Screenwriter Simon Stephenson has filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against director Alexander Payne, alleging that Payne secretly reworked his unproduced screenplay “Frisco” into the Oscar-nominated film “The Holdovers.” Stephenson filed the suit on October 28 in a California federal court, accusing the Oscar-winning director of lifting plot structure, characters and incidents from a script he wrote years before the film premiered.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Stephenson's agents sent “Frisco” to Payne in 2013, and Payne passed on the project. They sent it again in 2019, and according to the civil complaint, Payne declined a second time. Stephenson alleges that elements of his script nonetheless made their way into drafts of “The Holdovers” through Payne's input to the film's credited writer, David Hemingson, as reported by Variety.
Stephenson wrote “Frisco” in 2012-13, drawing on his own experience as a pediatrician, and the script went on to rank third on the 2013 Black List of top unproduced screenplays, per the same outlet. The lawsuit claims the two screenplays share 46 “matched incidents” across their plots, a level of overlap Stephenson's filing treats as central to the infringement claim.
From a Pediatric Ward to a Prep School
The complaint draws a direct line between the two stories' core setups. It alleges that a fictional children's hospital, a cynical pediatrician and a precocious young patient in “Frisco” became a boarding school, a curmudgeonly teacher and a precocious pupil in “The Holdovers,” according to Bloomberg Law. Both dramas, the suit notes, center on a curmudgeonly lead character stuck looking after a teenager, a parallel detailed in the filing as reported by the Hollywood Reporter.
Stephenson's filing also points to stylistic echoes beyond plot, including the way “The Holdovers” structures its story-day cards with the heading “Under Black,” which he characterizes as a misuse of the standard screenwriting convention “Over Black.” The complaint additionally flags a medical-conference reference that appears in “The Holdovers” but, Stephenson argues, plays a genuinely pivotal role in “Frisco.” The lawsuit names Payne, Hemingson, producer Mark Johnson, production outfits and distributors as defendants, though Hollywood Reporter and Variety offer differing accounts of the full corporate defendant list.
Payne's Defense and Hemingson's Record
Hemingson, who holds the sole screenwriting credit on “The Holdovers,” his first produced feature film, was also named as a defendant, per the Los Angeles Times. The film went on to win Hemingson the 2024 Writers Guild Award for original screenplay and earned Academy Award and BAFTA nominations, details that figure in the lawsuit's description of the stakes involved.
Payne has previously and publicly rejected the plagiarism accusation. He denied lifting major elements of the film from Stephenson's script and, at the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2024, called the claim the stupidest thing in the world, according to the Los Angeles Times. Payne has said that a pilot written by Hemingson and Marcel Pagnol's 1935 French film “Merlusse” served as his actual inspirations for “The Holdovers.”
A Detour Through the Writers Guild
Before heading to court, Stephenson brought his allegations to the Writers Guild of America in 2024, but the guild advised him that it could not adjudicate the dispute, Variety reports. The Hollywood Reporter notes that the guild ultimately determined it was the wrong forum for the fight since copyright-infringement claims are not arbitrable by the WGA, pushing Stephenson toward federal court instead.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages along with a court order barring further exploitation of “The Holdovers,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. Stephenson's case joins a recent string of screenwriting disputes with mixed outcomes: idea-theft claims against M. Night Shyamalan's “Servant” and Disney's “Moana” both ended in defense verdicts last year, while a lawsuit alleging “The Shape of Water” copied another work settled after an appeals court revived it in 2020. Representatives for Focus Features, Payne and Hemingson did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the Los Angeles Times reported.
