‘The Holdovers’ accused of plagiarism by ‘Luca’ screenwriter

‘The remnants’

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Alexander Payne Award Nominee The remains faces controversy on the eve of the Oscars, where David Hemingson’s script is nominated for best original screenplay.

The film stars Paul Giamatti as a cynical teacher at a boarding school who gets stuck babysitting a teenager (Dominic Sessa) during the Christmas holidays. According Luke and Paddington 2 from writer Simon Stephenson, the script has striking similarities to his unproduced screenplay for Frisco, about a cynical pediatrician who finds himself caring for a teenage patient for several days. Frisco’s script had some notoriety, as in 2013 it landed on the Black List, which honors the best unproduced scripts of the year.

Stephenson prepared documents comparing scenes from both scripts as well as their overall structure. Variety, which made one of those documents public on Saturday, reported that Stephenson sent it to the WGA in January to seek help. According to one document, Payne was sent drafts of the script in 2013 and 2019 in an attempt to get him to board the project.

“The significant entirety of THE HOLDOVERS script has been copied from the FRISCO script by transposition,” the document states. “This includes the entire story of the FRISCO screenplay, the structure, the sequence, the scenes, the sequential subtempos within the scenes, the line-by-line substance of the action and dialogue, the characters, the arcs, the relationships, the theme and tone. Most of this has been done line by line, and a lot of the unique and highly specific elements created in FRISCO are easily and unmistakably identifiable in THE HOLDOVERS.”

Among the similarities Stephenson highlighted was an early moment in which the protagonist is summoned to his boss’s office and reprimanded for having wronged a politician. (In The remains, Giamatti’s character failed the son of a US senator. In friscoThe protagonist doctor calls an American congresswoman, who was the mother of a patient, an idiot.)

The Hollywood Reporter has been in contact with WGA representatives, Payne, Hemingson and Stephenson. (Both Payne and Stephenson are repped by CAA, while Hemingson is at WME.)

The remains the script faces Teacher, Anatomy of a fall, Teacher, May December and Past Lives for best original screenplay at the Oscars, which ended their voting window at the end of last month. Late last year, Payne and Hemingson spoke with THR about the origins of the film. Payne said that he had long wanted to make a film set in a boarding school, while Hemingson had written an unproduced television pilot set in a school. The pilot script caught Payne’s attention and he called the screenwriter.

“At first I thought it was a prank call until I saw the Omaha area code and realized it was actually Alexander Payne,” Hemingson recalled of receiving that call from Payne. “And he said, ‘I have this movie I want to make about this obnoxious, socially challenged teacher stuck at school over Christmas.’ Would you be interested in writing it?’”