“Why am I an alcoholic?,” Shia LaBeouf says during an upcoming Parade interview with Dotson Raider. “I haven’t a damn clue! What is life about? I don’t know. The good actors are all screwed up. They’re all in pain. It’s a profession of bottom-feeders and heartbroken people. Every man has those feelings of escape and survival. I know you shouldn’t be that way. I’m trying to understand it and find the answers. I don’t have them now.”

Good for LaBeouf . Anyone who can look at an issue straight and call a spade a spade has taken a significant first step on the road to recovery. He wasn’t quite as forthcoming, however, when I spoke to him 13 months ago at an Indiana Jones party in Cannes. Some of the HE talkback yentas slammed me for trying to pay a roundabout compliment to the guy.

“I told LaBeouf he looked great also, adding — this was a minor mistake — that the program obviously agreed with him,” I wrote. “‘The program?,’ he asked. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘AA….no? I read you’d gone into the program after the Chicago Walmart bust.’ LaBeouf looked a little alarmed. ‘Nope…no program,’ he answered. ‘Just livin’ my life.'”

Except two months later came LaBeouf ‘s misdemeanor DUI following a 3 am overturned-car wipeout on Fairfax Ave. (Or was it La Brea?) And the previous March he was popped for boozy behavior in a Walmart in Chicago.