The 96th annual Academy Awards are taking place tomorrow, and one of the films with multiple nominations is Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. The film is nominated for five Oscars, including Best Original Screenplay for writer David Hemingson. The film is going up against May December, Past Lives, Anatomy of a Fall, and Maestro. While Oscar voting would have ended by now, new information has come to life that could shake things up down the line. In a new report from Variety, Payne and Hemingson have been accused of plagiarizing The Holdovers from Luca writer, Simon Stephenson. In January, Stephenson emailed the Writers Guild of America’s senior director of credits, Lesley Mackey, to set up a meeting in order to discuss the similarities between The Holdovers and his script, Frisco.
“I’ve encountered a credits-related issue on quite a high-profile WGA-covered project,” Stephenson wrote in his original email. A call between Stephenson and Mackey eventually took place, and Stephenson wrote in a follow-up email, “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.’”
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Stephenson’s screenplay follows “a world-weary middle-aged children’s doctor and the 15-year-old patient he gets stuck looking after” while The Holdovers follows “a world-weary middle-aged boarding school teacher and the 15-year-old pupil he gets stuck looking after.” Variety referred to Frisco as “one of the hottest screenplays in town” back in 2013. Stephenson provides proof that Payne not only read the script back in 2013 but again in 2019, shortly before the director approached Hemingson about writing The Holdovers.
“Quick update: We gave FRISCO to Alexander Payne’s producing partner Jim Burke whom we took to lunch yesterday. Our opinion is that in an ideal world this is the best way into Searchlight.” UTA’s Geoff Morley later indicated that Payne had read Frisco, writing in an email, “I spoke to Alexander Payne’s exec Jim Burke directly a while back and he said that Payne did like it but was not interested in prod or directing it.”
“Sorry to say that Alexander has now read but says it is not quite what he is looking for,” former Netflix executive Lisa Nishimura wrote in an email in 2019. “Might be worth following up with [Bob Odenkirk]. Netflix’s interest was predicated on Alexander but Odenkirk might be of interest to them too – do you want us to sound them out? Or there is still Krasinski possibly. Keen to know your thoughts….”
According to the report, these email exchanges have been “passed around by a few high-profile people in the industry as Stephenson made his case to the WGA.” While Payne is not a credited writer on The Holdovers, he has spoken about being a part of the process.
“I got involved in the script, although I don’t take credit for it,” he said at the Thessaloniki Film Festival last year.
Stephenson also sent the following email to the WGA board after his conversation with Mackey “went nowhere:”
“An urgent plea for help from a WGA writer in a truly extraordinary situation,” he 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. 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.”
“I’ve been a working writer for 20 years – in my native UK before I came to the US – and so I’m very aware that people can often have surprisingly similar ideas and sometimes a few elements can be ‘borrowed’ etc. This just isn’t that situation. The two screenplays are forensically identical and riddled with unique smoking guns throughout,” he continued. “This may be the best chance the Guild will ever have to improve the current dismal situation of the complete lack of meaningful protection against plagiarism by transposition for working writers, and to guard against a looming existentially catastrophic situation.”
WGA West associate counsel Leila Azari told Stephenson this was not a Guild issue despite all the writers involved being WGA members.
Payne and Hemingson have yet to comment on the accusations.
