Glaube und Währung - Dr. Gene Scott, Fernsehprediger

This probably isn't one of Herzog's best films -- and it certainly doesn't compare to some of his other documentaries, including "My Best Fiend," "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," "Lessons of Darkness" or even "Gesualdo." However, the subject matter is fascinating. I won't attempt to explain the late Dr. Gene Scott -- he needed to be experienced to be understood. For a while I was privileged to live where I could hear Dr. Scott on the radio 24 hours a day, and I have to confess that I found him compulsively listenable. Sure, he was a preacher, but in my experience he rarely really talked about religion. When he did, he preached strictly to the choir. The upshot is that Scott never really seemed to be trying to communicate with anyone, but carrying on a tortured inner dialog in a kind of code. The many flashes of paranoia and anger (usually directed at the government and his audience) and his borderline-abuse of his co-workers (constantly ordering his music director -- what was his name again -- to play the same song for the umpteenth time) further suggested that we were just watching or listening to a man struggling with himself.

The problem is that the best and most unbelievable Scott documentary would simply be to present a 90 minute segment of him doing his usual show -- I don't think even Herzog would dispute that. Here, we get a bit of Scott doing that, but also a lot of time is spent watching his volunteers answer phones, hearing from his parents and hearing Scott talking, very lucidly, in the back of a car. Scott also modestly described himself as just an employee-at-will reporting to some unseen church board of directors (likely only in the sense that Hank Greenberg was one). While it was interesting to hear where his anti-government diatribes came from, the movie was very tame and restrained compared to the man himself.

Still, anyone who had the longevity Scott had (yes, he's still on the air, albeit posthumously, and you can hear him streaming over the internet 24/7) can't really be a raving lunatic, and Scott was far from one. This comes across strongly in the documentary. What Herzog succeeds in showing us is not so much anger as extreme isolation and detachment. Scott was a brilliant man (we're reminded of his Stanford pedigree a couple of times) whose disdain for the world the rest of us live in caused him to build and occupy a startlingly persistent mirage. In this sense, the film is of a piece with Herzog's other documentaries that explore the many points of articulation between sanity and madness, reality and dream.

As ever with a Herzog documentary, the filmmaker doesn't try to preach or narrate his subject; instead he lets the subject matter speak for itself, and in this case the subject matter is a crazed tele-evangelist, Dr Gene Scott. In this 45 minute short, we witness Scott as he goes into his many angry rants, begging his viewers for cash and throwing childish tantrums when he doesn't get what he wants.

The narrative explores the true nature of American evangelism and those who front such shows. The segment in which Scott reads out the donations coming in is literally jaw dropping, you won't believe what you're seeing or how people can be so gullible. In fact, it's all so extreme that it feels like an absurd comedy, made all the more absurd by the fact that it's real. The surreal ending, with the toy music-making monkeys, brings to mind the glorious heights of the dancing chicken in STROSZEK.

Live TV at it's best…

I just had the opportunity to watch a print of this and I can't recommend it enough…a really fascinating documentary. It starts of so farcical that you wonder what Herzog's motives are in making this short film. However, we soon discover that this larger than life TV evangelist is not quite the pillar of towering strength that he portrays to his devoted audience (which as he reminds them, has grown well into it's 1000's).

What I found so fascinating about Dr Eugene Scott and his live telethon style broadcasts wasn't the usual reactionary opinions (although he had his share; homosexuals, women's rights etc). It was the surreal, completely unbelievable set-up of his television broadcasts. If you tried to make the most over the top parody of a TV evangelist possible, the result would still be nowhere near as ridiculous and captivating television as Scott's broadcasts. I've spent my share of time in America, seen many TV evangelists, but none of them have ever come close to Eugene Scott.

From the over the top set dressing, to his in house singing duo, to the old ladies manning the telephones (all major credit cards accepted) the whole broadcast really is quite astounding. The highlight though is Scott himself. Herzog shows us some quite extraordinary moments of television captured live by his small on-set crew. At one point the Dr grumbles ‘I will not be defeated tonight... (pause) not one more word until that thousand comes in'. At which point the presenter crosses his arms and just glares into the live camera refusing to speak until his requests for donations are met with.

With the Dr in full swing, resistance seems futile. Soon Scott is reporting on the incoming donations, all of which are in there hundreds, many thousands of dollars. However, it's just as well ‘It's not about the money!' as Scott screams at one point when again his requests to meet a larger target of a quarter of a million dollars are not met. Even when Scott's financial desires have been satisfied he still feels the need to insult his audience for not parting with their ‘few hundred miserable dollars' earlier.

The strength of this documentary though is in Herzog's one on one interviews with Scott, carried out on his estate or in the back of his stretched limo. Herzog's candid questioning shows an altogether different side to the TV persona his viewers were only allowed to whiteness. I've read that since Herzog's film, the FCC shut down Scott in the early 80's. I would suggest searching the Internet for Dr Scott. He seems to have embraced the Internet in order to continue his teachings.

This is a portrait of Dr Gene Scott a televangelist who ran into problems with the FCC in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Scott was eventually shut down, briefly, by the FCC. The documentary, which consists of little more than interviews with Scott and clips from his show, doesn't really deal with the reasons why the FCC was after him, rather it tries simply to show a man on a mission trying to save people while battling his inner demons.

This is an amazing one of a kind documentary that probably could only have been made by Werner Herzog. Herzog isn't interested in showing anything other than the man. There is no judgment as to what Scott is all about, there is just Scott talking to Herzog and to his audience. The result is a portrait of a man on a mission, who is doing what he feels to be right. The result is that you walk away from the film feeling that you've just met a real person and not a manufactured man of god.

If you can track this down its worth seeing. As with all of Herzog's documentaries you get to see something, or someone in a way that is very unexpected.

For a long time I was slightly disappointed with this documentary. I've had a semi-perverse fascination with Scott for many years, his degree from Stanford rather than from a bible mill, a somewhat scholarly approach to his subject on occasion which set him apart from his "peers" who merely disgusted me, and his lack of shame at appearing as a lunatic on the airwaves which set him apart much further from those who pose as the "status quo" keepers of morality and decency for average folks. This movie failed entirely to portray this essential difference. But it did capture what I now recognize as a very common underlying element to all of Herzog's movies I've seen, a character of mythic dimensions. Scott's quixotic nature to do battle with the FCC puts him on par with Aguirre or Fitzcaraldo. A living individual going all the way, taking it as far as he can, like the guy in "Grizzly Man." Herzog does something more deftly than any other director, create updated mythology for our era, and a portrait of a televangelist, even if it misses part of its subject is a very worthy part of this mythology.