Paul Giamatti in a scene from The Holdovers. Photo / AP
Paul Giamatti in a scene from The Holdovers. Photo / AP
The 96th Academy Awards are taking place today but a film up for Best Picture is facing shock allegations.
The Holdovers, directed by Alexander Payne, has been nominated for five awards at the Academy Awards and is now facing claims of plagiarism after Luca and Paddington 2 screenwriter Simon Stephenson raised an issue with the Writer’s Guild of America.
Variety has reported the allegations were first made to the WGA by Stephenson with the screenwriter claiming the story of The Holdovers is remarkably similar to Frisco - a 2013 script written by the star which never eventuated into a film.
“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 alleged in an email to WGA’s director of credits Lesley Mackey, after reportedly speaking with him in person.
New York Post continued to report that Stephenson backs up his claims by comparing scenes from the two films side by side. He further claimed that Payne sighted the Frisco script multiple times, first in 2013 and again in 2019. After his last sighting of the script, Payne reportedly approached film-writer David Hemingston to work with him on The Holdovers.
Dominic Sessa in a scene from The Holdovers. Photo / AP
Stephenson’s email to WAG was sent on February 25 and claims overall there are only five parts of The Holdovers which are not included in his script for Frisco.
An extract from the complaint obtained by Variety reads, “I can demonstrate beyond any possible doubt that the meaningful entirety of the screenplay for a film with WGA-sanctioned credits that is currently on track to win a screenwriting Oscar has been plagiarised line-by-line from a popular unproduced screenplay of mine.
“I can also show that the director of the offending film was sent and read my screenplay on two separate occasions prior to the offending film entering development,” he stated.
Stephenson added: “By ‘meaningful entirety’ I do mean literally everything - story, characters, structure, scenes, dialogue, the whole thing. Some of it is just insanely brazen: many of the most important scenes are effectively unaltered and even remain visibly identical in layout on the page.”
