Luca screenwriter Simon Stephenson has sued Alexander Payne for copyright infringement, accusing the director of ripping off his screenplay enroute to writing the Oscar-winning movie 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.
“Screenplays are often called the blueprint for a film,” the complaint states. “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. On the eve of show, it was reported that Stephenson took the dispute to the WGA with documents that he said proved Payne plagiarized his screenplay (An interesting wrinkle: Both Payne and Stephenson were repped by CAA at the time, with Hemingson at WME). The guild ultimately determined that it was the wrong forum for the dispute since copyright infringement claims aren’t arbitrable by the WGA, though the resolution of the case remains unclear.
In recent years, legal battles over copyright infringement have become increasingly common, though it remains rare for established talent to take their claims to court.
At the core of the lawsuit: Allegations that Payne read “Frisco” in 2013 years before developing The Holdovers. Stephenson had sought out Payne for the movie, with the writer’s representatives getting the script to the director’s producing partner Jim Burke, who had said that Payne “did like it but was not interested in prod or directing it,” according to the complaint. Years later in 2019, the lawsuit says, Payne received a copy of “Frisco” a second time when the project was submitted to him on behalf of Netflix.
Stephenson, whose writing credits include Paddington 2 and The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, alleges that “stylistic traces” from “Frisco” can be seen in The Holdovers. Exhibit A: The Holdovers is structured by story day cards (e.g. “Day 1 – December 18, 1970”), with the script introducing them with the words “Under Black,” a misnomer for “Over Black.”
“A term used incorrectly, and consistently, is more telling than a preference: it is a habit particular to a writer, not a choice any writer might make,” writes Julia Cherlow, a lawyer for Stephenson.
Beyond the writing quirk, the lawsuit stresses a remnant of “Frisco” remained in Payne’s film. In the screenplay for The Holdovers, a character looking for a hotel room says, “I understand it’s the holidays, but it’s kind of an emergency. I’m coming into the city for a medical conference.” The reference to “medical conference,” Stephenson claims, appears in the dialogue without explanation and is never mentioned elsewhere in the screenplay. It does, however, play a pivotal part in “Frisco,” whose central character travels to San Francisco to speak at a medical conference, the lawsuit says.
Among other similarities Stephenson highlights: An early moment in which the protagonist is summoned to his boss’ office and dressed down for wronging a politician. (In The Holdovers, Giamatti’s character failed the son of a U.S. senator. In “Frisco,” the doctor protagonist calls a U.S. congresswoman, who was the mother of a patient, a moron.)
Copyright law doesn’t protect general ideas — like incidents, characters and settings considered standard in the treatment of particular topics (think a priest in a movie about possession) — only the particular expression of those ideas. Stephenson points to substantial similarities in the plot, sequence of events and characters, among other things.
In interviews, Payne has been upfront that he took drew from 1935 French film Merlusse, which also explores a teacher tending to students at a boarding school. He said he had long wanted to make a film set at a boarding school and asked Hemingson, who had written an unproduced TV pilot set at a school.
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.”
On top of several Academy Award nominations, 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. One of those rulings — at least the third since 2020 overturning a defense-friendly decision in a copyright case — reversed a federal judge’s decision to toss Francesca Gregorini’s lawsuit against M. Night Shyamalan and Apple over Servant on the premise that dismissal was premature because “reasonable minds could differ” on whether her and the acclaimed horror director’s works are substantially similar.
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.