Shia LaBeouf Plagiarized for his Short Film
Shia LaBeouf recently posted a 10 minute short film starring Jim Gaffigan and Thomas Lennon called, ‘HowardCantour.com.
The project featured Gaffigan as a online film critic named Howard Cantour who has a delusional inflated ego. Many argue that the video is an attack against online film critics. But, it turns out that Shia LaBeouf’s started making headlines then all of a sudden the video disappeared.
It turns out that LaBeouf short was a beat-for-beat and almost word for word ripoff of a 2007 comic strip called ‘Justin M. Damiano’ by Daniel Clowes and LaBeouf did not credit it.
Nowhere in the promotion for or credits of the film does LaBeouf mention the Clowes comic; Eric Reynolds, longtime editor of Daniel Clowes’ comics and associate publisher at Fantagraphics, called the film “shameless theft!”
“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.” []
Since the video was taken offline, Labeouf has not commented on the video on his website or on his Twitter account, this is despite spending a day tweeting coverage of the project. We assume that he took the video offfline so that he could properly credit the source, but the lack of a response makes many people wonder, what is he really doing?
It seems pretty hard to imagine that he could easily forget to cite the motivation of the project and expect no one to notice.
Since taking the video offline, Labeouf hasn’t said a word about the video via his website or verified Twitter account, this despite spending all day retweeting film sites’ coverage of it. I’d give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he took the video offline so that he could properly credit the source, and maybe just forgot in the first place, but his silence on the matter does make you wonder. You can still watch the trailer for the film here. The Dan Clowes comic is here. It’s a real shame that LaBeouf seems to have chosen to plagiarize.
Update:
Shia LaBeouf Comment on the recent plagiarism:
UPDATE: According to reports, Shia LaBeouf also plagiarized his apology.
LaBeouf had remained out of touch for most of the day, and his reps did not immediately respond to EW’s request for comment. But then, early Tuesday morning, LaBeouf decided to tweet his thoughts on the kerfuffle, culminating in the mea culpa, “I f—-d up.” Take a look after the jump.
EW’s request for comment to Clowes was not returned.
But the controversy doesn’t end there. points out that part of LaBeouf’s apology comes from an answer from a user named Lili on Yahoo Answers.
