'The Holdovers' Accused of Plagiarism, Oscars 2024 Nominations Not Impacted

Oscar nominated film The Holdovers has been accused of plagiarism.

This whole story begins on January 12, 2024, when screenwriter Simon Stephenson, who wrote Pixar’s Luca, Paddington 2, and more, sent an email to an executive at the Writers Guild of America.

He wrote, “I’ve encountered a credits-related issue on quite a high profile WGA-covered project.” In another email, he continued, “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.’”

Keep reading to find out more…

Frisco is Simon‘s screenplay from 2013. According to Variety, “Frisco” was a “drama centered on a world-weary middle-aged children’s doctor and the 15-year-old patient he gets stuck looking after.” According to Variety, The Holdovers is ” a drama revolving around a world-weary middle-aged boarding school teacher and the 15-year-old pupil he gets stuck looking after.”

The Holdovers, directed by Alexander Payne and written by David Hemingson is nominated for best original screenplay this evening at the show, and is considered a frontrunner to win.

Simon alleges that Alexander actually had the screen play for Frisco in 2013 and again in 2019, with an email from a UTA exec from that time period that states: “I spoke to Alexander Payne’s exec Jim Burke directly a while back and he said that Payne did like [Frisco] but was not interested in prod or directing it.”

In 2024, Simon wrote another email to the WGA board, stating, “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. 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.”

He added, “I’ve been a working writer for 20 years – in my native UK before I came to the US – and so I’m very aware that people can often have surprisingly similar ideas and sometimes a few elements can be ‘borrowed’ etc. This just isn’t that situation. The two screenplays are forensically identical and riddled with unique smoking guns throughout.”

According to the report, the WGA seemed to conclude that this was not a guild issue and advised Simon that “a lawsuit remains the most viable option under the circumstances.”

As for Alexander‘s side of the story?

In November 2023, Alexander went on The Rough Cut podcast and spoke about how The Holdovers came to be: “I had the idea for the movie — that I stole from a 1935 French movie I’d seen at a film festival about a dozen years ago — and I thought ‘That’s a good premise for a movie.’ Not the story, how it pans out, but the premise. And so I was sitting on this premise for years thinking ‘Oh, I’ve got to go, you know, out to Eastern prep school some day and research that idea because I’m not from that world. And then about five years ago, I received, completely randomly, a TV pilot set at a boarding school. So that’s when I called up [Hemingson] and I said, ‘Hey, you’ve written a great pilot. I don’t want to do it. But would you consider writing a story for me, set in that same world?’ — that’s how it happened.

The Holdover is nominated for five Oscars this evening, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Paul Giamatti), Best Supporting Actress (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing. See the full list of nominees here.