February 27, 2005
Another Death Report
Doctor Gene Scott was no ordinary televangelist. In fact, it was just like him to sue Time magazine for comparing him with the likes of Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart. The maverick Scott might be a bit of a local Los Angeles phenomenon, but his often bizarrely unpredictable sermons were broadcast all over the world. Flipping deep in the channel count late at night, you never knew what high jinks the good doctor was going to be up to. As often as not what one came upon on one of those desperate late night searches for something vaguely watchable on TV was a tight headshot of the white bearded Scott smoking a cigar and berating a staff member, or reminding his congregation that a good seat in Heaven wasn’t cheap. Just as often Scott might be delivering one of his famous whiteboard sermons that featured the doctor feverishly working out a problem with his multi-colored felt tip markers that just became more and more densely composed of cross outs, arrows, and other indecipherable chicken scratch until it made the artist Joseph Beuys’ inscrutable chalkboard performance diagrams look like child’s play by comparison. Then again, he might just as well be seen galloping around in circles on one of his horses enjoying a sunny day. The German movie director Werner Herzog was so impressed with the doctor’s bully pulpit browbeating talent for moneymaking, he made Scott the subject of his 1980 documentary God’s Angry Man.