Back when time and sleep were of the more surplus variety, I would sometimes spend the tail end of a late night with that horse-happy, cigar-waving TV preacher, Dr. Gene Scott.  Scott wasn’t like the other preachers littering the cable crap-scape.  He had a Ph.D. from Stanford, and, as he often demonstrated while dissecting a bit of scripture at his beloved dry-erase board, was fluent in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic.

He was also, apparently, fluent in alcohol.  Oh, and womanizing.  As the Internet Monk’s Michael Spencer says in his terrific article on Scott, “I Just Couldn’t Look Away.”

And while his shilling for money was a near-constant, his gruff persona and random cutaways to his ponies (and “pony girls”) made it all seem oddly endearing.  After an hour or so of watching, it was hard to not start hoping Scott got some of that cash he was asking (barking!) for.

So…in short, was he crackpot?  Absolutely.  But, hey, he was an L.A. crackpot.  And just the type of self-possessed subject to attract director Werner Herzog.  What follows at the bottom is the little-seen documentary Herzog made of Scott in 1980, God’s Angry Man.
 

Barbie Bridges vs. Melissa Scott
 
Gene Scott died close to 5 years ago from complications arising from prostate cancer.  His younger-by-40-years wife, Melissa Scott, seized took over the still-profitable ministry’s reigns—and still dodges allegations of having had a possibly pornographic past (see above).