Key points
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Simon Stephenson filed a lawsuit accusing the makers of The Holdovers of copyright infringement.
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Stephenson claims that director Alexander Payne received multiple copies of his unproduced screenplay titled Frisco.
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The screenwriter alleges that The Holdovers contains a multitude of elements that appear to be copied from Frisco.
The filmmakers behind The Holdovers have been accused of copyright infringement in a new lawsuit.
Simon Stephenson, a screenwriter whose previous credits include Pixar’s Luca and Paddington 2, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing director Alexander Payne and writer David Hemingson of copying key elements of his unproduced 2013 script for Frisco to create their 2023 dramedy starring Paul Giamatti.
Stephenson also named producer Mark Johnson, his production company Gran, and production company Honest Scholar as defendants
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to representatives for Payne, Hemingson, Johnson, Miramax, and Focus Features for comment.
Stephenson’s lawsuit, which has been reviewed by EW, claims that Payne received multiple copies of the plaintiff’s Frisco screenplay before declining the opportunity to make the project, which would have focused on a grumpy pediatrician accompanying a young patient on a trip to the city. Stephenson alleges that Payne and his collaborators stole 46 incidents from Frisco and repackaged them in The Holdovers, which takes place at an elite prep school.
“Under Payne’s direction, Stephenson’s children’s hospital became a boarding school, the cynical pediatrician became a cynical teacher, and the precocious patient became a precocious pupil,” the lawsuit claims.
Stephenson points to one particular moment in one draft of The Holdovers‘ screenplay as alleged evidence of copying: when the main teen, Angus (Dominic Sessa), mentions that he is traveling “for a medical conference” despite no medical conference appearing in the film.
“No medical conference figures in The Holdovers‘ story: its adult protagonist is a teacher, and neither he nor the teenager is traveling to attend a medical conference,” the lawsuit says. “The explanation belongs to Frisco‘s plot, and its presence in the May 2021 The Holdovers script is evidence that the script was unlawfully copied. Its subsequent removal—while the lines surrounding it remained—is consistent with that copying then being concealed.”
Stephenson’s lawyers also included exhibits of multiple alleged email exchanges suggesting that Payne and his associates received and acknowledged the Friscoscreenplay, indicating that the filmmaker was familiar with Stephenson’s script by the time he made The Holdovers.
Stephenson is seeking actual damages and injunctive relief prohibiting the defendants from “further infringing Plaintiff’s copyright in Frisco,” plus legal fees.
Allegations of The Holdovers plagiarizing Frisco previously emerged in March 2024 when Variety reported that Stephenson accused Payne of copying his screenplay in a series of emails to the Writers Guild of America‘s senior director of credits Lesley Mackey.
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In one of his emails at the time, Stephenson wrote, “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.'”
Da’Vine Joy Randolph won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her work in The Holdovers. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actor for Giamatti, and Best Film Editing.
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