At last night’s Gotham Awards, Robert De Niro made a speech about Martin Scorsese and Killers Of The Flower Moon that, naturally (for De Niro), veered into a whole thing about Donald Trump and how he “lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office” and how his lies can’t “hide his soul.” But, when De Niro first took the stage and approached the teleprompter, he discovered that his speech had been mysteriously edited to remove the direct references to Trump and replace them with vague stuff about “watching the news today.” De Niro then suggested that the Gotham Awards and Apple (the studio behind Killers Of The Flower Moon) had conspired to edit his speech, remarking, “How dare they do that, actually.”
Today, some more details about what the heck happened have come out, with Variety indicating that it was less of a terrible conspiracy and more of an odd miscommunication—or at least that’s the unofficial official story. Supposedly, someone who was “overheard identifying herself as an Apple employee” instructed the teleprompter operator to upload a “revised version of the speech” just a few minutes before the event started, with “two Apple employees” then passing along the new text, without the Trump stuff, in an email.
The Gotham Awards deny any involvement, and a spokesperson for De Niro confirmed to Variety that he didn’t know anything about it until he saw it on the teleprompter, but—supposedly—this had nothing to do with censorship. According to “a source close to the film,” there had simply been “multiple versions of De Niro’s speech” floating around, and Apple thought the plan was to use a draft that specifically focused on Killers Of The Flower Moon. Everyone involved with that decision was also supposedly “unaware” that De Niro wasn’t privy to that decision and hadn’t signed off on that version of the speech.
That explanation, assuming it’s legitimate, still doesn’t really let Apple off the hook. Saying “we thought everyone wanted to focus on the movie” doesn’t not mean “we didn’t want him to talk about Trump,” and the fact that De Niro apparently didn’t have any idea this was happening effectively makes it not no different from the censorship conspiracy he claimed it was. So, yeah, Apple censored the speech, but maybe it didn’t do it on purpose?