Lights, Camera, Al Gore!

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 Beyoncé. 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."