Robert Snow, a veteran Secret Service agent who served as a technical adviser on movies together with Within the Line of Fireplace, The American President and Air Drive One, died March 22, his household introduced. He was 93.
Snow had retired after spending 33 years with the Secret Service when he was known as on for his experience in the course of the making of Wolfgang Petersen’s Within the Line of Fireplace (1993), starring Clint Eastwood as a CIA agent haunted by the JFK assassination.
“In Taxi Driver and different movies, we have been portrayed as monosyllabic idiots who can’t full a full sentence and [only] stand on the corners with darkish glasses,” Snow informed the Chicago Tribune in a 1997 interview. “Till Within the Line of Fireplace, there was nothing to indicate what the Secret Service actually did.”
He labored with Petersen and Eastwood once more within the 1997 movies Air Drive One and Absolute Energy, respectively, and on two X-Males films, Bryan Singer’s franchise kickoff in 2000 and Brett Ratner’s The Final Stand (2006).
Whereas advising on the Michael Douglas-starring The American President (1995), Snow mentioned he got here to admire director Rob Reiner for being “extraordinarily well-informed and well-versed on the presidency.” He additionally famous that he was often called “the token Republican on the set.”
Snow labored on 17 Hollywood movies, amongst them First Child (1996), Homicide at 1600 (1997), Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1997), Mimi Leder’s Deep Affect (1998), Andrew Fleming’s Dick (1999), Roger Donaldson’s 13 Days (2000), Chasing Liberty (2004) and Donald Petrie’s Welcome to Mooseport (2004).
He did observe that he wasn’t at all times listened to.
“A technical adviser explains the way in which it truly is, then a director will do as he rattling nicely pleases,” he mentioned. “You must settle for it and go about your online business. They’re not making a documentary.”
Born on March 3, 1932, in Rochester, New York, Snow enlisted within the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps in 1950 in the course of the Korean Conflict, then graduated from Michigan State College in 1957.
He started his stint within the Secret Service in 1959 in Buffalo, New York, and moved to Washington to work within the counterfeiting division earlier than serving within the White Home in the course of the Ford and Carter administrations and touring abroad with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He retired on the obligatory age of 60 in 1993.
In an interview with THR’s Ryan Gajewski in July, Within the Line of Fireplace producer Jeff Apple mentioned he was impressed to do a Secret Service movie based mostly on seeing President Lyndon B. Johnson in particular person in Miami in 1965. “These guys leap out of the automobile with darkish glasses and darkish fits, and I used to be so amazed,” he mentioned.
He reached out to Snow, then the assistant director of the Secret Service. Snow stayed with the venture after he retired and spent 9 months in California on the film. He even obtained to painting a Secret Service agent in Singer’s X-Males.
Snow, who lived in Ashburn, Virginia, additionally was a volunteer for twenty-four years with the Nationwide Heart for Lacking and Exploited Youngsters as its director of regulation enforcement liaison.
Survivors embrace his youngsters, Tom, Dan, Karen, Barbie and Kathy; his 14 grandchildren; and his 11 great-grandchildren. His highschool sweetheart and spouse of 67 years, Marilyn, died in 2021 of ALS at age 87.
Rhett Bartlett contributed to this report.