Though The Holdovers didn't walk away with the Best Picture Oscar on Sunday evening, the film certainly generated lots of buzz... and it doesn't seem like it will stop any time soon.
The most recent chatter, however, was ignited by a plagiarism accusation.
Simon Stephenson, a screenwriter most known for penning scripts such as Luca and Paddington 2, claimed the Academy Award-nominated film plagiarized his script Frisco practically "line-by-line."
Stephenson wrote the script in 2012 and claimed that The Holdovers director Alexander Payne read the script in 2013 after it made number three on Hollywood's "black list," an annual "list of the film industry's favorite unproduced screenplays as chosen by Hollywood executives."
In emails and correspondence to the Writer's Guild of America (WGA) obtained and reviewed by Variety, Stephenson detailed multiple counts of "line-by-line" plagiarism that was first brought to the attention of WGA's senior director of credits Lesley Mackey in January.
One email read:
“The evidence the holdovers screenplay has been plagiarized line-by-line from “Frisco” is genuinely overwhelming – anybody who looks at even the briefest sample pretty much invariably uses the word ‘brazen.'"
The plots of the two scripts more than parallel each other, as Stephenson noted.
"The screenplay FRISCO tells the story of a cynical and world-weary fifty-something children's doctor and the precocious teenage patient he finds himself stuck looking after in a one-on-one situation for a period of days."
"The screenplay and film THE HOLDOVERS tells the story of a cynical and world-weary fifty-something school teacher and the precocious fifteen year-old pupil he finds himself stuck looking after in a one-on-one situation for a period of days."
In an email to the WGA board on February 25, Stephenson also claimed Payne read Frisco in 2013 and then again in late 2019, just before Payne approached film writer David Hemingson about The Holdovers.
“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."
Payne, however, had a different story when speaking on The Rough Cut podcast in November.
“I had the idea for the movie — that I stole from a 1935 French movie I’d seen at a film festival about a dozen years ago — and I thought ‘That’s a good premise for a movie.’ Not the story, how it pans out, but the premise."
"And so I was sitting on this premise for years thinking ‘Oh, I’ve got to go, you know, out to Eastern prep school some day and research that idea because I’m not from that world. And then about five years ago, I received, completely randomly, a TV pilot set at a boarding school."
"So that’s when I called up [Hemingson] and I said, ‘Hey, you’ve written a great pilot. I don’t want to do it. But would you consider writing a story for me, set in that same world?’ — that’s how it happened.”
When the film's director Kevin Tent noted that he had "like 45 pages," Payne added:
“Could be — because, because David was sharing, you know, portions of drafts with me during his process.”
“I had the idea, we hashed out the idea tog- I mean the story idea together. He would send me different versions of what the story could be and then I could say yes or put the kibosh on it or whatever, and then we kind of hashed it out together.”
Even with more than 30 pages detailing examples of "the copying [being] so comprehensive that it seems likely THE HOLDOVERS was created by importing FRISCO into screenwriting software and directly overtyping the transposition on a line-by-line basis," Stephenson offered another 50 examples upon request.
He also acknowledged that only five parts of the film were not from his script. Ironically, one of those was an instance in which Paul Giamatti's character recounted a story about a person who had gotten away with plagiarism.
"THE HOLDOVERS has added a scene where the protagonist describes somebody powerful and well-connected getting away with plagiarizing a less well-connected person's work, then ensuring the victim came to serious harm."
People on social media were shocked over both the accusation and the similarities between the two scripts.
A few, however, felt the examples cited by Stephenson weren't similar enough to constitute a plagiarism claim.
Ultimately, Stephenson's pleas to the WGA went unanswered as they told him it was not a Guild issue. Instead, they believed a lawsuit would be the "most viable option under these circumstances" and referred him to a Los Angeles law firm.
