Oscar-nominated film ‘The Holdovers’ accused of plagiarism by screenwriter in bombshell allegations day before event: ‘Genuinely overwhelming’
On the eve of Sunday’s Oscars, Best Picture nominee “The Holdovers” has been accused of being “plagiarized line-by-line” from a decade-old screenplay for a film written about ten years ago that was never made, according to a report.
Simon Stephenson, best known for working on popular movies “Luca” and “Paddington 2,” made the bombshell allegations in emails to the Writer’s Guild of America that were obtained by Variety.
The screenwriter alleges in the missives that “The Holdovers” director Alexander Payne likely read a script for his eerily similar movie “Frisco” when it made the rounds around Hollywood in 2013 on the industry’s “black list” of most like scripts, where it peaked at number three.
“The evidence the holdovers screenplay has been plagiarised line-by-line from “Frisco” is genuinely overwhelming – anybody who looks at even the briefest sample pretty much invariably uses the word ‘brazen,’” Stephenson wrote in the email he sent to the WGA’s director of credits Lesley Mackey, after speaking with him about the movies’ similarities.
“Frisco” is a drama that follows a cranky children’s hospital worker who gets stuck watching after his 15-year-old student — similar to how Paul Giamatti plays a prep-school classics teacher who spends a Christmas break with a troubled teen, played by Dominic Sessa, and the school’s cafeteria manager, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph.
Stephenson meticulously compared the two films scene by scene as well as important sequences and dialogues.
He alleges Payne reviewed the Frisco script in 2013 and had it again in late 2019 before he approached first-time film writer David Hemingson about “The Holdovers.” Hemingson also received producing credits for the movie.
In a Feb. 25 to the WGA board, Stephenson wrote “I can demonstrate beyond any possible doubt that the meaningful entirety of the screenplay for a film with WGA-sanctioned credits that is currently on track to win a screenwriting Oscar has been plagiarised line-by-line from a popular unproduced screenplay of mine.
“I can also show that the director of the offending film was sent and read my screenplay on two separate occasions prior to the offending film entering development,” he continued.
Stephenson claims that only five parts from “The Holdovers” are not in his “Frisco” script — including, ironically, a backstory about someone getting away with plagiarism, Variety reported.
“By ‘meaningful entirety’ 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.”
A WGA associate counsel told him it is not a guild issue and referred him to a Los Angeles law firm but told Stephenson “A lawsuit remains the most viable option under these circumstances.”
“The Holdovers” is nominated for five awards at this year’s Oscars, including Best Original Screenplay.
Stephenson and Payne declined to comment to Variety, and they could not immediately be reached by The Post.
Payne previously won two Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay for his films “Sideways” (2005) and “The Descendants” (2012).
