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Apple

Apple Censored Robert De Niro's Gotham Speech 282

An anonymous reader shares a report: Who censored Robert De Niro? The "Killers of the Flower Moon" actor 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.

The actor said he had not been informed of the changes, which took out any mention of the former president. De Niro, who was on hand to present "Killers of the Flower Moon" with the Gotham Historical Icon and Creator Tribute, criticized the awards show and Apple. "I don't feel like thanking them at all for what they did," he said. "How dare they do that, actually." A revised version of the speech was delivered to the teleprompter less than ten minutes before the event started, according to sources with knowledge of the show. A woman who told the teleprompter operator to upload a new speech was overheard identifying herself as an Apple employee.
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Apple Censored Robert De Niro's Gotham Speech

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  • by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @09:07AM (#64040687)
    He should have been informed and given the opportunity to decline to speak (and given the last-minute circumstances still been paid), but is an award ceremony really the right place to stand on a political soapbox ? He's a hired hand after all.
    • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @09:19AM (#64040727)

      The thing is, De Niro is an actor with a pretty large profile. If he says something, people do listen.

      Beats me why people give a fuck about some celebrity's opinion about politics, but hey, people have even elected actors and TV personalities as president, so yeah, people do care about their opinion about politics.

    • by coofercat ( 719737 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @09:28AM (#64040755) Homepage Journal

      There's no simple answer here - usually, if you hire someone to give a speech, you're doing it precisely because you want THEIR take on something. You might be paying them big money to do it - but you still don't get to tell them what to say. At best you might get to "give feedback" on the speech to maybe tone down bits you don't like, but the speaker's integrity matters, and they're not (usually) just a mouthpiece.

      If you don't like a speaker having integrity, you can of course write your own speech and have an actor read it out. That's a completely different gig though, and you wouldn't ask the actor to write anything, or spend any time thinking about the writing - you'd only ask them to read what you'd provided to them. Unless you'd given them a tongue twister or something, you wouldn't expect them to ask for many changes.

      I guess the contract here is what matters - assuming it doesn't preclude such things, DeNiro is big enough that he could just publish the speech he wanted to make (possibly in the newspapers) and make apple look a bit silly. If they made him say something he specifically doesn't agree with, then maybe he could sue them, but I suspect they didn't make him say "Trump is the greatest!" or anything too controversial, so I doubt that's really feasible.

      Either way, if I had submitted a speech in plenty of time, I'd expect to read it out verbatim. If the organisers changed it at the last minute, I'd definitely be annoyed by that - depending on how it got changed would define "how annoyed".

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        There is a very simple answer here.

        It is your platform! You have an absolute right to exercise prior restraint. There is nothing wrong with at all with insisting that a hired speaker provides their speech to you in advance. There is nothing wrong about you choosing to edit or censor portions.

        There is a problem when your don't inform the speaker ahead of time of said edits and permit them work out agreeable revisions and/or back out of the engagement.

        De Niro, for his part should have stuck the topic at han

    • by taustin ( 171655 )

      This is a Hollywood event. Political soap boxing is pretty much mandatory, but it does require approval as the right kind of soap boxing, and even Disney is admitting, publicly, that there's something to "Go Woke, Go Broke". [hollywood-elsewhere.com]

    • Talking about political issues that matter to you during the except in speech has a long and storied history.

      Let me guess you're one of those guys who thinks the X-Men went woke...
      • Acceptance speech not "except". I really need to start proofreading my Google text to speech moor.
      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        Yes a long storied history of people being pretentious and awful.

        If you think it is totally fine to alienate a large portion of the audience at an event where you have only a minor role. It makes you a sack of crap!

      • by EvilSS ( 557649 )
        Except, according to TFS, he was presenting the award, not accepting it.
    • How many people were witness to the speech either live or via video? I assume not many. Never heard of this award, nor do I care what it stands for unless it's Batman. The only reason I'm even seeing a headline about it is because of this "censorship". So De Niro should be thankful. While I should be, and am annoyed that I had to hear about this non-Batman related award show.
  • Hmm. (Score:5, Funny)

    by VoodooCryptologist ( 7614904 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @09:09AM (#64040689)

    Is De Niro even capable of giving a speech that somehow doesn't mention Trump?

    • Re:Hmm. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @09:17AM (#64040711)

      If you know that, and if you don't want him to give one slamming Trump, maybe don't invite him to hold a speech?

    • by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      Have you seen any award show speech in recent memory that DIDN'T include mention of the person's cause? Hiring someone like De Niro when you don't want Trump bashed is like hiring Alex Jones to speak at a Gay Pride parade and expecting it to go well.
      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        Alex Jones - would firstly not take such a job. However if he did he would respect the venue.

        I have never seen Alex Jones go off script on other peoples platforms EVER.

        He is a loon on his own show, and he says similarly loony things on other peoples platforms like LWC, where he is invited, expected, welcomed to do so, but otherwise he stays on topic.

        • by Pascoea ( 968200 )

          Ok, maybe a bad analogy. I don't watch Alex Jones, or follow what he's been up to beyond getting his ass handed to him in court. I guess when you're a one-trick-pony you only get hired to do dog and pony shows.

          But the point still stands. Hiring someone who is known to pontificate, and expecting them to not pontificate is pretty dumb. And changing their speech without telling them is just a braindead move. (We'd have to assume that they did that, based on how it went down. If they did tell him, and he agre

  • Trump is polling at 44% right now and would win an old-fashioned election if held today according to the polls.

    So Apple might stand to lose, say, a third of their profit by letting Bobby spout off about his opinions on that venue. One can understand them not wanting to pay $n million for his feelings.

    That said, it was a dick move to surprise him like that.

    That said, he's a professional actor - why does he need a teleprompter? A five-minute extemporaneous speech is trivial if heart-felt.

    • That said, he's a professional actor - why does he need a teleprompter? A five-minute extemporaneous speech is trivial if heart-felt.

      Well that would have been the anti-Trump rant. Hence the need for the teleprompter to attempt to keep De Niro on topic.

  • 1984... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Saffaya ( 702234 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @09:43AM (#64040815)

    Censoring that comes from the firm that brought you the 1984 ad back in the day.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    The irony is more than palpable, it is quite thick.

    • I was reading all the comments to see if anyone made this allusion. If they didn't I was gunna. Good job, Gold star.

  • by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @10:35AM (#64040971) Homepage Journal

    It is impossible for Apple or anyone else "censor" their own work-for-hire. If you are thinking about personally saying something as yourself, and then you change your mind, you are not "censoring" yourself; you're just choosing a different thing to say.

    When people use "censor" for things like this, they are just desensitizing others to the threat of actual censorship. Nobody had a gun pointed as De Nero's head, saying that he had to work for Apple and say whatever they wanted him to say. He voluntarily agreed to this work (whenever you see De Nero on a stage publicizing a movie, he is at work ), and I bet he was well paid for it.

    Furthermore, I bet whenever De Nero's is off Apple's stage, he's allowed to talk about whatever it was that Apple's corporate mouth did not want to say. How dare you compare this to censorship!

    It has always been this way. When I worked in the newspaper biz (2007-2020), the process I saw was that every writer's work was edited in some way. It was usually just for space (e.g. "we need to get these 200 words down to 100 words"; ah, the constraints of physical paper, where you can't just put up a scrollbar), but not always.

    • People in the newspaper biz I know get very annoyed when the headline or an edit entirely changes the meaning they intended to convey. Editing for length, grammar, clarity, fact checking, and similar, is very different than changing the topic entirely.

      Also stop trying to redefine censorship. It's like you thought someone said "First amendment" or "free speech", wrote your comment about how only the government can do that, then saw they just said censorship, so changed that word but went ahead and posted t
  • by lunatick ( 32698 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @10:40AM (#64040997) Homepage

    Seriously you are hired to make a program for a company. They want features X Y and Z. You decide to put in Features for A B and C that they didn't ask for nor do they want. So they have you remove it.

    Imagine going to a play and one of the performers decide they want to talk about something other than the play in the middle.

    De Niro was hired to promote a movie. He is free to expel whatever words from his mouth on his own time. Apple wants him to represent them not Robert De Niro

    • It's celebrity culture, and the rules are a bit different than for you or I.

      They hired DeNiro, and his fame is part of that package. If you stop him from being him, you're damaging his brand. DeNiro decided to take the contract, because of the money and also to keep his brand going.

      The only thing actors aren't supposed to do is bad mouth a project before the last cent has been wrung from it.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Never store your data in just one location.

  • by mad7777 ( 946676 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @12:04PM (#64041261)

    what was the last Apple-related censorship scandal? something about China, if memory serves, and not so long ago. just about a couple months maybe.

    control is what Apple is all about.
    https://wordsimade.wordpress.c... [wordpress.com]

  • "Flower Moon" had a $200m budget; movies generally need 2-2.5x their budget at the box office to break even, and as of today it has $151m box office worldwide on boxofficemojo. People aren't seeing it. Yet it's audience score is above 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. Apple has exclusivity streaming rights for "Flower Moon". So by the numbers, it's a film people will like, probably wanted to see, but didn't make it to the theater in time. This is a prime candidate to do very well on streaming. Apple can't guarantee c
  • If you really have to spend your time in public slamming a former president on someone else's dime, take a copy of your speech with you.
  • It's too bad they censored him. It would have been good for all the world to see what an asshole he is.

  • by kaatochacha ( 651922 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @01:56PM (#64041681)
    Deniro's Take: They censored me because of my valiant stand against fascism, and don't want an intelligent thinker speaking their mind and standing up to power
    Apple's Take: We don't want the crazy old fool going off the rails and rambling on about things with no relation to the actual awards. Ain't nobody got time for that.
  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @04:56PM (#64042221)

    But De Niro actually gave his unaltered speech. He had the text on his phone, and once he realized the teleprompter text was wrong - he announced what had happened and switched to reading the speech off his phone.

  • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @05:26PM (#64042299)

    >"The company was responding to feedback from the filmmaking team that wanted the actor's remarks to be centered on the movie"

    Imagine that. How dare they try to restrict the speech to THE TOPIC OF THE PRESENTATION. Instead of his endless personal/ranting opinions on unrelated topics.

    Thank you Ricky:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

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