Two days ago, Shia LaBeouf released his short
HowardCantour.com onto the internet. Not long after, several people noticed that Shia's short plagiarized from Daniel Clowes' 2007 comic,
Justin M. Damiano. Most of the film features word-for-word dialogue and shot-for-shot scenes as seen in Clowes' comic. Shia even issued an apology, but that too was plagiarized from
Yahoo! Answers. Wait, it gets better. Instead of letting Shia off the hook for plagiarism Daniel Clowes is planning on pursuing legal action against the
Transformers star.
“His apology is a non-apology, absolving himself of the fact that he actively misled, at best, and lied, at worst, about the genesis of the film,” Reynolds wrote to BuzzFeed in an email on Tuesday. “No one ‘assumes’ authorship for no reason. He implied authorship in the film credits itself, and has gone even further in interviews. He clearly doesn’t get it, and that’s disturbing. I’m not sure if it’s more disturbing that he plagiarized, or that he could rationalize it enough to think it was OK and that he might actually get away with it. Fame clearly breeds a false sense of security.”
Comic writer Josh Farkas and
BuzzFeed did some digging, and noticed an unsettling amount of evidence that Shia LaBeouf plagiarized from several other writers to create his "original" comics,
Let’s [frick]ing Party and
Stale N Mate. The writers that Shia "borrowed" from are Charles Bukowski and Benoît Duteurtre. Below, I've added pages from Shia's comics and the original quotes from the original writers, that he of course forgot to credit.
Benoît Duteurtre's "The Little Girl and the Cigarette” - Page 10:
"Seemingly indifferent to the fate that awaited him, Désiré Johnson continued to look obstinate. In the antechamber of the execution room, a silent exchange pitted the condemned man,a tall young black man, very calm under his dreadlocks, against the director of the institution, a Vietnamese law-school graduate, recently promoted to the directorship of this ultramodern prison to ensure that a dozen capital executions were smoothly carried out there every year."
Benoît Duteurtre's "The Little Girl and the Cigarette”:
"Désiré Johnson followed his guards towards death row, in a direction that he was the first to take. As he was returning to life, all he did was mumble, as if other people were trying as hard as they could to complicate his life:“I wasn’t asking for much.””
Assault by Charles Bukowski:
Lorca was shot down in the road but here
in America the poets never anger anybody.
the poets don’t gamble.
their poetry has the smell of clinics.
their poetry has the smell of clinics.
where people die rather then live.
here they don’t assassinate the poets
they don’t even notice the poets.
Duteurtre wrote: "Unaware of the debate that was going on in the wings, these individuals patiently awaited the beginning of the spectacle.”
And this morning, the 27-year-old actor went to
Twitter again to offer another insincere apology.
Sounds good, right? Wrong! The Film Stage was the first to spot that the tweet above and the one below are word-for-word lifted from
Tiger Woods and
General Robert McNamara.
Looks like we might have an Amanda Bynes-like mental breakdown going on here.
About The Author:
I am Jay Jayson, one of the greatest writers and researchers to ever grace the comicbookmovie.com community. If there is a story or a picture hiding on the internet I will find it.