Alexander Payne isn’t holding a grudge against “The Holdovers” script allegations, but the writer/director is admitting just how “stupid” he thought the perceived scandal was.
On the eve of the 2024 Oscars, Disney’s “Luca” co-screenwriter Simon Stephenson publicly accused Payne and “The Holdovers” screenwriter David Hemingson of plagiarizing the script from his 2013 Black List screenplay “Frisco.”
Now, Payne told Deadline while at the Sarajevo Film Festival what he really thought of the media coverage at the time.
“It was the stupidest thing in the world,” Payne said when asked about the Variety report. “It was irresponsible of Variety to report on that without having read the scripts and comparing them themselves. Do you think The New York Times would have done that?”
At the time, Variety cited emails that suggested Payne did read Stephenson’s script or was at least aware of it when he decided to pass in December 2019 — shortly before he began work on what became “The Holdovers” with Hemingson. Payne had commissioned the script from Hemingson based on a past idea of the screenwriter’s. “The Holdovers” went on to be nominated for Best Original Screenplay.
As described on the 2013 Black List, “Frisco” had a logline of following a “forty-something pediatric allergist, who specializes in hazelnut and is facing a divorce, learns lessons in living from a wise-beyond-her-years terminally ill 15-year-old patient when she crashes his weekend trip to a conference in San Francisco.”
In contrast, “The Holdovers” is about a prep school history teacher (Paul Giamatti) who is forced to care for a 15-year-old student (Dominic Sessa) over the holidays.
“I haven’t heard anything more about it and I wish him [Stephenson] well but there was just no merit to it,” Payne said of the comparisons. “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 continued, “Meanwhile, I’ve spoken openly about the film I did steal the idea for ‘The Holdovers’ from and it was a 1935 French film [Marcel Pagnol’s ‘Merlusse’]. That’s where I stole it from – I didn’t steal it from that guy.”
Payne will next be reuniting with Hemingson for a Western film.
The writer/director also told IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson that the film’s holiday-set premise was inspired by “Merlusse” after he first watched it while at the 2011 Telluride Film Festival.
“It was stealable,” he said. “Kids who have nowhere to go over Christmas break. And then the very disliked teacher taking care of him who has a wonky eye. Even in the French movie, he has a wonky eye. So that’s the setup I took. And I didn’t know what the hell the story was going to be.”
Payne later read a TV pilot by Hemingson set at an East Coast elite boarding school.
“I just called the guy up,” Payne said. “And I said, ‘I’ve never heard of you. I like your pilot. I don’t want to do it. But would you consider writing a feature based on an idea I have set in that same milieu?’ And he agreed. And that’s how miraculously it came about.”
