MAY

13

newVideoPlayer("shialet_def.flv", 463, 387,"");Watching Shia LaBeouf recount for David Letterman the amusing circumstances surrounding his arrest last November at a Chicago Walgreens for drunken, public benzoyl-peroxide abuse, we were suddenly left wanting to know how—likable as he is—he so quickly ascended to superstar status. Well, that's the great thing about media-saturation campaigns riding the coattails of massive summer movie releases: Those kinds of wishes are easily granted. According to a profile in the new GQ, it all started when Steven Spielberg saw LaBeouf's Disturbia audition tape, and instantly cast him in Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That was easy! But just who is this charismatic, precocious, and ridiculously named young man? And from whence does he come? Not too far, as GQ reports—in fact, as close by as a traveling tubesteak sideshow in Echo Park:

Part of this easygoing showmanship comes from LaBeouf's teenage years in Echo Park, where despite being nearly the only white kid for miles, he blended in. He picked up freestyle rapping. He was, he says, "a major dozens player" at a mostly black school. Just so he could hang out with his friends, he learned how to breakdance. "It was sort of your greeting card," he says. "Like, yeah, I'm white, but I have soul."The rest derives from what you might call family tradition: Shia's forebears include a long line of counterculture roughnecks and artistes manques. His maternal grandfather—from whom Shia takes his name—was a comedian and Mafia barber on New York'...

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