A screenwriter is claiming that the Oscar-nominated script for The Holdovers was “plagiarized line-by-line” from an un-produced screenplay that was seen by director Alexander Payne, according to an exclusive report from Variety. In February, Simon Stephenson wrote to the Writers Guild of America, saying he could “demonstrate beyond a possible doubt” that the The Holdovers had been lifted from his script Frisco,which had been number three on the Black List of best un-produced screenplays in 2013, and had been sent to Payne twice, once in 2013 and again in 2019. In his emails with the WGA, Stephenson provided correspondence demonstrating that Payne had read Frisco, which focused on the relationship between a curmudgeonly older doctor and a young patient in his care. The second time Payne received the script in 2019 and passed on it was shortly before he approached writer David Hemingson to begin work on The Holdovers. Payne has previously said that the film was based on a French film from the 1930s, and that Hemingson had written a pilot about a boarding school that had inspired him to work on a story “in that world.” Stephenson alleges that Payne and Hemingson were “insanely brazen,” and copied the “meaningful entirety” of his screenplay, including “story, characters, structure, scenes, dialogue, the whole thing.”
