Alexander Payne calls Holdovers plagiarism claim "stupidest thing in the world"

Earlier this year, one day before the 2024 Academy Awards, Variety reported that The Holdovers director Alexander Payne and writer David Hemingson had been accused of plagiarism by another screenwriter. “It was the stupidest thing in the world,” is how Payne describes the controversy now to Deadline. “It was irresponsible of Variety to report on that without having read the scripts and comparing them themselves. Do you think The New York Times would have done that?”

In March, it came to light that Luca writer Simon Stephenson had contacted the Writers Guild of America about his claim in January, describing the similarities between Holdovers and his script Frisco as “brazen.” Frisco, about a worn-out pediatrician stuck caring for a 15-year-old, was a hot ticket script in 2013 when it landed at number three on The Black List. Stephenson said that Payne had his script in 2013 and later revisited it in 2019, though he declined to direct. Payne brought his own idea for a boarding school-set story to Hemingson and helped shape Hemingson’s Oscar-nominated screenplay. In communication with the WGA, Stephenson asserted that the two scripts were “forensically identical and riddled with unique smoking guns throughout.”

Payne, of course, would disagree. “I haven’t heard anything more about it and I wish him [Stephenson] well but there was just no merit to it. I mean, I didn’t even pay attention to it because kooky accusations come out of the woodwork all of the time and this didn’t even bother me but then it kind of kept coming, I thought, ‘Well, that’s dumb,'” the filmmaker says in conversation with Deadline at the Sarajevo Film Festival. “Meanwhile, I’ve spoken openly about the film I did steal the idea for The Holdovers from and it was a 1935 French film [Marcel Pagnol’s comedy-drama Merlusse]. That’s where I stole it from—I didn’t steal it from that guy.”