Freddie Prinze Jr. went on a podcast recently talking about his experiences on the set of 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer. He claims the film’s director, Jim Gillespie, was an “asshole” who wanted a different actor in the role and treated Prinze badly because of it. “He was very direct in the fact that, ‘I don’t want you in this movie,’” Prinze said.
A 2017 interview with Gillespie contradicts Prinze’s story. Gillespie said:
“Nobody wanted Freddie; they thought he was too soft, he wasn’t muscular enough, so Freddie probably screen-tested four or five times. He got to the point where he was saying, ‘I’m done’, and I really had to plead with him to stick with it because I wanted him. I thought he was going to be great with it. He went to the gym and worked out, changed his diet and his hair cut. I stuck to my guns and eventually they went, ‘Yes.'”
Why are these Hollywood people telling contradictory descriptions of the same events? It’s because Hollywood is full of liars. I would wager that a good 80% of all words spoken by people within the movie business in Los Angeles are pure lies. One of the reasons for such a high percentage is that when they say stuff like “have a good weekend” or “I’m happy for you” they don’t actually mean it. So you have the business lies, the personal lies, and the lies the people tell to themselves, and then the 20% of truth is when they tell their assistants where they parked the car or like what kind of coffee they want.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Jim Gillespie and Freddie Prinze Jr. are both lying.
In August, while Olivia Wilde was doing press for her film Don’t Worry Darling, she was asked to explain why Shia LaBeouf left the movie during pre-production. She implied that she fired him, saying, “His process was not conducive to the ethos that I demand in my productions.”
LaBeouf refuted Wilde’s claims, saying that he quit because Wilde wasn’t allowing time for rehearsals. He forwarded an email to Variety between him and Wilde where he writes, “You and I both know the reasons for my exit.”
LaBeouf sent screenshots of text messages to Variety showing what Wilde had written to him at the time of his departure: “Doesn’t feel good to say no to someone, and I respect your honesty. I’m honored you were willing to go there with me.”
“I’m honored you were willing to go there with me” to “his process was not conducive with my ethos” is quite an evolution. Doesn’t seem like she respects his honesty after all.
Maybe LeBeouf is lying. Maybe he photoshopped those screenshots and sent them to Variety (unlikely).
It’s possible. He is a liar after all. He was caught plagiarizing Daniel Clowes’s comic “Justin M. Damiano” for the short film “HowardCantour.com.”
LaBeouf just ripped Daniel Clowes off for a film. The story, the dialogue, the visuals, all of it.
Daniel Clowes, who is a normal human being on the periphery of the movie business because it feeds off his ideas while at the same time rejecting his humanity, responded to the ordeal with the following statement:
“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.”
Neither can most people, I would think, but LaBeouf was doing some sort of performance art about being a liar. That’s what it was. Yeah, whatever.
LaBeouf responded in a series of tweets beginning with, “Copying isn’t particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else’s idea to produce something new and different IS creative work.” He went on for a while like that, and when people plugged his statement into search engines, a four year-old forum posting written by a rando popped up. So that means LaBeouf plagiarized his statement about plagiarizing because he’s a cutting edge performance liar and it’s all a brilliant meta-commentary on the pervasive dishonesty in Hollywood or something.
Last summer, LaBeouf’s programming once again went haywire when he admitted that he made up the whole “my dad abused me” thing for his supposedly autobiographical film Honey Boy. Totally normal stuff, the guy wrote and starred in a movie about how his dad beat him when he was a child and it was all a fake story. Did the director, Alma Har’el, know?
“I wrote this narrative, which was just nonsense,” LaBeouf said. “I did a world press tour about how fucked he was as a man.” His dad, Jeffrey LaBeouf, died two years after the movie came out.
It stresses me out when I know someone is lying because it puts me in the uncomfortable position of either calling the liar out or just going along with the lie. Being a liar is often a sign of mental illness or just extremely low character.
The funny thing is I believe LaBeouf in the scenario with Wilde, but who cares? The whole thing is rotten. Most of the people in Hollywood are extremely dishonest. Every bad thing you’ve ever heard about the movie industry is true. From the way they conduct themselves in personal relationships to the ways they sell their movies, it’s all lying and pretending. That’s why they manage to make such good movies sometimes.