Marjoe Gortner
Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner | |
|---|---|
| Born | |
| Nationality | American |
Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner, generally known as Marjoe Gortner (born January 14, 1944) in Long Beach, California), is a former revivalist who first gained a certain fame in the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s when he became the youngest ordained preacher at the age of four, and then outright notoriety in the 1970s when he starred in an Oscar-winning, behind-the-scenes documentary about the lucrative business of Pentecostal preaching. The name "Marjoe" is a portmanteau of the names "Mary" and "Joseph".
When Gortner was three, his father Vernon, a third generation minister, noticed his son's talent for mimicry and overall fearlessness of strangers and public settings. His parents claimed he had received a vision from God during a bath but was later confirmed by Marjoe that this was a lie his parents forced him to repeat. They enforced this by mock-drowning him, since they would not beat him due to his public appearances and scars being left over. They began training him to deliver sermons, complete with dramatic gestures and emphatic lunges. By the time he was four, his parents arranged for him to perform a marriage ceremony for a film crew from Paramount studios, referring to him as "the youngest ordained minister in history." Like much in Gortner's early life it is hard to say for sure who exactly ordained him, if his father ordained him, or if he was even ordained at all.
Until the time he was a teenager, Gortner and his parents traveled the United States, holding revival meetings. As well as teaching him scriptural passages, his parents also taught him several money-making tactics, involving the sale of supposedly "holy" articles at revivals which promised to heal the sick and dying. By the time he was sixteen, he later estimated, his family had amassed maybe three million dollars. Shortly after Gortner's sixteenth birthday, his father absconded with the money, and a disillusioned Marjoe Gortner left his mother for San Francisco, where he was taken in by and became the lover of an older woman. He spent the remainder of his teenage years as an itinerant hippie until his early twenties, when, hard pressed for money, he decided to put his old skills to work and re-emerged on the circuit with a charismatic stage-show modeled after those of contemporary rockers, most notably Mick Jagger. He made enough to take six months off every year, during which he returned to California, surviving on the previous six months' earnings.
In the late 1960s, Gortner suffered a crisis of conscience — in particular about the threats of damnation he felt compelled to weave into his sermons — and resolved to make one final tour, this time on film.[1] Under the pretense of making a documentary detailing a viable ministry, he assembled a documentary film crew to follow him around revival meetings in California, Texas, and Michigan during 1971. Unbeknownst to everyone else involved — including, at one point, his father — he gave "backstage" interviews to the filmmakers in between sermons and revivals, explaining intimate details of how he and other ministers operated. After sermons, the filmmakers were invited back to his hotel room to tape him counting the money he collected during the day. The resulting film, Marjoe, won the 1972 Academy Award for best documentary.[2]
After leaving the revival circuit, Gortner then attempted to break into both Hollywood and the recording industry.[3] He cut an LP with Columbia Records, entitled "Bad, but not Evil" (Gortner's description of himself in the documentary), which met with poor sales and reviews. He began his acting career with a featured role in The Marcus-Nelson Murders, the 1973 pilot for the Kojak TV series.[4] The following year saw him featured in the Academy Award-winning ensemble cast disaster film Earthquake as Sgt. Jody Joad, a psychotic grocery manager-turned-National Guardsman and the film's main antagonist, and in the television movie Pray for the Wildcats. Oui magazine hired Gortner to cover Millennium '73, a November 1973 festival headlined by Guru Maharaj Ji who was sometimes called a "boy guru".[5]
During the late 1970s, Gortner attempted to self-finance another similar film, this time a pseudo-fictional drama about an evangelist con-man and based in part on Gortner's real-life experiences. The film started shooting in New Orleans, Louisiana, but went bankrupt less than 6 weeks into production. Gortner disappeared late one night with several thousand dollars worth of film stock, most of it unused, and left the crew stranded in Dallas, Texas, where they had been moved for shooting. The film was never completed and the film stock was never recovered.
Gortner was married briefly to Candy Clark, from 1978 to December 14, 1979.[6]
Gortner's most memorable film performance was as the psychopathic, hostage-taking drug dealer in Milton Katselas's 1979 screen adaptation of Mark Medoff's play When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?, also starring Peter Firth, Lee Grant, and Hal Linden. He also starred in several B-movies such as the television film The Gun and The Pulpit (1974) {also released on home video as The Gun and the Cross}, The Food Of The Gods (1976), and Starcrash (1978). He appeared frequently on the 1980s Circus of the Stars specials. He hosted an early-1980s reality TV series called Speak Up, America and appeared on Falcon Crest as corrupt psychic-medium "Vince Karlotti" (1986-87) before ending his movie career in 1995 with an appearance in the western Wild Bill, in which he played a preacher.
Today he sponsors charity golf tournaments and other events, as well as working as a public speaker.
Legacy
In 2007, the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival commissioned actor and writer Brian Osborne to write a one-man play about Marjoe Gortner. The play, The Word, was presented as a work in progress. [1]
In 2008 The Melbourne Underground Film Festival held the first retrospective of the cinematic works of Marjoe Gortner as part of their 9th festival.
References
- ^ Interview with Roger Ebert, The SunTimes, September 25, 1972
- ^ New York Times Movies Academy Award listing
- ^ IMDb
- ^ New York Times Movies
- ^ "Who Was Maharaj Ji?" Marjoe Gortner, OUI Magazine, May 1974
- ^ State of California. California Divorce Index, 1966-1984. Microfiche. Center for Health Statistics, California Department of Health Services, Sacramento, California. p 8613.
- Article in the November 1972 issue of Playboy page 191.