Shia LaBeouf Hires Skywriting Planes To Write Bitter Message Above L.A.
Shia LaBeouf may be officially retired from public life, but he’s still got plenty to say.
After a handful of plagiarizing controversies forced the actor to go into a self-imposed “retirement” from public life, Shia decided to pay a fleet of skywriting airplanes $25,000 to send a bitter message to Los Angeles.
Shia reached out to the skywriting company Skytypers shortly after he announced his public retirement on Friday, paying for five airplanes to fly wing-to-wing as they wrote out the giant message “STOP CREATING” over Los Angeles.
The message stretched five miles long in the sky, and because the smoke is only visible for seven minutes at at time the planes had to go over it 18 separate times to keep it visible, TMZ reported.
This isn’t the first time that Shia LaBeouf has used skywriters to send a message. Earlier in the week he hired the planes to write out “I am sorry Daniel Clowes” in the sky, referencing the graphic novelist who his is accused of copying for a short film called HowardCantour.com.
Though the film was released in 2012, it wasn’t until it hit the internet that Clowes realized that much of HowardCantour.com was the same as his comic, Justin M. Damiano.
LaBeouf claimed that his experience with critics inspired the work, then later apologized when the lifted portions were brought to his attention.
But as The Huffington Post soon realized, even the apology was plagiarized, bearing a strong resemblance to 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, and it may even revolutionalize [sic] the ‘stolen’ concept,” Shia had written.
After weeks of criticism, Shia LaBeouf announced his “retirement” from public life, but with a controversial movie in Nymphomaniac coming out and a publicity run likely, some observers think it may apply only to social media. It’s already clear it doesn’t apply to skywriting.
