time of the film's release he generated considerable press, but the movie was never shown in theaters in the Southern United States, based on the fears of the distributor over the outrage it would cause in the Bible Belt.
Although released on VHS, the film had long been out of print and had deteriorated. In 2002 the negative and other elements were found in a vault in New York City. Once the rights were secured, the film was restored with funds provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. On November 15, 2005, in New York City, the IFC Center showed Marjoe as the closing film in a series of documentaries called "Stranger Than Fiction". In their program they called it "a lost gem."
Stephen Holden, New York Times, January 13, 2006:
‘For many complicated reasons, fundamentalist Christianity in America doesn't look the same today as it did in 1972. What makes the movie more than a glib exposé of what Mr. Gortner calls "the Jesus business" is Mr. Gortner himself (the name Marjoe is a hybrid of Mary and Joseph), a parentally exploited, ruthlessly disciplined child, who, at the age of 4, was billed as "the world's youngest ordained minister." The movie's vintage film clips of this wind-up baby preacher in full flail are creepy but oddly compelling. After renouncing his profession at 14 and taking a seven-year break, Mr. Gortner returned to the pulpit as a nonbeliever who was strictly in it for the money. Or so he says, as he gleefully exposes the tricks of his trade and demonstrates how his grown-up style incorporates moves garnered from rock stars like Mick Jagger. Mr. Gortner, who went on to have a minor career as an actor in mostly B- and C- movies, comes across as an overgrown teenager, at once preening and vulnerable, calculating and silly, pathetically eager to impress the sophisticated East Coast filmmakers with his cool and charisma. More than 30 years later, he looms as an unsavory, if fascinating, cultural product of the Jesus-hippie connection that flourished in the early 1970's.’
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