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Heston sees his evolution as the result of years of reading. "I didn't change," he insists. "The Democratic Party slid to the left from right under me." He concedes one U-turn: in 1968, after the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, Heston endorsed Lyndon Johnson's 1968 gun-control law--a fact that his N.R.A. rivals blasted over the Internet in an effort to stave off his election. "I was young and foolish," Heston explains.
Now his positions track the N.R.A.'s. Trigger locks? "A ludicrous invention. If you can't put it on a weapon without taking the bullets out, why put it on?" A five-day waiting period? "It's hard for me to accept that a guy says, 'I'm going to kill that s.o.b., but, darn, I have this five-day waiting period.' He probably still wants to kill him after five days." Ban Saturday-night specials? "The black and Hispanic women who clean office buildings until 3 a.m. and then walk home--of course, they want a handgun in their purse." Limit purchases to one gun a month? "It's the camel's nose in the tent. Look at Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin--every one of these monsters, on seizing power, their first act was to confiscate all firearms in private hands." Sarah Brady, head of the lobby Handgun Control Inc., doubts that Heston will moderate the N.R.A. "A pretty face but the same old words," she says.
Michael Levine, Heston's publicist, believes the actor's outspokenness has damaged his career. "There's a reverse blacklist," he says. "It is far better in Hollywood to admit you're a drug addict than a conservative." But Heston, having just wrapped his 75th film, Gideon's Webb, shrugs off the concern. "People in the film community think being politically active means getting on Air Force One and going to dinner at the White House," he says. "I've scorned a few liberals in this town, and I get a kick out of that." Only six weeks ago, he called a press conference to attack Barbra Streisand as "the Hanoi Jane of the Second Amendment" for a TV movie she had produced on the 1993 mass shooting on the Long Island Rail Road.
And he hasn't hesitated to take on a major employer. Heston's first skirmish in the cultural war dates back to 1992, when, in what he calls "one of my proudest moments," the actor stood up at the shareholder meeting of Time Warner, owner of Warner Bros. studio and this magazine, to read out loud the violent lyrics of Ice-T's Cop-Killer CD, distributed by the company. But Heston limited his attack on media violence to rap music and has had little to say about film or television. "I'm part of the problem," he acknowledges with a chuckle. Had he no qualms about accepting a part in True Lies, the notably violent 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie? "No," he confesses. "It was an interesting part, and they paid me an obscene amount of money."