“The Holdovers,” Alexander Payne’s Oscar-nominated film, is being accused of plagiarizing its script “line-by-line” in a “brazen” way, screenwriter Simon Stephenson says in multiple emails obtained by Variety.
Stephenson, who has penned multiple feature films including StudioCanal’s “Paddington 2″ and Pixar’s “Luca,” claims his spec-script “Frisco” was plagiarized in “meaningful entirety,” and that he has evidence Payne read his original screenplay.
“I do mean literally everything — story, characters, structure, scenes, dialogue, the whole thing. Some of it is just insanely brazen: many of the most important scenes are effectively unaltered and even remain visibly identical in layout on the page,” Stephenson wrote in emails to Lesley Mackey, the senior director of credits at the Writers Guild of America (WGA).”
“The Holdovers,” which is nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, follows the story of a middle-aged boarding school teacher who gets stuck looking after a 15-year-old pupil over Christmas break.
Stephenson’s original spec script “Frisco” is reportedly about a middle-aged doctor and a 15-year-old patient he gets stuck looking after.
“The two screenplays are forensically identical and riddled with unique smoking guns throughout,” Stephenson said in his email correspondence with the WGA.
A document linked in the Variety story alleges that “The Holdovers” is so much like “Frisco” that the screenplay to Payne’s movie was likely written “by importing Fricso into screenwriting software and directly overtyping the transposition on a line-by-line basis.”
The document includes numerous side-by-side comparisons of the two scripts.
“Frisco” was a popular spec script in Hollywood that reached No. 3 on The Black List in 2013, the Hollywood Reporter said at the time.
Variety also reviewed emails from agents and industry executives who claimed Alexander Payne had received and read “Frisco” in 2013 and later again in 2019.
Although Payne is not credited with writing “The Holdovers” — the movie’s writing is attributed to David Hemingson — Payne has said in an interview that he was inspired by a pilot script written by Hemingson, set in a boarding school, and asked him to write a story “set in that same world.”
Stephenson, Hemingson and Payne are all members of the WGA. Guild representatives reportedly told Stephenson that the matter of plagiarism was not a Guild issue.
