{"id":898205,"date":"2026-10-29T01:56:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T01:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/898205\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T01:56:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T01:56:10","slug":"alexander-payne-sued-for-plagiarism-over-the-holdovers-by-writer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/898205\/","title":{"rendered":"Alexander Payne Sued for Plagiarism Over \u2018The Holdovers\u2019 by Writer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLuca screenwriter Simon Stephenson has sued Alexander Payne<\/a> for copyright infringement, accusing the director of ripping off his screenplay enroute to writing the Oscar-winning movie The Holdovers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in California federal court, Stephenson accuses Payne of transposing major elements from his screenplay, \u201cFrisco,\u201d into the film while adding surface-level cosmetic changes to avoid the appearance of copying. He claims the director read his script in 2013 and again in 2019 before Payne approached screenwriter David Hemingson about collaborating on the project.<\/p>\n

\n\tStephenson seeks unspecified damages and a court order that, if granted, would bar further exploitation of the movie. The lawsuit names Payne, Hemingson, producer Mark Johnson, production outfits Gran Via, Honest Scholar and Mirax and distributors Focus Features and Universal Home Entertainment.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cScreenplays are often called the blueprint for a film,\u201d the complaint states. \u201cThe defendants built their film using Frisco as their blueprint.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBoth dramas feature curmudgeonly lead characters tasked with looking after teenagers, with The Holdovers following a boarding school teacher and \u201cFrisco\u201d following a pediatrician. The latter in 2013 landed on The Black List, which honors the year\u2019s best unproduced screenplays.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Holdovers in 2024 was nominated for five Academy Awards, including one for best screenplay. On the eve of show, it was reported<\/a> that Stephenson took the dispute to the WGA with documents that he said proved Payne plagiarized his screenplay (An interesting wrinkle: Both Payne and Stephenson were repped by CAA at the time, with Hemingson at WME). The guild ultimately determined that it was the wrong forum for the dispute since copyright infringement claims aren\u2019t arbitrable by the WGA, though the resolution of the case remains unclear.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn recent years, legal battles over copyright infringement have become increasingly common, though it remains rare for established talent to take their claims to court. <\/p>\n

\n\tAt the core of the lawsuit: Allegations that Payne read \u201cFrisco\u201d in 2013 years before developing The Holdovers. Stephenson had sought out Payne for the movie, with the writer\u2019s representatives getting the script to the director\u2019s producing partner Jim Burke, who had said that Payne \u201cdid like it but was not interested in prod or directing it,\u201d according to the complaint. Years later in 2019, the lawsuit says, Payne received a copy of \u201cFrisco\u201d a second time when the project was submitted to him on behalf of Netflix.<\/p>\n

\n\tStephenson, whose writing credits include Paddington 2 and The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, alleges that \u201cstylistic traces\u201d from \u201cFrisco\u201d can be seen in The Holdovers. Exhibit A: The Holdovers is structured by story day cards (e.g. \u201cDay 1 \u2013 December 18, 1970\u201d), with the script introducing them with the words \u201cUnder Black,\u201d a misnomer for \u201cOver Black.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cA term used incorrectly, and consistently, is more telling than a preference: it is a habit particular to a writer, not a choice any writer might make,\u201d writes Julia Cherlow, a lawyer for Stephenson.<\/p>\n

\n\tBeyond the writing quirk, the lawsuit stresses a remnant of \u201cFrisco\u201d remained in Payne\u2019s film. In the screenplay for The Holdovers, a character looking for a hotel room says, \u201cI understand it\u2019s the holidays, but it\u2019s kind of an emergency. I\u2019m coming into the city for a medical conference.\u201d The reference to \u201cmedical conference,\u201d Stephenson claims, appears in the dialogue without explanation and is never mentioned elsewhere in the screenplay. It does, however, play a pivotal part in \u201cFrisco,\u201d whose central character travels to San Francisco to speak at a medical conference, the lawsuit says.<\/p>\n

\n\tAmong other similarities Stephenson highlights: An early moment in which the protagonist is summoned to his boss\u2019 office and dressed down for wronging a politician. (In The Holdovers, Giamatti\u2019s character failed the son of a U.S. senator. In \u201cFrisco,\u201d the doctor protagonist calls a U.S. congresswoman, who was the mother of a patient, a moron.)<\/p>\n

\n\tCopyright law doesn\u2019t protect general ideas \u2014 like incidents, characters and settings considered standard in the treatment of particular topics (think a priest in a movie about possession) \u2014 only the particular expression of those ideas. Stephenson points to substantial similarities in the plot, sequence of events and characters, among other things.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn interviews, Payne has been upfront that he took drew from 1935 French film Merlusse, which also explores a teacher tending to students at a boarding school. He said he had long wanted to make a film set at a boarding school and asked Hemingson, who had written an unproduced TV pilot set at a school.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuit argues that Payne, who has twice won Academy Awards for best adapted screenplay, and Hemingson may have borrowed the premise for The Holdovers from Merlusse, but that they took the architecture of their screenplay from \u201cFrisco.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn top of several Academy Award nominations, The Holdovers made roughly $46 million at the box office. Focus Features had bought it during the Toronto International Film Festival for an estimated $30 million. It\u2019s currently available on Netflix.<\/p>\n

\n\tStephenson is pursuing the lawsuit amid a shift in recent years in the vetting of copyright lawsuits that\u2019s increasingly encouraged creators to sue. Federal appeals courts have been cautioning judges against early dismissal and from imposing their views on whether two works overlap enough to warrant allowing lawsuits to proceed. One of those rulings \u2014 at least the third<\/a> since 2020 overturning a defense-friendly decision in a copyright case \u2014 reversed a federal judge\u2019s decision to toss Francesca Gregorini\u2019s lawsuit against M. Night Shyamalan and Apple over Servant on the premise that dismissal was premature because \u201creasonable minds could differ\u201d on whether her and the acclaimed horror director\u2019s works are substantially similar.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the bar for convincing a jury of copyright infringement remains exceedingly high. Last year, cases involving idea theft against Shyamalan over Servant and Disney over Moana ended with defense verdicts. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe last case in which a plaintiff may have come out on top involves the Shape of Water. A settlement was reached after a federal appeals court in 2020 revived the lawsuit from the estate of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Zindel, which alleged that the makers of the Oscar-winning film ripped off Let Me Hear You Whisper. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Luca screenwriter Simon Stephenson has sued Alexander Payne for copyright infringement, accusing the director of ripping off his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":898206,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[74176,88,309472],"class_list":["post-898205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-alexander-payne","tag-entertainment","tag-the-holdovers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=898205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/898206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=898205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=898205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=898205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}