Simon Stephenson has sued Alexander Payne for copyright infringement, accusing him of copying his screenplay for The Holdovers. In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in California federal court, Stephenson accuses Payne of transposing major elements from his screenplay, “Frisco,” into the film while adding surface-level cosmetic changes to avoid the appearance of copying. He claims the director read his script in 2013 and again in 2019 before Payne approached screenwriter David Hemingson about collaborating on the project. Stephenson seeks unspecified damages and a court order that, if granted, would bar further exploitation of the movie. The lawsuit names Payne, Hemingson, producer Mark Johnson, production outfits Gran Via, Honest Scholar and Mirax and distributors Focus Features and Universal Home Entertainment.
The lawsuit states that screenplays are often called the blueprint for a film, and that the defendants built their film using Frisco as their blueprint. Both dramas feature curmudgeonly lead characters tasked with looking after teenagers, with The Holdovers following a boarding school teacher and “Frisco” following a pediatrician. The latter in 2013 landed on The Black List, which honors the year’s best unproduced screenplays. The Holdovers in 2024 was nominated for five Academy Awards, including one for best screenplay.
The lawsuit argues that Payne, who has twice won Academy Awards for best adapted screenplay, and Hemingson may have borrowed the premise for The Holdovers from Merlusse, but that they took the architecture of their screenplay from “Frisco.” The Holdovers made roughly $46 million at the box office. Focus Features had bought it during the Toronto International Film Festival for an estimated $30 million. It’s currently available on Netflix.
Stephenson is pursuing the lawsuit amid a shift in recent years in the vetting of copyright lawsuits that’s increasingly encouraged creators to sue. Federal appeals courts have been cautioning judges against early dismissal and from imposing their views on whether two works overlap enough to warrant allowing lawsuits to proceed. But the bar for convincing a jury of copyright infringement remains exceedingly high. Last year, cases involving idea theft against Shyamalan over Servant and Disney over Moana ended with defense verdicts.
The last case in which a plaintiff may have come out on top involves the Shape of Water. A settlement was reached after a federal appeals court in 2020 revived the lawsuit from the estate of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Zindel, which alleged that the makers of the Oscar-winning film ripped off Let Me Hear You Whisper.
