Demetria Kalodimos and Kathy Conkwright produced, directed, and researched this fascinating documentary about an unexplored facet of underground Nashville history: The popularity of the Prophet Omega, a radio evangelist who taped wild, stream-of-consciousness sermons in an apartment complex on Lamont Drive. They were broadcast over gospel station WNAH-AM in the late 1970s and early '80s, but it wasn't until years later that they became a cult phenomenon, passed from musician to musician.

Not only do Kalodimos and Conkwright trace Omega's cult following to its original source- country singer T. Graham Brown, who taped the shows off the radio and duped them for friends- but they follow its spread to subsequent generations of admirers, from Marty Stuart and Adrian Belew to Saturday Night Live bandleader G.E. Smith and Melissa Etheridge. (If nothing else, the movie is an ingenious piece of detective work about the transmission of urban folklore). It's hilarious to hear Smith, Stuart, and even Billy Bob Thornton recite the Prophet from memory, as if his words were a membership rite in some secret organization. But the surrounding material, especially about the shady characters scuffling along the radio gospel circuit, becomes oddly compelling. That Omega himself remains absent, except for a poignant final coda, is fitting: The film is perhaps most interesting as an investigation into the ways legends obscure and overtake their subjects. The early scenes rely too much on cutesy graphics. Other than that, the film's chief flaw is that there isn't more of it.

VHS - 2000
Genuine Human Productions
www.genuinehuman.com

The creators of this documentary have also released a DVD edition, digital downloads of the "Complete Sermons" of Prophet Omega's audio recordings, and even an Apartment 258 t-shirt that comes with the digital download of "Complete Sermons" Disc 1! - Please consider supporting them through Bandcamp:
https://genuinehumanproductions.bandcamp.com/album/prophet-omega-the-complete-sermons-disc-one

Sleeve insert scan:
https://imgur.com/a/CDpc3ZO