What's your favorite image of Al Gore? Maybe it's Gore standing ramrod straight at a presidential debate, or lecturing about global warming in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth? Mine run along those lines. But on Sept. 17, it was a totally different Al Gore who greeted me at the Four Seasons Hotel. Clad in a black suit and black silk shirt, Gore was pounding on his laptop computer in the same room where he had exchanged Hollywood happy-talk the night before with Sean Penn and other entertainment power-players.
Like it or not, we have entered the era where the former Vice-President (whose Presidential campaign failed in the most public of ways) suddenly has become the unlikeliest of Hollywood's power elite. Gore can't greenlight a film or order up a second season for some lamebrained sitcom, but the former Veep has scored one of those rare Hollywood accomplishments, winning two awards in the same year, in two different media. In February, his eco-documentary An Inconvenient Truth won an academy award and on Sept. 16 he won a special Emmy for interactive TV for Current TV, the two-year-old user-generated news channel he started with partner (and heavyweight Democratic fund-raiser) Joel Hyatt.