The incredible plagiarism surrounding the work of Shia LaBeouf
When Shia LaBeouf arrived on our screens as part of the Disney show Even Stevens, no one knew what a genuinely envious career in the film industry he would have. For a man at just the humble age of 36, LaBeouf has seen more than his fair share of the success of both blockbuster and independent cinema hits — albeit with his fair share of controversy.
Before his acting career took off, LaBeouf had performed stand-up comedy in clubs around Los Angeles, claiming that he served up dirty material, having a “50 year old mouth on a 10-year-old kid”. After brazenly calling someone in the Yellow Pages, he soon found an agent by pretending to be his own manager. The rest, as they say, is history.
While the actor’s reputation is now tarnished amid claims of abuse by former girlfriend FKA twigs, Shia LaBeouf’s issues don’t end there. Another fascinating insight into the actor is the fact that he appears to have plagiarised several other famous stars, even when extending apologies to others. One instance of this came in 2013 when he quit the Broadway show Orphans. LaBeouf had put his exit from the show down to “creative differences” with Alec Baldwin, and when apologising to Baldwin via email, he seemingly lifted words verbatim from a 2009 Esquire article entitled ”What is a Man”. However, when LaBeouf tweeted the email, the source article’s author, Tom Chiarella, noticed.
Chiarella responded by writing, “What can I say? Am I outraged? Of course not. It actually makes me happy that my words were some succor to the kid, that he found them wise enough (or high enough on the Google search, anyway) to foist them off as his own. Any writer wants to be read, remembered, considered. A late-night email, double-spaced, vaguely bullet-pointed — this too is a kind of literary memory, I guess, especially when you leak it on Twitter to evince a magnanimous self.”
Then, ridiculously, when making an excuse for his plagiarism, LaBeouf tweeted: “Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school,” a quote from the playwright David Mamet.
Later that year, LaBeouf was again accused of plagiarism in his short film HowardCantour.com. When it was posted online in late 2013, the audience began to notice that it was a seemingly direct replication of Ghost World, a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes.
Then, shortly after, Clowes responded by saying: “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. 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.”
LaBeouf did not end his stupidity of copying the words of others when he shockingly responded to plagiarism claims by reposting a post from Yahoo! Answers: “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…”.
Yet these were not the first times that LaBeouf accredited himself with original work when it was stolen. In 2012, it came to light that his self-published graphic novels, Stale N Mate and Let’s Fucking Party, featured several lines that had been pinched from the work of Benoit Duteurtre and Charles Bukowski.
Rather than offer a sincere apology for the act, LaBeouf instead decided to use the words of Tiger Woods (“I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart”), Robert McNamara (“We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why”), Shepard Fairey (“I sincerely apologise for my lapse in judgment, and I take full responsibility for my actions, which were mine alone”), and even Mark Zuckerberg (“I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you”).
It’s pretty astonishing for an evidently talented actor and writer to do such a thing. However, the fact that his responses to accusations are also plagiarised suggests that either LaBeouf is having a bit of fun or just simply doesn’t care.
