Lights, Camera, Al Gore!

By KAREN TUMULTY

Al Gore used to joke that it was easy to pick him out in a roomful of Secret Service agents: He was the stiff one. So he was the first to say how surreal it was to find himself the toast of Cannes last week. Over two days at the celebrated film festival, the former Vice President conducted what he figures were 48 interviews, many of them roundtable sessions, to accommodate the kind of interest that entertainment reporters usually bestow on people named Halle and Beyonce. And then there was that encounter with Hugh Jackman, the Australian heartthrob whose expected summer blockbuster, X-Men: The Last Stand, was set to open in some 16,000 theaters around the world. "It was just a random comment, and here's how I remember it--Hugh Jackman saying, 'Well, I look forward to your movie,'" Gore told TIME with a lusty chortle. "And I thought to myself, Oooo-kay."

Then again, Gore's new movie has something of a mutant-action-hero plotline of its own. It's the tale of a scorned, washed-up politician transformed into a laptop-wielding ninja whose PowerPoint could rescue the planet from the forces of greed and indifference. The slide-show warning about the risks of global warming that Gore, 58, has been giving to audiences for years has been turned into a 92-min. documentary called An Inconvenient Truth. The film opened in New York City and Los Angeles to better-than-decent reviews, expands to all the 10 biggest markets this week and will go nationwide by the Fourth of July weekend. Laurie David, wife of Seinfeld creator Larry David, is one of the producers; it's being distributed by Paramount.

Already there are spin-offs. A book with the same title has been published. The money Gore makes from the film will go toward a bipartisan media and grassroots education campaign whose participants include Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to the first President Bush. Viewers of the film are directed to a website: www.climatecrisis.net And at the end of the summer, Gore plans to begin a training program in Nashville, Tenn., that will enable 1,000 activists "to give my slide show in their voices," with a limited-use license to remix its music and images. But the best measure of the potential impact of the Gore film may be the fact that there's already an oil-industry-financed ad campaign to discredit it.

This is not a movie that is likely to draw many people who don't agree with its premise. And yet Gore says, "I actually hold out hope even President Bush and Vice President Cheney could change their minds before their term is up." As some Evangelicals and business leaders--both Republican constituencies--worry publicly about climate control, Gore says, "I think that the small bubble of unreality in which [Bush and Cheney] are living is getting more uncomfortable and a little lonely for them."

When people see his movie, they are also taking a new look at Gore himself. They are proving far more receptive than the audiences of his Senate days, when he would drag his global-warming flip charts to Washington dinner parties. Then again, there could hardly be a better backdrop than record gas prices and the onset of hurricane season if you are trying to draw attention to the issues of energy and the environment. Also working in Gore's favor is a political climate change, as the man who defeated him for the presidency in 2000 is currently suffering from approval ratings in the 30s. Says former Gore aide Chris Lehane: "People are now looking at him through the prism of the last six years and realizing that he had and has a lot to offer."

When Gore appeared at New York City's Town Hall last week, the notice in the box-office window read: TONIGHT'S PERFORMANCE IS SOLD OUT. NO WAITING LIST. NO STANDING ROOM. NO TICKETS FOR SALE. Gore was greeted by cheers, whistles and a standing ovation. Nine days earlier he got the same reaction at the film's Los Angeles opening.

Everyone in the Democratic Party seems to be asking the same questions: Could all this be a prelude to another presidential run? Could the new Al Gore be the answer for a party in which so many are discomfited by the fact that Senator Hillary Clinton is looking increasingly inevitable as the 2008 nominee even though she's commonly seen as unelectable? "I'm not planning to be a candidate again, ever. I have no intention of being a candidate," Gore says again and again. But he also notes, "I haven't made a Shermanesque statement because it just seems odd to do so."

That is the kind of fan dance you would expect from someone who still harbors hope for the job he fell just short of winning six years ago but doesn't want to look hungry for it. Democratic insiders weigh Gore's demurrals against his increasingly robust activism, not only on the environment but also in his full-throated criticism of the Iraq war. His opposition stands in sharp contrast to the support Clinton and many other leading Democratic contenders gave to the invasion of Iraq. And it is far more in tune with the sentiments of the party--and, more and more, the country at large.

One school of thought has it that if Clinton runs as expected, Gore won't be able to resist being drawn into the contest, if only because of a kind of sibling rivalry that goes back to the days when each had to maneuver around the other for influence in Bill Clinton's White House. Gore is the one Democrat whose entry into the race could deprive Clinton of the automatic front-runner advantage she now enjoys with fund raisers and activists.

There was plenty of renewable energy around the prospect of an Al-vs.-Hillary smackdown last week. New York magazine's cover story on Gore, written by John Heilemann, carried the headline: THE UN-HILLARY. And while Gore was basking in solar-drenched adulation at Cannes, Clinton was presenting her own energy plan in an hourlong wonkathon at the National Press Club in Washington. As Clinton showed her command of the intricacies of carbon-dioxide sequestration and cellulosic ethanol, it was impossible not to wonder whether the two of them might once again be crowding onto the same turf. Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times: "Al Gore must want to punch Hillary Clinton right through the hole in the ozone layer." Gore, however, took pains to tamp down that kind of talk. As he pointed out Chelsea Clinton in the audience at Town Hall last week, he added, "I want to commend to all of you Senator Clinton's important address on environmental policy."

One development suggests that Gore may indeed be burning the bridges to his political career. In recent weeks, Democratic sources tell TIME, he has been quietly telephoning some of his biggest fund raisers and telling them to feel free to sign on with other potential candidates. And he wants them to put out the word, instructing, "Tell everybody I'm not running." Still, Gore is positioned better than just about anyone else to tap the enormous, near instant fund-raising potential of the Internet should he choose to, considering the following he has generated among bloggers and with the Net-based political organization MoveOn.org

Gore is well aware that much of the glow around him would vanish the moment he became a candidate. The irony of the current buzz is that words like passionate and authentic are being used to describe a man who showed three entirely different personalities in as many presidential debates and whose 2000 campaign is remembered mostly for the way it was homogenized and shrink-wrapped by a string of poll-addicted handlers.

His new admirers keep asking, Why didn't we see this Gore when he was running for President? "Part of it is in the eye of the beholder," Gore says. "Those who behold a political campaign do so through a thick lens of skepticism, which is not all bad, but it does affect the way candidates are seen--all the more so when the other side of that campaign is constantly painting negative caricatures. But the second answer is, I've been though a lot in the last six years, and the old cliche, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, sometimes has a grain of truth."

Gore says he has found "a different kind of campaign," one that plays more to his strengths than electoral politics did. The 2000 defeat taught him lessons about his talents and his limits. When he was considering four years ago whether to make a 2004 presidential bid, Gore told TIME, "I'm better at looking over the next ridge to try to anticipate what we're going to see there. What I don't think I'm good at is the back-slapping and political compromise that are part of being a candidate."

Since leaving politics, there's something Gore appears to have discovered he is very good at, and that is earning a living. Friends say he has come to enjoy the luxury of a private life. He has a busy schedule on the lecture circuit, earning as much as $150,000 a speech. The technophile former Vice President has been a part-time adviser to Google since 2001, and while he refuses to say how he is compensated, the guessing in Washington is that Gore has accumulated a hefty chunk of its stock. Forbes magazine reports that the 60,000 options he holds in Apple Computer, where he is on the board, are worth $2 million.

Current TV, the youth-oriented cable network that Gore launched last August, has been picked up by Comcast for its digital tier, and will reach 28 million homes as of this week, says Gore's business partner Joel Hyatt. The network is in negotiations with cable systems in France, Germany and Italy, and expects to achieve the relatively rare feat of becoming profitable in its first year. Says Hyatt: "We are just on fire." Additionally, Gore has begun a London-based equity firm with former Goldman Sachs Asset Management CEO David Blood. It's a partnership that, despite its nickname Blood & Gore, aims to invest in socially responsible ventures.

All this would be hard to walk away from. Or, looked at another way, it would be a good source of seed money for a return to politics. Gore boasts of "moving the needle" in the climate-change debate, but he conceded in his New York appearance, "Look, I'm under no illusion that the office of the President is second to none in its ability to make changes and get things done."

In any case, Gore doesn't have to make any decisions soon. Meanwhile, he's enjoying his red-carpet moment, even as he pleads that he's a little bewildered by it all. The experience, he says, reminds him of a New Yorker cartoon that used to hang on the wall of his Senate office. It showed a funny-looking dog riding a tricycle onstage in an opera house, to rapturous applause from a fancy audience. Gore can relate to what the caption says the dog is thinking: "I don't know why they like this, but I'm going to keep on pedaling."

With reporting by JAMES CARNEY/WASHINGTON, Jeffrey Kluger/New York, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles