Remember when Shia LaBeouf got caught plagiarizing? Well, he’s still milking that cow for every last droplet of publicity. On New Year’s Day, the actor decided to pay a plane to skywrite an apology to author Daniel Clowes. Why? Maybe he thought it would be a nice gesture. Maybe he was trying to punish himself. Or maybe he was hanging a lantern on his fuck-up again so no one else could. Regardless, that’s the course of action he took, and you can check out the Twitter evidence of it below, courtesy of the Transformers star’s Twitter account…
The plagiarizing incident in question involves Shia, a short film called HowardCantour.com and a novella by Daniel Clowes. Basically, LaBeouf hired comedian Jim Gaffigan to star in a short film he supposedly wrote called HowardCantour.com. Upon further review, that play turned out to have lines of dialogue and plot elements taken directly from a novella written by Clowes called Justin M Damiano. There was no credit or mention of the overt influence, and as a result, the world collectively responded with a big WTF?
Rather than offer up a sincere apology or explanation, LaBeouf instead decided to publish a series of apologies on his Twitter that merely plagiarized from other famous apologies. I suspect he thought he was making a grand commentary on the human condition or something other nonsense, but really, he kinda just pissed everyone off, which naturally caused him to release even more sketchy apologies and later even sorta infer he helped Clowes by bringing attention to his work.
LaBeouf is a talented dude. If he plays his cards right, he could be involved in a lot of Academy Award winning movies moving forward, but sadly, over the past few years, he’s started to become more known for his bullshit than his actual craft. Maybe some day he’ll get his act together long enough to make the most of his talent. Maybe he won’t. Either way, he needs to find the right side of the plagiarism line because if he’s not careful, he could end up with some serious judgments to pay as a result of his carelessness.
Here’s to hoping this is the last time we ever have to cover this story.
