Actor Robert De Niro slammed Apple this week over anti-Donald Trump comments deleted from his speech at the Gotham Awards Monday evening.
The legendary actor noticed the commentary missing from the teleprompter as he began to introduce the Gotham Historical Icon and Creator Tribute to Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon, produced by Apple (and starring De Niro). So he took out his smartphone and read them anyway.
Robert De Niro swipes at Apple over alleged censoring of Gotham Awards speech
After his presentation, including the delete remarks read from a phone (see below), De Niro expressed his displeasure with Apple and the Gotham Film & Media Institute, according to a report in Variety.
“I don’t feel like thanking them at all for what they did,” he said. “How dare they do that, actually.”
According to the report, a version of the speech Apple revised to focus only on the film and filmmaking was added to the teleprompter less than 10 minutes before the ceremony began. But DeNiro said he never saw it. Apple and filmmakers didn’t know he hadn’t signed off on the final of several drafts, a source said.
Variety wrote:
A woman who told the teleprompter operator to upload a new speech was overheard identifying herself as an Apple employee. 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. It instead had De Niro reference how “watching the news today” makes it clear that “we actually are living in a post-truth society.”
Full deleted remarks, courtesy of The Verge:
History isn’t history anymore. Truth is not truth. Even facts are being replaced by alternative facts and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness. In Florida, young students are taught that slaves developed skills which can be applied for their personal benefit.
The entertainment industry isn’t immune to this festering disease. The Duke, John Wayne, famously said of Native Americans, ‘I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.’
Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal. The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office, and he’s keeping up the pace in his current campaign of retribution. But with all his lies, he can’t hide his soul. He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature, and shows disrespect, for example, by using ‘Pocahontas’ as a slur.
