“It was the stupidest thing in the world,” director Alexander Payne has said regarding a screenwriter’s allegation that The Holdovers was plagiarised from a 2013 script.
In March, Variety ran an article which shared British screenwriter Simon Stephenson’s allegation that Alexander Payne’s Oscar-winning comedy drama The Holdovers was plagiarised from a script he wrote in 2013.
Speaking at the Sarajevo Film Festival, Payne has now provided a strongly-worded response to that allegation. He called it “the stupidest thing in the world,” and then went to describe Variety’s reporting on the matter as “irresponsible”.
“It was irresponsible of Variety to report on that without having read the scripts and comparing them themselves,” the director said, as reported by Deadline. “Do you think The New York Times would have done that?”
According to Stephenson – best known for his work on Luca, Paddington 2 and the drama The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain – The Holdovers was “plagiarised line by line” from a script called Frisco, which he wrote in 2013 and wound up on the Black List of unproduced screenplays.
Citing back-and-forth emails on the drama, Variety's piece reported that Stephenson had tried to plead his case to the Writers Guild of America, arguing that The Holdovers (credited to David Hemingson) had been taken in “its meaningful entirety” from Frisco, and that Payne had been in possession of the latter script on two separate occasions.
Read more: The Holdovers review | Pure, cinematic soup for the soul
The WGA declined to get involved in the situation because Stephenson had written the screenplay on spec. It’s unclear whether Stephenson has since taken the WGA’s recommendation that he file a lawsuit – and Payne doesn’t have heard much else about the situation, either.
“I haven’t heard anything more about it and I wish him [Stephenson] well but there was just no merit to it,” Payne said during a festival masterclass on the 18th August. “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.’”
Payne has happily conceded, however, that The Holdovers’ true source of inspiration was Merlusse, a 1935 French comedy about a grumpy teacher taking care of the kids left behind at a boarding school.
Said Payne, “I’ve spoken openly about the film I did steal the idea for The Holdovers from, and it was a 1935 French film [Merlusse]. That’s where I stole it from – I didn’t steal it from that guy.”
The Sarajevo Film Festival also saw Payne talk about his plans for future movies, including a sequel to Election, a western and some form of car chase movie. Here’s hoping all three of those pan out in due course.
