It’s a new year and Shia LaBeouf is still saying “sorry.” The actor explored an alternative means to issue an apology to artist Daniel Clowes on Wednesday, Jan. 1 — by hiring a skywriting team to create a 5-mile-long apology over Los Angeles!
The message simply read, “I am sorry Daniel Clowes. LaBeouf, 27, posted a photo of the apology, following a series of additional tweets he shared on Tuesday, Dec. 31. “Mr. Clowes, I can only ask that you view my apology as a stepping stone toward repairing this misunderstanding between us. I’m sorry,” he wrote in one message.
The company that executed the vaporized apology confirmed their part in the mea culpa: “Shia Labeouf apologizes in LA to Daniel Clowes using our skywriting team! 5 mile long apology. That’s a big SORRY!” wrote Skywriting Aerial Ad on Wednesday.
Clowes’ Fantographics publisher Eric Reynolds, meanwhile, responded to LaBeouf’s latest gesture and told BuzzFeed on Thursday, “I imagine airplane messaging is the norm in Hollywood, but someone really should have informed Mr. LaBeouf that Mr. Clowes lives in the Bay Area before he went to all that trouble.”
Following his skywriting apology, the Charlie Countryman star gave an interview to Bleeding Cool’s Richard Johnston Wednesday evening. “Authorship is censorship,” LaBeouf said. “Should God sue me if I paint a river? Should we give people the death sentence for parking violations — you’ll not only have less parking violations but less drivers,” he continued.
LaBeouf came under fire in mid-December after it was discovered that his short film, HowardCantour.com, directly lifted parts from Clowes’ 2007 graphic novella, Justin M. Damiano. “I’m embarrassed that I failed to credit @danielclowes for his original graphic novella Justin M. Damiano, which served as my inspiration. I was truly moved by his piece of work & I knew that it would make a poignant & relevant short. I apologize to all who assumed I wrote it,” LaBeouf wrote in a series of messages shared via Twitter on Dec. 17 and 18.
Reynolds told Us last month that the artist was “exploring his legal options,” despite LaBeouf’s numerous apologies. “He has given interviews where he has had every opportunity to pay his respects to the source material, but instead he continues to position himself as the sole creator,” Reynolds said of the Transformers star. “So, no, a half-a–ed, insincere and plagiarized apology on Twitter is probably not enough, and Dan is currently exploring his legal options.”
“I’m very sorry,” the Nymphomaniac star said in his interview Wednesday night. “I have agents to suss out material. I have a lawyer to get me out of jail. Nothing is original. Creativity is just connecting things.”
