Best Original Screenplay Nominee Accused of Plagiarism: Here’s All We Know

Summary:

• The Holdovers, the receiver of a number of Oscars ’ nominations, is accused of plagiarism from an unreleased script by the screenwriter Simon Stephenson.
• He sent a letter to the WGA claiming his 2013 screenplay had a strikingly similar story, characters and even dialogue structure.

The Holdovers, Alexander Payne’s atmospheric holiday drama, has gained not only critics and viewers’ praise throughout the last year, but, moreover, five Oscar nominations, including the main one, Best Picture, winning an award in a Best Supporting Actress category for Da'Vine Joy Randolph’s performance.

Just before the Academy Awards ceremony, this movie and personally Payne as its director was accused of plagiarism by Simon Stephenson, who wrote Luca and Paddington 2.

He claims The Holdovers’ script, which was among all nominated by the Academy in a Best Original Screenplay category, is a mere “line-by-line” calque from his 2013 Black List script for an unmade movie called Frisco. According to Stephenson, it could happen because Payne received his screenplay and read it two times prior to the process of making the accused movie and then copied the “meaningful entirety” of it.

As we recall The Holdovers’ plot, it unfolds in an isolated boarding school where a strict teacher is left in charge of an eccentric teen student over the winter holidays.

The Frisco script, attached to Stephenson’s letter to the Writers Guild of America, follows a story of an annoyed doctor getting stuck with a problematic teen patient, while the very content of the pages seems to share little in common with Payne’s masterpiece.

Payne himself has answered these accusations, saying he’d had a rough idea for the film for years, inspired by obscure 1935 French film Merlusse, directed by Marcel Pagnol, which features a teacher being left with boarding school students over the holidays, and then hired screenwriter David Hemingson to realize his idea of revitalizing it.

Both critics and fans in the Internet are skeptical about Stephenson’s loud claims, having mostly agreed on the fact that a similar formula of a student or any other subordinate being forced to share space and time with his teacher or any other senior figure without the latter’s desire too isn’t enough to pose such an accusation.

“With The Holdovers being accused of plagiarism, I’d like to point out that Oppenheimer is basically Minions,” the Twitter user @juliussharpe jokes on this problematic issue.

Having in mind the above-mentioned statement was sent to the WGA in January and was made public only before the Oscars ceremony, we hope it hadn’t affected the number of awards The Holdovers have received and that this is just a promotion move.

Source: Variety