Pod Only Knows #030 – “Marjoe” (1972) with Megan Goodwin
The 1972 film Marjoe won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. And then it spent a long time having largely been forgotten until it was restored and rereleased in 2005.
Marjoe is an intimate look at the life of Marjoe Gortner, who rose to fame in the charismatic evangelical revival world as the world’s youngest preacher until he was ultimately unmasked as a fraud, trained (often through torture) to deliver sermons with fake piety while fleecing untold crowds of true believers.
The film starts with Marjoe in his twenties having made a comeback, fully aware he was still a conman and showing at least some signs of remorse and discomfort with the grift.
It’s a film told from a questionable perspective, dripping with iffy journalistic ethics, but it poses (even if inadvertently) some tantalizing, unanswerable questions about, among other things, the role sincerity plays in the preacher-believer relationship and the unfortunate ease with which religion can be leveraged to stay cons.
Our friend Megan Goodwin joins us to talk through all of it.
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