Hollywood screenwriter Simon Stephenson claims Oscar Best Picture nominee “The Holdovers” is “plagiarized line-by-line” from a decade-old screenplay for a film he wrote but was ultimately never made, according to a report.
One the eve of Sunday’s Oscar’s, Best Picture nominee “The Holdovers” has been accused of being “plagiarized line-by-line” from a decade-old screenplay for a film written about a decade ago never made, according to a report.
Simon Stephenson, best known for working on popular movies “Luca” and “Paddington 2,” made the bombshell allegations in emails to the Writer’s Guild of America that were obtained by Variety.
The screenwriter alleges in the missives that “The Holdovers” director Alexander Payne likely read a script for his eerily similar movie “Frisco” when it made the rounds around Hollywood in 2013 on the industry’s “black list” of most like scripts, where it peaked at number three.
“The evidence the holdovers screenplay has been plagiarised line-by-line from frisco is genuinely overwhelming – anybody who looks at even the briefest sample pretty much invariably uses the word ‘brazen,’” Stephenson wrote in the email he sent to the WGA’s director of credits Lesley Mackey, after speaking with him about the movies’ similarities.
