Disney has one factory where they manufacture dwarves, princesses and chatty kitchenware, and another where they produce pop-culture tweenbots like Miley Cyrus, Jonas Brothers and Demi Lovato. (Yes, I had to look up that last one.)

Shia LaBeouf may be short, but he came out of the latter factory in 2000 playing the seventh-grade trouble-making star of Even Stevens. For a Disney show it wasn't bad, or at least LaBeouf wasn't bad. He even won a daytime Emmy for the role. Not quite young River Phoenix talent, but there was potential there -- and LaBeouf coincidentally had an similarly odd hippie upbringing, with his mom being a ballerina-turned-headshop-owner and his father a Vietnam vet-turned-clown. Oh, and before he got on TV, he had a brief career as a ten-year-old insult comic. Seriously.

LaBeouf's promise finally became realized in his first movie role, Holes. Though released by Disney, it was based on a cult Newbery Medal-winning kids book about a juvenile detention center and maintained the source material's dark, edgy tone. It helped to have Sigourney Weaver as the big bad and The Fugitive's director to give it an epic feel.

That same year he starred in the The Battle of Shaker Heights, a movie that was best known as being the product of Ben Afleck and Matt Damon's movie-making reality show Project Greenlight. He followed with a number of small parts in films like Constantine, and voiceover work on Hayao Miyazaki's epic anime Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

He stepped up to leading man status in Disturbia, a teen Rear Window remake (though he's under house arrest, not injured) that not only scored critical acclaim, but delivered LaBeouf his first number one film. More importantly, it proved his box-office bona fides to Hollywood's heaviest hitter, Steven Spielberg who produced Disturbia and had been a fan of Holes.

He quickly re-hired LaBeouf to star as Indiana Jones' son in the fourth Indy film (though as sidekicks go, he's no Shortround) and as the lead human in the Transformers franchise.

After a brief stint as a tabloid darling -- thanks to two arrests, one for being drunk and disorderly in a Walgreens and one for drunk-driving, though the other driver was at fault -- LaBeouf has kept it pretty low-profile, though he'll be closing Cannes with his Oliver Stone-directed sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which will be released this September. Then he gets back to work on Transformers 3.

In the meantime, Disturbia is a perfect opportunity to watch a rising star begin his ascension... by acting crazy paranoid. Watch it on Showcase this Sunday, May 30 at 4pm ET/PT.