'Luca' Writer Sues Alexander Payne, Claiming Oscar Nominee 'The Holdovers' Copied His Unproduced Script 'Frisco'
The Hollywood Reporter reported on October 28 that Simon Stephenson, who holds a story credit on Pixar's "Luca," filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in California federal court the same day, alleging that director Alexander Payne's Oscar-nominated film "The Holdovers" was built on his unproduced screenplay "Frisco." The suit seeks unspecified damages and an injunction barring further exploitation of the movie.
Also named as defendants are "The Holdovers" screenwriter David Hemingson, producer Mark Johnson, and companies including Miramax, Focus Features and Universal Home Entertainment. The complaint says Payne read "Frisco" in 2013 and again in 2019 and passed on both occasions, but in 2022 finally made Stephenson's screenplay: "Screenplays are often called the blueprint for a film. The defendants built their film using Frisco as their blueprint."
According to the complaint, Payne transposed Stephenson's children's hospital into a boarding school, the cynical pediatrician into a cynical classics teacher, and the precocious patient into a precocious pupil. It identifies 46 incidents that correspond across the two works, 24 of them occurring in the same order. As one piece of evidence, the filing points to a May 2021 draft of "The Holdovers" in which the teenage lead mentions traveling "for a medical conference" — although no medical conference figures in the film — a detail the suit says belongs to "Frisco"'s plot and was later removed while the surrounding lines remained.
"Frisco," written in 2012–13, tells of a forty-something pediatric allergist facing divorce who learns lessons in living from a terminally ill 15-year-old patient; it placed third on the 2013 Black List of the industry's most-liked unproduced screenplays. Stephenson, a former pediatrician, also worked on "Paddington 2," "Wonka" and "Luca." The defendants have not publicly responded to the lawsuit, according to the reports.
The dispute is not new. In March 2024, on the eve of the Academy Awards — where "The Holdovers" competed including for Best Original Screenplay — Stephenson took his accusations to the Writers Guild of America, which said it could not adjudicate the matter and referred him to an attorney. Payne later denied the allegations at the Sarajevo Film Festival, calling the claim "the stupidest thing in the world."
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：《留校联盟》导演亚历山大·佩恩。照片：CC BY-SA 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: Alexander Payne, director of "The Holdovers." CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
