As I briefly mentioned this morning, an unscripted moment happened last night at the Gothams, this one involving Robert De Niro.
As the actor read prepared remarks from a teleprompter, De Niro paused when he noticed that part of his speech, calling out Donald Trump, had been deleted. Here’s Variety with the rundown …
[De Niro] was gearing up to slam Donald Trump at Monday’s Gotham Awards, but when he took the stage he discovered that the speech he planned to give had been altered at the behest of Apple, the film’s producer. The company was responding to feedback from the filmmaking team that wanted the actor’s remarks to be centered on the movie, according to a source.
It turns out that an Apple-approved and revised version of the speech was delivered to the teleprompter less than ten minutes before the show, according to sources who spoke with Variety.
At 6:54 p.m., the teleprompter company was sent an email from two Apple employees with the new text, which omitted explicit references to Trump […] A spokesperson for De Niro said that the actor did not see the changes.
De Niro maintains that he had not been informed of the changes, which took out any mention of Trump. He went on to criticize the Gothams and Apple. “I don’t feel like thanking them at all for what they did,” he said. “How dare they do that, actually.”
De Niro ended up reading his original remarks from his phone. In them, he calls Trump a “Charlatan” and accused the former President of “attacking the weak, destroying the gifts of nature and showing disrespect, for example, by using ‘Pocahontas’ as a slur.”
Despite Variety’s sources claiming that Apple was to blame for the censored speech, the tech company is denying that, calling it all a “miscommunication.” Yeah, sure …
A source close to the film denied that there was any censorship involved and said that the incident was a miscommunication. There had been multiple versions of De Niro’s speech and there was a desire to focus solely on the moviemakers and their artistry, according to the source. Apple and the filmmakers were unaware that De Niro hadn’t signed off on the final draft, the insider added.
They’re trying to deflect. Who are we kidding here? Apple clearly, and purposefully, cut the Trump lines out of De Niro’s speech. Do you blame them? They know that every time he mentions Trump, it becomes a bigger story than the actual film being promoted.
Then again, De Niro is not someone you want to censor — editing out his words will only make him angrier.