Alexander Payne Award contenders holdover The film is facing controversy on the eve of the Oscars, where David Hemingson’s script is nominated for Best Original Screenplay.
The feature stars Paul Giamatti as an eccentric boarding school teacher who is stuck caring for a teenage boy (Dominic Cessa) during the Christmas holidays. According to Luca And paddington 2 According to writer Simon Stephenson, the script is very similar to his unproduced screenplay for Frisco, about an eccentric pediatrician who cares for a teenage patient for several days. The Frisco script gained some notoriety, as in 2013 it appeared on the Black List, which honors the year’s best unproduced screenplays.
Stephenson prepared documents comparing scenes from both screenplays as well as their overall structure. Diversity, which made one of those documents public on Saturday, reported that Stephenson had sent it to the WGA in January asking for help. According to a document, drafts of the script were sent to Payne in 2013 and 2019 for his inclusion in the project.
“The entire screenplay of The Holdovers is copied from the Frisco screenplay by transposition,” the document claims. “This includes the entire story, structure, sequencing, scenes, sequential sub-beats within scenes, line-by-line content of action and dialogue, characters, arcs, relationships, themes and tone of the FRISCO screenplay. Much of it is done line-for-line, and the large number of unique and highly distinctive elements created in Frisco are easily and clearly recognizable in The Holdovers.
Among the similarities Stephenson highlighted was an early moment in which the protagonist is called into her boss’s office and is framed for wronging a politician. (In holdover, Giamatti’s character unsuccessfully pursues the son of a US senator. In FriscoDoctor Nayak calls a US Congresswoman, who was the mother of a patient, a fool.)
hollywood reporter The WGA has reached out to representatives for Payne, Hemingson and Stephenson. (Payne and Stephenson are both repped by CAA, while Hemmingson is at WME).
holdover goes against the script artist, anatomy of fall, artist, may december And past life for Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars, whose voting window ended late last month. Late last year, Payne and Hemingson spoke heart About the origins of the film. Payne said he had long wanted to make a film set in a boarding school, while Hemingson had written an unproduced TV pilot set in a school. The pilot script caught Payne’s attention and he called the screenwriter.
Hemmingson recalled receiving that call from Payne, saying, “At first I thought it was a prank call, until I looked up the Omaha area code and I realized it was actually Alexander Payne.” “And he said, ‘I have this movie I want to make about this obnoxious, socially challenged professor who’s stuck in school on Christmas – would you be interested in writing it?'”
