It started with wedding ceremonies. "I remember my mother going through very, uh, correctional activities, you might say, to get me prepared to say the wedding ceremony, because I would have to say the whole Episcopal ceremony verbatim and write my name on the certificate... As I child I'd want to go out and play and we'd have to spend hours and hours, you know, memorizing and my mind would slip and finally my mother would begin to lost patience with me and she would put a pillow over my head maybe and smother me for a little bit, other times she would hold me under the water faucet, but she never wanted to put any marks on my body, because she knew I had to be in front of the press and so she never hit me or anything."

Gortner goes on,"When I would go to a press conference or an interview, my father would march me, in full outfit, right up to the news editor and say, 'I want to see the editor.' They would be so shocked, at a 6-year old kid coming up with a full handshake, and I would say, 'How do you do, my name is Marjoe Gortner. I'm in town to give the devil two black eyes!' At this point, he's falling out of his seat."

But Marjoe grew up, hit adolescence, and the novelty wore off. Around twelve, Gortner's father abandoned the family. At fourteen and a half, Marjoe told his mother he would preach no more. He left, and met an older women who took him in.

For years, Marjoe Gortner hid his scrapbook, hid his past life from his friends.  

Now it's the early 1970's. Marjoe Gortner tells the documentary film crew all the secrets of a traveling Pentecostal tent revivalist, how to liberate, with no drugs or substances whatsoever, people from their normal sensibilities and pry loose the biggest denomination bills from their wallets.

He's a young man returning to the traveling preaching circuit for some quick cash. He whips up the crowd, all the old tricks, releases a dove at the end, the music at a crescendo. People start falling like bowling pins, tongue talking words flying about, bodies shaking on the church floor...

Marjoe is back in the church office, with the church preacher, splitting up the piles of cash. It was a success. "That's a good sermon boy," says the preacher. "Thank you," says Gortner, "coming from you I think that's a compliment." "...A good sermon, I like that!" (they're laughing), "that climax, boy that dove!..." Gortner explains, "I got that when I was down in Texas. You know Fitzgerald? I preached that the first time at his church."

"You count the big stuff, and I'll count this," says the preacher. "OK", says Gortner. "You gonna trust me?" "Oh, I think I'll trust you" says the preacher. They're chuckling, bills rustling under hot fingertips, "fifteen, sixteen"...

"Thank you Jesus!" Marjoe dumps the pile of bills out of a bag onto his hotel room bed. He's singing a gospel tune, "Are you washed in the blood tonight?... Oh glory, glory, Hallelujah, I feel good in my soul..."

He considers the piles of bills, fives, tens, twenties, and so on - "it sure isn't as heavy as it used to be though, in the old days. Wow. It was really heavy then. I can remember how I used to have to go down, and work with my mother and father, the whole thing, money! money! - from the time I was four years old."

"I really supported them, you know, when I was a child, come to think about it. I remember how they used to send me down into the aisles and I wore these little velvet pants and Lord Fontaine suits with satin shirts but my mother sew, you know, extra pockets into the suits so I could stuff money."

"And they would announce, 'Everyone tonight that gives twenty dollars, little Marjoe's going to come down and give you a kiss.' All these little lovely old ladies that wanted to get their fingers in my curly locks, and after I would fill up my pockets I'd come back and my father would alleviate me of the money...

"I don't know how much came in, as far as I can guess maybe about three million dollars from the time I was four to fourteen... I never got any piece of it for my education of anything." In 2011 terms, the money Gortner earned might be worth well over twenty million dollars.

Towards the end of the one and a half hour documentary, Gortner struggles with his cash-driven return to the evangelism circuit; for him it's an act, no more or less. He says the words -- "Can God can deliver a homosexual? Yes he can!", jokes about other things he may or may not be expected to say: "Kill a commie for Jesus!"

Marjoe Gortner spent much of the rest of his adult life pursuing an acting career, until 1995. Now he raises money for charity.