LaBeouf offers cloudy plagiarism apology

Los Angeles (CNN) — Shia LaBeouf’s plagiarism apology tour took to the sky Wednesday as the “Transformer” actor hired an airplane to sky-write “I’m sorry Daniel Clowes.”

Clowes is the author whose story LaBeouf admits he copied for his short film “HowardCantour.com” without crediting Clowes.

But it was a cloudy apology, raising suspicion that LaBeouf has moved on from saying he’s sorry to Clowes and is now taunting Clowes fans and LaBeouf critics who have attacked him online in the two weeks since he was busted.

The creativity shown by LaBeouf in more than two dozen Twitter postings of apology raises the question of why such a fertile mind needed to borrow ideas.

Shia LaBeouf’s plagiarism mea culpa

Those tweets included the words “naiveté,” “embarrassed,” “regret,” “terribly wrong,” “deeply sorry,” and “hurtful and thoughtless.”

The apology tweets started clearly enough on December 16: “Im 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.”

Transforming apologies

But three days later, it appeared LaBeouf was frustrated that the online attacks against him continued. Sarcasm emerged in his tweets: “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.”

Sincere-sounding apologies continued for another week, including this on December 28: “When you’ve made a mistake you should apologise. But more importantly — most important of all — you’ve got to learn from your mistakes.”

By December 31, LaBeouf was mocking those who refused to accept that he was sorry for copying from Clowes: “I am sorry for all the plagiarized tweets, they all were unintelligent, ambiguous and needlessly hurtful. You have my apologies for offending you for thinking I was being serious instead of accurately realizing I was mocking you.”

On New Year’s Day, LaBeouf went old school, used a predecessor to the 140 character Twitter forum. He hired a single-engine airplane to write through the blue skies of Los Angeles: “I AM SORRY DANIEL CLOWES.”

He then tweeted a photo of the airborne apology, since it was unlikely the author, who lives in San Francisco, would have seen it.

The text that accompanied the tweet posted Wednesday night read:

CLOUD:

– vapor floating in the atmosphere

– remote servers used to SHARE DATA

– to make LESS CLEAR or TRANSPARENT

If LaBeouf is considering a sequel to his short but controversial film about an online film critic, perhaps he already has a script for a movie about an actor who finds his voice on Twitter.