In September 2018, actor Shia LaBeouf—then enjoying a career high—announced that he was developing a free new theater school at the Slauson Recreation Center in Los Angeles. Hundreds of people showed up to those first classes, among them Leo Lewis O’Neil, a wide-eyed transplant from Austin, Texas. After meeting O’Neil, LaBeouf handed him a camera and told him to film everything that took place at Slauson. Neither of them could know that O’Neil’s project would span years, capturing the collective’s beginnings as well as the dark turn it took as the pandemic descended—and LaBeouf became increasingly unstable. In its final months, O’Neil captured multiple instances of LaBeouf initiating physical altercations. “No matter how weird or difficult or strange or dramatic it got, I felt like at the end of this process, it had to be all worth it,” O’Neil tells David Canfield in his first conversation about the resulting documentary, Slauson Rec.“There had to be something that was going to be worth it.”
Elsewhere in HWD, You Must Remember This podcaster Karina Longworth regales us with the Old Hollywood tale of how Clark Gable got George Cukor fired from Gone With the Wind; Richard Lawson recommends seven more Parker Posey projects to watch now that The White Lotus is winding down; Savannah Walsh explains why everyone’s talking about Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney (again); and Chris Murphy breaks down what we know about Sam Mendes’s ambitious four-film Beatles project.
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