“What I did was against the advice of my family and my colleagues. I asked for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average American stockholders, I simply read the full lyrics of “Cop Killer” — every vicious, vulgar, instructional word: ‘I got my 12-Gauge sawed-off. I got my headlights turned off. I’m about to bust some shots off. I’m about to dust some cops off.’ It got worse, a lot worse.” -Charlton Heston
HESTON TAKING ON TIME WARNER’S PROMOTION OF “COP KILLER” ALBUM (Conversation between host Tony Snow and Charlton Heston)
SNOW: “You have one of the great voices in the entertainment world. A few years ago, you showed up at a Time Warner stockholders meeting and started reading the lyrics from a rap album and just froze everybody in their tracks.”
HESTON: “That was that terrible album by Ice T called ‘Cop Killer.’ And I’m very proud of this, I really am. I owned some Time Warner stock and I went in and confronted their full board meeting and read the lyrics. I can’t repeat them on television.”
SNOW: “No, you can’t.”
HESTON: “And I shamed Time Warner, the largest entertainment conglomerate in the world, into firing Ice T and dropping the album. Now, he threatened to kill me. He hasn’t done that yet.”
SNOW: “I believe your quote was something like ‘Let him try.'”
HESTON: “Well, maybe I scared him. And I haven’t gotten a job from Warner Brothers since or a good notice in Time, but I’m as proud of that as anything I’ve ever done.”
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