As a few of you might remember, Shia LaBeouf got into a brouhaha (What? I like that word) with Alec Baldwin a few months back, and posted his apology to Alec to Twitter so that everyone could read it and see how grown up he was. Except it turns out he stole the entire thing word for word from a GQ article. Well, having learned nothing from the experience, Shia released a short film called HowardCantour.com, which was basically plagiarized Daniel Clowes‘ 2007 comic, Justin M. Damiano. It’s the kind of distinct artistic integrity you’d expect from the star of Even Stevens. Buzzfeed reports …
“The first I ever heard of the film was this morning when someone sent me a link. I’ve never spoken to or met Mr. LaBeouf,” Clowes told BuzzFeed. “I’ve never even seen one of his films that I can recall — and I was shocked, to say the least, when I saw that he took the script and even many of the visuals from a very personal story I did six or seven years ago and passed it off as his own work. I actually can’t imagine what was going through his mind.”
Both the film and comic (below) begin with narration by the main character, who says, “A critic is a warrior, and each of us on the battlefield have the means to glorify or demolish (whether a film, a career, or an entire philosophy) by influencing perception in ways that if heartfelt and truthful, can have far-reaching repercussions.”
Since being called out, Shia released an apology on Twitter, except as Buzzfeed points out, even his apology seems more or less lifted from someone else’s work …
The first part of his apology is very similar to an entry on Yahoo! Answers written four years ago. A user named Lili wrote, “Merely copying isn’t particularly creative work, though it’s useful as training and practice. Being inspired by someone else’s idea to produce something new and different IS creative work, and it may even revolutionalize [sic] the ‘stolen’ concept.” LaBeouf wrote: “Copying isn’t particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else’s idea to produce something new and different IS creative work.”
Part of me is a bit surprised that he thought he could basically lift someone else’s work, word for word, and no one would call him out on it, but then I remembered that this is the douche who leaked his own plagiarized apology on Twitter for everyone to see how grown up he is. He’s also the same douche who got punched for filming a girl throwing up for fun, plus he threatened to have someone killed in a restaurant. This is like being shocked that the guy who eats puppies also punches kittens; At this point, it’s just a lateral move on the general human awfulness graph that is Shia’s life.