This Month’s Hollywood Trailers: Non-Stop, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Endless Love

This is funny.

Shia LaBeouf Accused Of Plagiarism In His Short Film, Then Plagiarizes His Apology

Shia LaBeouf made a short film about critics. That in itself was enough to earn an avalanche of attention when the film, “HowardCantour.com,” debuted online yesterday, available for a wide audience for the first time after premiering at Cannes in 2012. Critics are totally unaccustomed to anyone looking at them, much less to being portrayed by Jim Gaffigan and Thomas Lennon as they mouth pitch perfect lines like “I love these publicists—they always spring for the good cookies.” “HowardCantour.com” could have been a train-wreck vanity project from an actor who’d always seemed prickly to critics, but instead it was interesting and thoughtful. The reception was surprisingly warm. That is, until the accusations of plagiarism began.

This being the Internet, with much better access to Google than a theater at Cannes, it took no time at all for baffled writers to realize LaBeouf’s film was a very close adaptation of a comic strip by Ghost World and Art School Confidential author Daniel Clowes, called “Justin M. Damiano.” Same characters, different names, same lines of dialogue—the connection is unmistakable. And it didn’t take long for the uproar to get back to LaBeouf, who then password-protected the film and issued a series of tweets by way of apology.

Ready for yet another twist? That first part of the apology—”Copying isn’t a particularly creative work”—was itself copied from Yahoo Answers, as pointed out by Buzzfeed’s Jordan Zakarin. The writer also got in touch with Clowes, who said he’d first heard of LaBeouf’s adaptation yesterday morning, when friends sent him the link: “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.”

Shia LaBeouf may be an amateur filmmaker, but he’s not an amateur filmmaker who gets to claim naivete. He has been acting since he was 12. He has worked for Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay, Oliver Stone, Robert Redford, and Lars von Trier. He is surrounded, both professionally and privately, by people who know perfectly well that even when a newspaper article inspires you to write a story, you give it credit. It is possible that LaBeouf didn’t tell any of the dozens of people who worked on “HowardCantour.com” about Clowes’s comic. But it seems impossible that LaBeouf himself never supposed that his adaptation was the kind of thing that demanded credit.

Then again… how could he have possibly thought he’d get away with it? Nobody said anything when the film screened at Cannes, sure, but that’s an incredibly small audience compared to the Internet, where no indie comic is too small to be defended by its ardent fans. Clowes’s original comic appeared in the anthology collection The Book of Other People, a charity effort that directed all proceeds to Dave Eggers’s 826NYC non-profit. By adapting the comic without permission LaBeouf isn’t taking money away from the charity or Clowes himself; it is a fairly victimless crime of omission. But for a guy who can’t seem to catch a break, between feuding with Alec Baldwin and getting into a bar brawls, it can’t help to cross a beloved indie artist who did his work for charity. It’s a shame, too—the film is actually pretty good.

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