three million dollars. Shortly after Gortner's sixteenth birthday, his father absconded with the money. In the years that followed, Gortner took a break from preaching. He grew resentful of his parents and bitter over the childhood they had forced upon him. At age 20, Gortner considered suing his parents, but never did. Career Gortner spent the remainder of his teenage years as an itinerant beatnik. In the late 1960s, Gortner experienced a crisis of conscience about his double life. He decided his performing talents might be put to use as an actor or singer. When approached by documentarians Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan, he agreed to let their film crew follow him throughout 1971 on a final tour of revival meetings in California, Texas, and Michigan. Unknown to everyone involvedincluding, at one point, his fatherhe gave "backstage" interviews to the filmmakers between sermons and revivals, some including other preachers, explaining intimate details of how he and other ministers operated. The filmmakers also shot footage of him while counting the money he had collected during the day, later in his hotel room. The resulting film, Marjoe, won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Documentary. Gortner capitalized on the success of the documentary. Oui magazine hired him to cover Millennium '73, a November 1973 festival headlined by the "boy guru" Guru Maharaj Ji. He cut an LP with Chelsea Records titled Bad, but Not Evil, named after his description of himself in the documentary. He began his acting career with a featured role in The Marcus-Nelson Murders, the 1973 pilot for the Kojak TV series. In 1974, he made several appearances in film and television. In the disaster film, Earthquake, he was Sgt. Jody Joad, a psychotic grocery manager-turned-National Guardsman, the main antagonist. He starred in the television movies The Gun and the Pulpit and Pray for the Wildcats, and appeared in an episode of Nakia, a 1974 police drama on ABC. Gortner portrayed the psychopathic, hostage-taking drug dealer in Milton Katselas's 1979 screen adaptation of Mark Medoff's play When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?. He starred in a number of B-movies including Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (1976), The Food of the Gods (1976), and Starcrash (1978). In the early 1980s, Gortner hosted the short-lived reality TV series, Speak Up, America. He also appeared frequently in the 1980s Circus of the Stars specials. He also played a terrorist preacher in a