In 1972, an odd little documentary called Marjoe made its way into American cinemas — but was kept away from the Bible Belt. It took home an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, ran on TV here and there, got a VHS release, and then quietly disappeared until 2005, when a restored copy of the “lost” film was screened in New York as part of a series hosted by the IFC Center. And if it hadn’t been lost, we probably could have saved outselves a lot of trouble over the last 30 years or so.

IMDB and Wikipedia have the basic information on the movie — little more than what I said in that first paragraph — and director Sarah Kernochan has written at length about the effort to resurrect the film on DVD, so that spares me the trouble of going into any of that here. Instead, I can focus on what matters: one of the greatest religious scams ever captured on film, and the charming bastard who pulled it off.

That charming bastard was Marjoe Gortner (pronounced just like it looks), who rose to fame in the late 1940’s and 1950’s as “the world’s youngest preacher.” He was ordained — and had begun officiating at weddings — at the age of four, and spent much of the next ten years on the road, preaching at revival meetings. The Gortner family was able to rake in the donation money with their adorable, Gospel-spouting toddler. The cute factor drew a crowd, but little Marjoe’s talent as a preacher helped his family make a very nice living.

After introducing us to the Littlest Preacher, the movie cuts to the early 1970’s, where Marjoe, now in his late 20’s and looking every bit the hippie, sits down for a series of interviews in which he admits that he doesn’t accept the Christian ideas of sin and Hell, that he spent years resenting his parents for pushing him into preaching, and that he’s not sure he’s ever felt a sincere belief in God. Then he slicks his hair back, puts on his suit, and gets up to preach in front of a revival crowd, where he once again brings the house down.

Such was the life of Marjoe Gortner in the early 70’s: spending half his year preaching to tents full of ecstatic evangelicals, and the other half as a groovy 70’s dude with money to burn. He wasn’t a subversive or a performance artist, and he wasn’t trying to bring down the evangelical movement from the inside. There’s nothing in his preaching that would make you doubt his sincerity — he testifies, speaks in tongues, lays hands on the sick, and takes big, fat donations with the earnestness of a man who truly believes he’s doing the Lord’s work. Then he sits down with the crew back at the hotel, admits it’s an act, and describes some of the techniques he uses.

He had to give up preaching once the movie came out, of course, but that had been his plan all along. He was coming out of the closet as a nonbeliever, and brought along the film crew to take his confession. It’s easy to dismiss Marjoe as a con man, but what does that say about the preachers he worked with? Donations make sense if you’re running a proper church — there are salaries to pay, youth groups to run, tracts to publish, and a large building to maintain — but what about the revivals run out of tents? What about the preachers like Marjoe, who travel from place to place speaking in other people’s tents, with no real overhead of their own? At the end of the night, the people in charge of the revival are more than happy to hand him a stack of bills taken from old ladies’ purses, which he giddily dumps onto his hotel bed and counts, cameras rolling the whole time.

The only difference between Marjoe and those other preachers is honesty, at least when he drops his preacher persona. He’s willing to admit, for instance, that “speaking in tongues” is based mostly on peer pressure — once everyone’s doing it, you feel a little safer faking it, not knowing that nearly everyone else is faking it as well. He flirts with cute 70’s girls in a bar by explaining the tricks behind faith-healing, and the girls seem truly impressed.

In short, he does everything Matt Taibbi did when he went undercover at John Hagee’s church last year, but he did it 36 years earlier, in an Oscar-winning film. If that film, and its remarkable subject, had received the exposure they deserved and stuck around through the intervening years, we could have had a much cooler country. Try to imagine the rise of the Christian Coalition, or George W. Bush, or Sarah Palin, in a country where everyone had seen Marjoe. Those things still would have happened to some extent, but there would have been a whole lot more people calling bullshit, and that’s all you can really ask.

I’ve been pretty lax about posting for the last couple of weeks, due to a super-secret project. Well, I’m happy to announce that the project is complete, and can now be unleashed upon the world.

A little background for the uninitiated: Watchmen, in its original graphic novel form, featured a gigantic squid-like monster in a rather prominent role. The movie version of Watchmen hits theaters on March 6, and director Zack Snyder has promised it will remain faithful to the source material. With one small exception: he left out the squid. His movie is squidless. Whether the movie is good or bad, whether the new ending works or not, the fact will remain that we won’t get to see New York under attack from a monstrous cephalopod. What to do?

Sell “I [squid] NY” T-shirts, that’s what. You can’t change the movie, but you can sure as hell put a few more squids in the theater. People are excited about this movie, and you can set yourself apart from the Johnny-come-latelies by saying to the world, “Screw you, I read the book!” And if the movie turns out to be bad? Distance yourself from it by displaying your dedication to the original ending! Either way, the other nerds will love you.

If you don’t want one, you probably have a friend who will. Maybe it’s a Watchmen fan, maybe it’s a scientist who studies squids or something; I don’t know who your friends are. I just know that I don’t have much of an advertising budget for this project, so a little word-of-mouth couldn’t hurt. So come on; make the other nerds jealous.

Ralph Bakshi has a message for all the amateur animators and cartoonists out there, and more generally, all us struggling artists. That message is:

“You guys are sitting today with the world in your hands.”

Bakshi, generally regarded as a groundbreaking animator and filmmaker, is best known for directing the film adaptation of R. Crumb’s X-rated Fritz the Cat. He struggled for much of his career against behemoth animation studios like Terrytoons and Disney, and witnessed the original death of theatrical animation in the 1950s. Bakshi discussed this on a panel at the 2008 San Diego Comic Con, and explained how he managed to beat the trend in a fading industry:

“I started to think about what I’d hated about the cartoons I’m looking at, and why the studios should close down. There’s no reason to keep stuff open that’s boring. In other words, why do you need another Terrytoons with a cat chasing a mouse in 1956?”

Soon realizing that he was in a room full of wide-eyed young geeks hanging on his every word, Bakshi took the opportunity to deliver a much-needed spanking to wannabe animators everywhere:

“You got these computers that can do this stuff for nothing! And what do you do with it? You try to get a job with some asshole studio.”

He has a point, of course, recognizable to everyone who watches original online cartoons, or even just Adult Swim. Coming from an aging animator who had to do it all the hard way, Bakshi is almost wistful when he talks about the amazing D.I.Y. possibilities available to today’s aspiring animators. If he sounds angry at all, it’s only because we’ve got it so much easier than he did (at least from a technological standpoint), and he suspects we may be wasting it.

“Four guys can get together and make their own movie in a year. But nobody does except Bill Plympton… That’s what I would do if I was young. I wouldn’t even get a job! I’d get a couple of computers and a bunch of guys. We’d eat crap for a year, and be millionaires the next year.”

I’m not sure how realistic this plan is, but it’s nice to hear a successful old pro, especially one who appears to be coherent and sober, say the sort of shit that young writers usually tell each other around beer #6. If you’re any variety of starving artist struggling to make a living, particularly in the current trainwreck economy, I recommend you watch the full clip of Ralph Bakshi’s wonderful 9-minute impromptu lecture below:

Well, you heard the man.

I’ve never really done New Year’s resolutions. My birthday is January 1st, and surviving another year usually feels like enough of an accomplishment that I don’t bother setting any more implausible goals for myself. This year, though, I’ve got a good one:

My resolution for 2009 is to convince somebody to pay me for something I actually like doing.

Which is to say, I want to finish at least one comic, and sell at least one copy.

Which is to say, if I manage to complete one of my many, many unfinished comics, I plan on seriously showing it to people. Not just passing it around among my friends or posting it here, but giving it to wealthy strangers who might want to publish it. It will certainly work better than my current strategy of doing nothing.

As much as I enjoy writing on my very own fancy-pants website, I’d rather be selling unreadable comic books to an obscure niche audience. I don’t want to “break into the industry” or anything so grand; just sell a couple books to complete strangers. Hopefully they’ll like it, but that’s not really necessary for my plan.

Mostly I just want an excuse to blog about comics as I work on them, and to vent about the miserable slowness of the creative process. Maybe post some art every now and then, but probably not. At the very least, I’ll always have something to write about on slow news days, and that’s reason enough to try this.

Hey, remember this asshole? Paul Nawrocki, the former executive who took to the streets of Manhattan with a placard advertising his “almost homeless” status, essentially panhandling for a new high-paying executive position? Well, that guy’s got some competition on the opposite side of the country.

Meet Kelly Kinney, a 29-year-old marketing professional from LA. She, like her New York counterpart, has been standing on the street asking for white-collar employment. The difference is, Kinney is wearing her resume.

About a week ago, after seeing a guy wearing a T-shirt that read “Unemployed,” she decided to take the idea a step further and put her resume on the front of her shirt and a cover letter on the back. The credentials on the white T-shirt are listed below a boldface heading: “I NEED A JOB!”

Is this any less pathetic than Nawrocki’s approach? Not really; in addition to wearing his sign, he hands out resumes from his corner in New York. But instead of banking on people’s sympathy, Kinney is making use of an ancient secret of marketing: if it’s on a T-shirt, it’s automatically kind of funny. People see her, and they think, “This person doesn’t make me sad. Why, this person might brighten up the whole office if we hired her! Too bad we’re in the process of laying off half our employees.”

It doesn’t hurt that she’s been sending out a staggering number of resumes the old-fashioned way as well, or that she’s tried other gimmicks in the past:

Kinney is tenacious. While the T-shirt idea is her latest promotion, she also posted her resume on her car window and sent postcards to potential employers — all in the hope one will believe in her.

“If I can sell myself this well, I can sell your company this well as well,” she said.

That’s a lot of “well”s, but her point stands, and I’m inclined to believe her. If she can take something as depressing as begging for employment on a street corner and make it seem fun, then she clearly knows something about marketing. Ms. Kinney, if I had any money or business sense, I would start a company and offer you a job. Or I would if you were willing to relocate to Pittsburgh, which you probably aren’t.

Look, at least I’m trying to do something nice here. Is there anyone in LA who could maybe help me out with this?

Dear Mr. Spielberg (and, if you insist, Mr. Lucas),

During a recent conversation with my friend Horatio (you know, the other guy on this site) we discovered that neither of us hated Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It wasn’t our favorite Indy movie, but we still didn’t understand why it had generated so much rage among our fellow geeks. After all, a dead alien is no more or less absurd than a magic god-box that melts people’s faces (a feature of the Ark which I do not recall anyone mentioning in the Bible, incidentally).

In time, though, we reached a disagreement. I said that nothing in the new movie was as annoying as Short Round, while Horatio claimed he’d always sort of liked Dr. Jones’ li’lest sidekick. He made a compelling case. Horatio:

I think I’m the only person I know that actually likes Short Round. Somehow, his background is just so much seedier than the background of all other cute movie children, which is a quality that I find quite compelling. I mean, his mother was obviously a prostitute, and she probably died of typhoid or malaria. [...] And since Temple of Doom is a prequel, Shorty is either in jail by the time “Raiders” rolls around, or more likely dead, killed in a spike trap or speared by feisty natives. And you’ll notice that Indy never mentions him again. Something sinister about that, too.

I, being the sort of person I am, was compelled to reply:

Short Round isn’t necessarily dead or in jail. Perhaps his real father, a central figure in the southeast Asian opium trade, tracked him down, brought him home, and introduced Shorty to the family business. Indy was devastated to see his young ward fall to the dark side, and never spoke of it again.

And that, Mr. Spielberg, is the premise for your next movie. Bear with me, I promise you it will get awesome.

See, Shorty is all grown up, and controls nearly every aspect of southeast Asia’s criminal underworld. He uses his wealth and influence to fund archaeological expeditions, partly to lend an air of legitimacy to his operation (and to sell the finds on the black market), but mostly out of nostalgia for his travels with Dr. Jones. Inevitably, one of these missions will bring him into conflict with his former mentor, and the two will be forced to race each other across Mao’s China in search of some artifact or another.

(The artifact itself doesn’t actually matter; just get on Wikipedia and find something Chinese-sounding. A sword or some jade bullshit or something, whatever. People aren’t seeing this movie because they want to look at dusty old museum crap.)

Look, I’m giving you the perfect movie here (for a reasonable fee, to be negotiated later). We’ve got the 2009 version of Harrison Ford (a.k.a. “Old Indy”) coming to terms with his newly adversarial relationship with an old friend, with all that entails – the student returning to challenge the aging master, and so forth. Whether fans loved or hated Short Round in Temple of Doom, they’ll like seeing him become a badass villain.

I’ve even given you the perfect storyline for the much-maligned Mutt Williams, who will get a glimpse of his potential future as a forgotten sidekick of the good Professor. I mean, the scene damn near writes itself. “He may be your teacher, Mutt, but to me… he was a father!” Holy shit. Sure it’s cheesy, but people will eat it up.

And most of all, I’ve given you a story with opportunities for fancy things like subtext and maturity. This hypothetical evil Short Round idolizes Jones, but also resents him. This goes beyond the grudging professional respect displayed by Belloq in Raiders, and even the doomed Nazi romance in Last Crusade is quaint by comparison.

Really, one of the only things people liked about Crystal Skull was the return of Marion. Here was Indiana Jones, cranky and haggard, finally forced to confront his past, which up to that point had been littered with ex-lovers and ex-sidekicks that he’d apparently forgotten. You gave him a happy reunion with an old friend.

If you ask us, he’s long overdue for a really painful one. Just promise us this movie won’t have any fucking dragons.

Sincerely,
The Staff of TheBeak.org