The Holdovers issue
A report claims that ‘The Holdovers,’ a Best Picture nominee on Sunday’s Oscars, has been accused of being “plagiarised line-by-line” from a ten-year-old screenplay for a picture that was written roughly ten years ago but was never produced.
The shocking claims were made by Simon Stephenson, who is most renowned for his work on the well-liked films “Luca” and “Paddington 2,” in emails to the Writer’s Guild of America that Variety was able to get.
Screen writer’s claim
In the missives, the screenwriter claims that Alexander Payne, the director of “The Holdovers,” probably viewed a script for his hauntingly identical film “Frisco” while it was on the “black list” of most similar scripts in Hollywood in 2013, peaking at number three.
After discussing the films’ similarities with the WGA’s director of credits Lesley Mackey, Stephenson wrote in an email to Mackey, “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’s main grievance centers on Payne’s alleged possession of the “Frisco” script in 2013 and late 2019, just prior to Payne’s outreach to Hemingson over a potential project collaboration. Email correspondence involving multiple Hollywood agencies and producers appears to support that claim.
In an email sent to several recipients on August 28, 2013, Verve founder Bryan Besser wrote to Stephenson, saying, “Quick update: We gave FRISCO to Alexander Payne’s producing partner Jim Burke, whom we took to lunch yesterday.” In a perfect world, this is the best way to use Searchlight, in our opinion. After four months, Geoff Morley of UTA appeared to suggest that Payne had read “Frisco,” writing: “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.”
About Frisco The Movie
In 2019, ‘Frisco’ seemed to be reviving thanks to Brightstar’s John Woodward and producer Tanya Seghatchian, who were previously involved in Jane Campion’s Oscar-nominated “The Power of the Dog.” Now, the movie is being brought to Netflix.
The script was then brought to Payne by top executive Lisa Nishimura, who departed Netflix the previous year. “Sorry to say that Alexander has now read but says it is not quite what he is looking for,” Woodward wrote to Stephenson and Seghatchian on December 6, 2019. It might be prudent to inquire more with [Bob Odenkirk]. Netflix expressed interest in Alexander, but they may also be interested in Odenkirk. Would you like us to check with them about this? Or perhaps Krasinski is still around. eager to hear your opinions.
When Hemingson noticed the Omaha area code, she understood it was Alexander Payne, not the joke caller as Payne had initially led her to believe. And he said, ‘I would you be interested in scripting this film I want to do about this smelly, socially awkward professor stranded at school over Christmas?’
