THE RESURRECTION OF GENE SCOTT

Gene Scott was sitting alone in front of the camera, doing a number on the Book of Numbers, reading, again and again, a passage from Chapters 22 and 23 recounting the story of Balaam’s ass.

His days of fighting with Gov. George Deukmejian and the Federal Communications Commission largely over, the Scott now seen on TV is inclined to lecture at length on the earthier aspects of the Bible with a gusto that would mortify any conventional “born-again” Christian. Scott’s vision of God, after all, is of a guy who could hold His own in a working-class bar.

In recent months, though, something strange has happened to the flamboyant preacher who lost some of his broadcast visibility after the FCC lifted the license of his Glendale church about two years ago. Scott has rebuilt his TV network into a greater force than it ever was, and, in the process, he has become a popular late-night TV attraction.

In fact, in Dallas and Reno, two of the markets where his “University Network” (he likes to call it “the Un-channel”) appears via satellite, the latest ratings show Scott to be at least as popular as NBC’s David Letterman, even beating him in some time slots. Occasionally, he blows away ABC’s Ted Koppel and outdraws the old movies and most of the syndicated series broadcast in late-night slots by network affiliates.

And while his performance is inconsistent across the country--and weaker in Nielsen ratings than in Arbitron’s--it is clear that, based on the latest ratings period and earlier surveys, the preacher from Glendale has acquired a strikingly large audience nationwide.

Scott, currently carried in Los Angeles on Channels 18 and 30, seems to be having the last laugh on the FCC. His television ministry, which once struggled to raise an announced goal of $300,000 a month, now takes in, Scott says, $1 million a month--sometimes $2 million.

The parking lot of Scott’s Faith Center Church in Glendale once was filled with rusting old cars bought by the pastor who preceded Scott. Now the church owns two airplanes (a Learjet and a DC-3) and stationary and mobile satellite dishes and a fully equipped mobile TV van.

The church lost its license to operate Channel 30, now called KAGL, after a long-running dispute between the FCC and Scott over the federal agency’s demand that Scott turn over financial records to FCC investigators.

Irregularities had been charged in his management of the station, but none of the accusations of financial mismanagement was ever proved. The dispute over the licenses of Channel 30, a San Bernardino FM radio station and TV stations in San Francisco and Hartford also owned by Faith Center was strictly over his refusal to turn over records to the FCC.

Scott has since sold the Hartford station and says he expects to lose pending license-revocation actions against the local radio outlet and the Bay Area TV station. But he’s put together a new network by buying time on some stations--usually in the middle of the night--selling satellite receiver dishes to his followers and persuading cable companies to run his programming 24 hours a day on closed circuit. The network now includes 18 over-the-air stations and cable outlets in 15 markets.

Considering the time slots Scott buys, his unusual program has begun to show the makings of a significant national ratings sleeper.

He draws about the same numbers as Robert H. Schuller in some markets, while consistently outdrawing such evangelical superstars as Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart in markets surveyed for this article by The Times.

But what has surprised and even amazed officials of many of the stations on which Scott buys time is that he’s registering a share of the audience far higher than most TV experts thought likely, or even possible, for somebody who talks about Jesus Christ all the time. (A “share” of 10% means that a show captured 10% of all of the TV sets actually turned on during that time period in that market).

In Dallas, where Scott is buys time between 12:30 and 6 a.m. on KDFI-TV, Channel 27, he won the ratings race in his time period on selected nights in May. Viewer response, said KDFI General Manager John McKay, has been “tremendous,” with Scott pulling 25 to 30 telephone calls daily.

The reaction of Bill Andrews, part owner and general manager of KAME-TV, Channel 21, in Reno, typifies those of executives of stations on which Scott appears.

In that market, Scott’s late-night share has been as high as 39% of all homes actually viewing--a measure Andrews asserted is even more significant in Reno than in other markets because the city is very much a Nevada gambling town, with a wide diversity of people likely to be awake in the middle of the night.

Those viewers include Andrews himself. When Scott first started buying time on the station a year ago, Andrews didn’t think much about it until he found himself awake at about 3 one morning and started randomly switching across the dial until he got to his own station, where Scott was on. Andrews recalls that he abruptly let go of the changing knob and sat back, transfixed.

“You go by him and, all of a sudden, you find yourself watching him,” Andrews said. “He mesmerizes you. He’s a highly intelligent man and I think large numbers of people are just that--mesmerized. He just sits there and talks. And, every once in a while, he gets off onto things that I’m intensely interested in.”

Scott has yet to crack the kingpin markets of Los Angeles and New York with significant ratings performances, however.

In Los Angeles, he’s on Channels 18 and 30. Several local cable systems run his programs around the clock. Because of the diversity of outlets in Southern California, Scott’s effect on any one channel is dilluted, making him essentially invisible in ratings surveys.

In New York, he’s carried on Spanish-language WNJU-TV, Channel 40, where his is the only program aired in English. Still, though, said Tom Johansen, vice president for sales for the New Jersey-based station, when Channel 40 started Scott’s show, the switchboard was overwhelmed by hundreds of calls. The heavy viewer response continued for months, Johansen said: “I honestly had no idea when I saw the pilot that viewer response would be like that.”

The total size of Scott’s audience around the country cannot be known--nor, for that matter, can there be any sure idea of the number of people who watch any preacher on TV.

But Scott’s potential cable audience--the total of subscribers to cable systems on which he appears--is about 20 million, or more than four times the number available to Trinity Broadcasting Network, the Orange County-based organization that is his major “born-again” competition in the L.A. market.

Scott, who earned a doctorate from Stanford University, was sitting in a small room off his main Glendale studio one night recently, preparing for a broadcast that would be classically Scott.

He would teach from the Book of Ezekiel, Chapter 23, which is about as close to pornography as the Scripture gets--and that’s fairly close. Even the language of the King James Version leaves little to the imagination, describing bare-breasted women committing “whoredoms” and “abominations.”

“This is a porno story. God,” Scott would say later on camera, “told a dirty story through Ezekiel. What the Scripture says is these people were dinging around in Egypt.”

Then, pausing at the thought of more conventional “born-again” preachers treating Ezekiel 23 on TV, Scott would belly laugh. “I’m tired of the Bible being made dull,” he would say. “I like God. I bet He could hold people’s attention in a bar.

“But they (evangelical congregations of the Christian extreme political right) wouldn’t let Him in church. What’s the matter with being a little colorful?”

Sitting preparing for what was to come in the studio, Scott seemed a man set free. As his television fame has grown, his ministry has prospered and the battle with the FCC has begun to recede into the past. He has drifted to the left, leaving many “born-agains” and evangelicals aghast--even more, probably, than they were before. And they have never really liked Scott.

He says now, for instance, that he has nothing against letting homosexuals worship at his church; that he thinks “born agains” have missed the point in the fight over prayer in the schools; that he thinks the original U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing such mandatory prayer was the right one, and that, on abortion, “I agree with Richard Pryor. If men could get pregnant, abortion would have been legalized 5,000 years ago.”

“There is so much of a crunch of Bible-thumping, judgmental condemnation that I got the last word in the preacher invasion of television,” Scott said. “There is a vast audience that wants to listen to somebody who will say, ‘Hey, let’s bust their (traditional “born agains”) bubbles and get down to reality.’

“People are interested in God. The world is crazy and messed up and I guess the subjects I’m on have reached their time.”

During the broadcast that began a few minutes later, Scott would pause during his lecture on Ezekiel 23. He would look up from his Bible for a second and ask a question his studio and broadcast audiences are accustomed to hearing, many times each night.

He would demand to know: “Am I boring you?”

And they would answer in unison: “No, sir!”