No, The Holdovers was not plagiarized

Plagiarism has been a hot button issue both on and off YouTube for the last several months. So when British screenwriter Simon Stephenson recently accused Alexander Payne and David Hemingson’s acclaimed film The Holdovers of plagiarizing Stephenson’s unproduced screenplay ‘Frisco’, many were quick to jump to conclusions. Indeed, if you’ve read the Variety article that broke the news, you may well have been convinced that Stephenson has a strong case.
But I’m here to tell you that you’ve been had! You’ve been bamboozled! Don’t let them do this to you! Join me as we unpack the situation and dissect a few of the wackier claims Stephenson makes in the 33-page introductory document he sent to the WGA. An enlightening case study in perspective, framing, and (dis)honesty.

Transpose some money into my bank account (and get access to bonus content): https://patreon.com/JaneMulcahy?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink

00:00 – Intro
6:00 – Context
17:23 – The worst supporting document of all time
49:08 – What is to become of Simon Stephenson?

Sources/documents: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AzHrmO5qLoTV9QlTERG_LWB2i2kLvlx2uprL5CKhubw/edit?usp=sharing

Footnote: I JUST realized right before posting this that although I call Simon Stephenson a “British screenwriter” in this video, he is in fact from Scotland. I want to apologize for this, as I know that no Scot likes to be mistaken for a Brit. But in my defense, the Variety article also refers to him as a “British writer” and I guess I foolishly took their word for it. What is going on over there?! Tatiana you’re an executive editor! Could you try *editing* next time???

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If you’re at all tuned into the film world or the awards season news cycle, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about the recent plagiarism allegations leveled at Alexander Payne’s critically acclaimed comedy drama The Holdovers. According to Variety, British screenwriter Simon Stephenson, known for his work on such films as Paddington 2 and Pixar’s Luca, has accused Holdovers screenwriter David Hemingson of “brazenly” copying Stephenson’s unproduced screenplay Frisco. And I mean, the article presents a pretty good case. According to Stephenson, Frisco and The Holdovers share many similar story elements and characters, with certain scenes from Frisco “transposed line-by-line” into The Holdovers. Most damningly, Stephenson even has proof that Alexander Payne received and read Frisco, possibly on more than one occasion– both in 2013 and 2019. An open-and-shut case, no? Well… no! There are just a few small problems with this reporting and Stephenson’s larger claims. Just a few. I would call this Variety article gobsmackingly misleading. It was written by Tatiana Siegel, Variety’s Executive Editor of Film and Media, who was actually already on my radar due to some very biased reporting she’s done over the last few months on Melissa Barrera’s firing from the Scream franchise. But that’s another story. Similarly to that situation, in this article, Siegel paints a very… curated picture of the scandal. You know how I said Simon Stephenson is known for Luca and Paddington 2? I said that because that’s how Siegel introduces him. She calls him a writer “whose credits include Pixar’s ‘Luca’ and StudioCanal’s ‘Paddington 2’”, despite the fact that Stephenson did not write the screenplays for either of those films. He has a story credit on Luca and is one of four writers credited with contributing “additional material” to Paddington 2. I’m not trying to minimize those contributions, he definitely did work on both films. But it’s a little misleading to list only those ones. When you say a screenwriter is known for his work on a certain film, most people are going to assume that means he wrote the screenplay. Siegel also takes a rather dismissive tone when describing the career of Holdovers screenwriter David Hemingson: “Hemingson has an atypical career trajectory for an Oscar-nominated writer. He was an entertainment attorney at Loeb & Loeb before becoming a TV writer in the mid-‘90s. “The Holdovers” marks his feature film debut.” It seems like she’s framing it this way in an attempt to delegitimize Hemingson, but it’s not “atypical” for a screenwriter to have a different job before getting into screenwriting, or to write for TV before writing films. And notably, he’s not even the only first-time feature writer nominated for an Oscar this year. Then, most egregiously, at one point Siegel describes an email Stephenson received in 2019 confirming that Alexander Payne had read his screenplay, the one he’s claiming Payne ripped off. She then writes that Payne and Hemingson started working on the Holdovers “not long after” that 2019 email. But Hemingson has said before this news ever broke that he and Payne started working on the script in 2018. It seems like Siegel just didn’t bother to check, and instead made up a detail that makes Stephenson’s allegations sound more incriminating. You can’t just do that! But even disregarding all of this, the main problem with this article is that despite Siegel presenting Stephenson’s allegations as completely credible and incriminating, once you actually read the attached document that Stephenson sent out to officials at the Writers Guild of America, or god forbid, you read the screenplays of both Frisco and The Holdovers, it becomes abundantly clear that these plagiarism accusations are at best misguided and delusional, and at worst, willfully dishonest. I wasn’t intending to make a video about this, but when the news came out, the more I read about it, the more this seemed like something worth unpacking. I think this situation is a great example of A. the importance of actually doing your research when stories like this come out instead of just trusting the headlines at face value, and B. the dangers of being too trigger happy about things like intellectual property theft. Plagiarism has been a particularly hot topic here on YouTube in the past few months, ever since Hbomberguy made a very thorough video discussing a few notable cases of plagiarism in the YouTube video essay world. Even out there in the real world, this topic has been in the news a lot in the last few months in relation to Harvard president Claudine Gay. Gay faced plagiarism allegations mainly fueled by conservative activist Christopher Rufo, but according to most actual academics who weighed in at the time, these allegations were not particularly sound. But even so, this controversy was enough to prompt Gay to resign, which contributed to the perception that the allegations held water. So it makes sense that people are a little sensitive to accusations like these at the moment. At first glance, it might look like this is a classic case of a couple of powerful industry figures exploiting a smaller artist and reaping the rewards. But I’m here to tell you, as someone who has actually done the research, that this is not one of those cases. I’m not a lawyer, I’m not the arbiter of what is or isn’t plagiarism– Please don’t sue me, Mr. Stephenson– but in my opinion, these two scripts are demonstrably, entirely different, these accusations are completely unfounded, this supporting document is laughable, and this article is dishonest. So let’s discuss why. Context. Spoiler warning, I guess. The Holdovers, written by David Hemingson, reportedly with some uncredited contributions from Alexander Payne, is a period comedy-drama set in 1970 at a prestigious New England boarding school, and follows a grumpy, strict classics teacher, Paul Hunham, who is forced to spend his Christmas break looking after “the holdovers”, the boys who are not able to go home for the holidays. Eventually, one student’s father arranges for most of the boys to spend Christmas with their family, leaving only one boy, Angus Tully, to ‘hold over’ with Hunham and the school’s cook, Mary Lamb. While Hunham and Tully’s relationship is initially antagonistic, they gradually bond and help each other overcome some of their hangups. At the end of the story, Hunham loses his job over his decision to let Tully visit his father during the holiday break, but this turns out to be a blessing as Hunham finally takes control of his life and sets out to fulfill his dream of traveling the world. Frisco, written by Simon Stephenson, is a comedy-drama set in a present-day children’s hospital and follows Dr. Jeff Willis, a misanthropic allergist on the verge of divorce who travels to a medical conference in San Francisco, only to find that Amy Morrison, a 15-year old patient dying of cancer, has tagged along, wanting to experience the sights and sensations of ‘Frisco’ while she’s still alive. Willis is initially upset about this, but gradually bonds with Amy and is able to get his zest for life back. At the end of the story, Amy succumbs to her illness, and Willis loses his job over his continued disrespectful behavior toward the parents of his young patients. But this turns out to be a blessing as Willis finally takes control of his life and sets out to fulfill his dream of road tripping across the United States. First, let’s establish exactly what we’re looking at here. [Carey Mulligan:] What is it exactly that we’re looking at here? This is not a lawsuit. So far, Stephenson has only brought his concerns to the WGA. And the press, apparently. No. I don’t know for sure that Stephenson himself is the one who leaked this to Variety, but like who else would’ve done it? That’s purely speculation. Please don’t sue me, Mr. Stephenson. So far, he’s only brought this to the WGA, the Writers Guild of America. But according to the Variety article, he hasn’t been able to make much progress with the guild. The article phrases this kind of snarkily– “Azari appeared sympathetic, but still made clear that this was not a guild issue, even though Stephenson, Hemingson and Payne are all members, and “The Holdovers” is also nominated for a WGA Award” Like, Tatiana, just because the movie was nominated for a WGA Award doesn’t necessarily mean the guild is equipped to take on a case like this. Those two things aren’t really related. She goes on to frame it like the guild was being shadowy and unfair, but it honestly sounds pretty reasonable to me. The crux of the WGA’s response is that this situation simply isn’t a guild issue. The WGA can and does help members who have not been credited properly for their contributions to a film’s script, but from what I can tell, the main issue here is that Frisco was not a produced script. The WGA provisions on creative rights mostly apply to a writer’s rights during development and production, both stages that Frisco never reached. Frisco was an unproduced spec script that appeared on the Black List in 2013– if you don’t know, the Black List is an annual compilation of the most popular unproduced screenplays in Hollywood. Given that Frisco was a spec script that had not been picked up by a studio or entered production when The Holdovers was made, it would seem that the WGA doesn’t really have a way to take action here. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, it’s just not what they do, from what I understand. So the counsel from the WGA basically told Stephenson that his best option if he wanted to proceed would be to take legal action, and again, I think that’s fairly reasonable. The WGA is a labor union, they exist mostly to keep you from being exploited by an employer, they only have so much recourse in place to keep you from being exploited by other guild members. At that point, you might just have to take them to court. So that’s the situation currently. As far as Stephenson’s claims, he is alleging that quote, “The meaningful entirety of the screenplay for The Holdovers has been copied from the Frisco screenplay by transposition” unquote. Notice his wording there. “Transposition.” You’re going to be seeing that word a lot. He uses it constantly throughout his document. I’m used to hearing the word “transpose” or “transposition” in a musical context, but in general, it means to change something from one position or context to another. The way Stephenson keeps referring to “plagiarism by transposition” specifically, I kind of thought maybe that was an established concept, but no, when you look it up, the only thing that comes up is this story. So he invented that, to be clear. I think this language is really telling. It’s interesting that he couldn’t just say “plagiarism,” he had to say “plagiarism by transposition.” He had to clarify that, according to him, the “plagiarism” here was done by copying him, and then changing the position and context of what was “copied.” It’s almost like that isn’t plagiarism. But of course, supporting the allegation that Payne and/or Hemingson plagiarized Stephenson’s Frisco is evidence that Frisco had been sent to Alexander Payne. Stephenson has emails from 2013 confirming that the script was in the hands of Payne’s producing partner, and that Payne had read the script but wasn’t interested in making it. Then there are emails from 2019 again seeming to confirm that Payne had read the script but passed on it. Though, remember, according to Hemingson, he and Payne were already working on The Holdovers in 2018, so this 2019 email isn’t that relevant in my opinion. The knowledge that Payne likely read Frisco before conceiving The Holdovers would be rather incriminating if the two scripts resembled each other in any way, but they don’t. More on that in a moment. One more contextual detail I want to bring up here, and one thing that immediately gave me pause upon reading Stephenson’s accusations, is that Alexander Payne has already, repeatedly admitted that The Holdovers was largely inspired by another film. But it wasn’t Stephenson’s unproduced screenplay Frisco. It was a French film from 1935 called Merlusse. So, to be completely thorough, I watched Merlusse. And honestly, even if you don’t read Frisco or read through Stephenson’s nonsensical document, just watching Merlusse already debunks a lot of his claims. Stephenson seems to believe that the concept of a curmudgeonly, unpopular authority figure watching over a rebellious teen is something that The Holdovers couldn’t possibly have gotten from anywhere other than HIS script, but all of that is present in Merlusse. In fact, there are several far more specific details in The Holdovers that are, dare I say, “transposed” directly over from Merlusse. Notably, the teacher in this film has a glass eye and smells like fish, hence his nickname Merlusse, meaning ‘cod’. [Angus:] You smell. Like fish. Unlike Frisco, Merlusse has the specific premise of a curmudgeonly teacher stuck watching over the boys who aren’t going home for the holidays at a boys boarding school. Like in The Holdovers, all of these students hate the teacher and gossip about him behind his back. [Kountze:] He’s probably jerkin’ off into the cobb salad. [Crocker:] Why would he do that? [Kountze:] ‘Cause he’s Walleye! Who knows what that foul-smelling freak does? There’s even the shared detail of the teacher getting stuck with this job because the intended supervisor has to go home to care for his sick mother. [Rosenswieg:] I thought this was your year. [Endicott:] It was. I told Woodrup my mother has lupus. [Jane:] One of the boys the teacher is supervising in Merlusse has a similar relationship with his mother and new stepfather as Angus does in The Holdovers. [Angus’s mother, on phone:] Stanley has been working so hard, and we’ve had no time for a honeymoon. [Angus:] You guys have been married since July. You’ve had all these months. And finally, the film ends with the teacher getting in trouble with his superiors for doing a kind thing for the kids– in Merlusse, he gives Christmas presents to each boy, while in The Holdovers, he allows the boy he’s supervising to visit his father, who’s in a psychiatric hospital. There are plenty of differences in the story too, and they’re also just very different overall in tone, execution, etcetera. Merlusse, like many films from this period, is a little more like a stage play. A lot of the character stuff is established through dialogue, whereas The Holdovers establishes its characters more through action. It’s just more of a modern, conventional, Hollywood-type movie. I want to emphasize here that although The Holdovers is clearly very influenced by Merlusse, this is ALSO not plagiarism. Every film has influences, some of them are very reliant on influences. But that’s allowed. That’s kind of how art works. And even if it weren’t for Merlusse, Payne and Hemingson cite several other sources of inspiration for The Holdovers. Hemingson had written a semi-autobiographical TV pilot set in a New England boarding school, and Payne saw this and asked Hemingson if he could ‘transpose’ the world of this pilot onto his reworking of Merlusse. Many details in the Holdovers are supposedly based on Hemingson’s real life. He says that much of Paul’s character is based on his uncle, Mary was based in part on his own mother, Angus dislocating his shoulder was based on a real incident he witnessed. I just think there’s something really presumptuous about assuming that the only way another screenwriter could’ve possibly had plot elements similar to yours is by reading and copying your script. It makes me wonder if Stephenson was aware of these influences on The Holdovers. If he wasn’t, then it seems a little irresponsible to start throwing around these accusations without having done any research on what the screenwriter says informed the script, and if he was aware, then that makes the accusations seem all the more misleading and poorly thought-out. Like if you truly believe you have a case, why wouldn’t you acknowledge or attempt to debunk Payne’s claims that the script is based on Merlusse? But I think the best way I can illustrate the weakness of Stephenson’s accusations is just to unpack his supporting document with you. Because that is really where it all falls apart. The worst supporting document of all time. It really is crazy how flatteringly this Variety article frames Stephenson’s allegations. Because you read it and think ‘Wow, it sounds like he has a pretty strong case.’ But then you read the supporting document and realize that you are not dealing with a serious person. He says he actually sent 3 documents to the WGA, but only one has been made public, so that’s the one we’ll be looking at. I’m going to go through some of the introductory claims, then one of the side-by-side scene comparisons, and then go through the lengthy list of specific “transpositions” Stephenson has provided. So buckle up, we’re doing this. The document begins with an introduction of sorts. First, Stephenson gives synopses of both scripts. Already, I think this is rather misleading. These synopses are both written by him. He didn’t use the official synopsis for The Holdovers, he wrote both himself. So he’s already kind of picking and choosing his representations of both of these films, specifically emphasizing their similarities without acknowledging their differences. Also, throughout the entire document, Stephenson consistently refers to Angus Tully, the teenage character in The Holdovers, as a “fifteen year-old.” But in the film, Angus isn’t 15, he’s 17. He’s a junior. To be absolutely fair, the only copy of The Holdovers screenplay I was able to find online is clearly a later draft than the one Stephenson references in this document. It’s mostly the same, but there are a couple of scenes here and there that are ever so slightly different in the page samples Stephenson provides, so I assume he has access to a different draft. Maybe in that earlier version of the script, Angus was originally 15. But it’s weird to me that Stephenson never acknowledges that Angus is in fact 17 in the finished film. Like in this synopsis he says it applies to “The screenplay and the film” which is not correct. Stephenson goes on to describe the timelines of the two scripts’ writing, and the fact that Alexander Payne was sent and read Frisco in 2013 and 2019. He then claims that the “meaningful entirety of the screenplay for The Holdovers has been copied from the Frisco screenplay by transposition.” He says that this includes Frisco’s “entire story, structure, sequencing, scenes, sequential sub-beats within scenes, line-by-line substance of action and dialogue, characters, arcs, relationships, theme and tone. A majority of this has been done line-for-line, and a large number of unique and highly specific elements created in Frisco are readily and unequivocally identifiable in The Holdovers.” …No? No, that’s not true. It’s hard to definitively disprove some of these things without just reading you the entirety of both screenplays, but as someone who has read them… No. The ‘meaningful entirety’ of The Holdovers is not copied from Frisco. All of the scenes are different. The story is different. The pacing and structure is in fact different. The relationships, theme, and tone are different. There are a couple of characters and scenes that are superficially similar in a generic, conventional sense, but there are far more characters and scenes in both scripts that have no analog in the other script. Also, I don’t know everything about copyright law, but one thing that’s important to note as we go over all of this is that there’s this thing called scènes à faire.’ That’s French for “You don’t own the idea of a grumpy old guy bonding with a precocious teen, Simon.” This principle basically acknowledges that there are some scenes and story elements that are considered necessary or typical of certain genres and scenarios. Some things are just storytelling conventions and tropes, and you cannot copyright conventions or tropes. The writers of the movie Teen Wolf can’t sue the writer of the movie Cursed just because Cursed also contains a teenage boy werewolf whose werewolfism makes him more popular and better at sports. That’s just a basic convention of the teenage boy werewolf genre. Most of the actual similarities between Frisco and The Holdovers come down to scènes à faire. A guy gets in trouble with his boss for his unorthodox methods. A teenager is rebellious. The characters eat a meal together. The protagonist decides to leave his unfulfilling job to go follow his dreams. These concepts were not invented by Simon Stephenson. Stephenson then writes, “The copying is so comprehensive that it seems likely The Holdovers was created by importing Frisco into screenwriting software and directly overtyping the transposition on a line-by-line basis. Indeed, there are even places in which versions of a transposed Frisco sequence can be identified twice in The Holdovers: once in the sequence’s original Frisco location and a second time in the place in The Holdovers’ narrative where it has been resequenced to. This implies that after being imported into the screenwriting software, the resequenced Frisco sequences were moved by use of ‘COPY AND PASTE’.” Okay. No. I don’t know how or why someone would be this confident about making such easily disprovable claims and sending them to the WGA and the press, but no, The Holdovers is demonstrably not just Frisco imported or copy-pasted into screenwriting software. Like… Just put them next to each other. They’re not. To make perfectly clear how wrong he is, let’s look at one of the examples Stephenson gives of The Holdovers ‘line-for-line transposing’ Frisco. His first comparison is between the opening scenes of both scripts. Stephenson’s argument here is that The Holdovers copied Frisco because both scripts open with four scenes depicting life in the setting without visually showing any of the main characters, and then follow that with a fifth scene where there are two action lines – laid out with a space between them – and in this second action line there’s a description of the character’s age and disheveled appearance. This is the kind of minutiae we’re dealing with here and will continue to deal with throughout this entire 33-page document. Stephenson is unable to point to any actual instances of his words being copied or his characters being reproduced or his specific ideas or scenarios being ripped off, so instead he has crafted this conspiracy-theory-level method of cherry-picking where he attempts to convince the reader that things like the same amount of scene headers or paragraph breaks on the page constitute plagiarism. I feel like I shouldn’t even have to say this, but 1. Two scripts having the same amount of scenes on one page isn’t really at all relevant to whether one copied the other. What matters is the content of the words and the story being told, which in this case are totally different. In the opening scene of The Holdovers, we see several establishing shots of Barton Academy before cutting to Paul’s room, where he’s grading papers and insulting the students that wrote them. [Paul:] Philistines. Lazy, vulgar, rancid little philistines. [Jane:] In the opening scene of Frisco, we see several establishing shots of the children’s hospital– no, it is not plagiarism for two films to both open with establishing shots of the central location– before we cut to Willis in the hospital describing how disillusioned he’s become with life. Different scenes. And 2. You don’t own the concept of a man in his 50s with a disheveled appearance, Simon. I’m sorry, but you just don’t. Furthermore, there’s something a little misleading going on here. Can you see what it is? Stephenson has made a little note here where he says “A voiceover Willis speaks over these first four scenes has been removed from the scenes below." What?! Yeah, in the actual script, there’s a voice over playing over these four establishing shots. Why would Stephenson remove that? He doesn’t provide any explanation. It seems like the only reason he would have for doing this is to make the page of the script appear more similar to the first page of The Holdovers. Because the voiceover makes this scene even more obviously different from the scene in The Holdovers. I feel like I’m going crazy. You can’t just do that. You’re not representing your script honestly. I’m not going to go through the rest of the side-by-side scene and dialogue comparisons. I’m going to link all the related documents in the description, so by all means check it out yourself if you’re curious, but believe me when I tell you that they’re all like this. I thought it would be kind of redundant and needlessly long winded to break down every single one. I can only do so many feature-length videos, it’s bad for my health. Instead, let’s rewind a little bit. One extremely funny part of the document’s introduction is this moment where Stephenson lists all the parts of The Holdovers that don’t have a corresponding scene in Frisco, and of course he frames this like it’s all just minor fluff the screenwriter has added to cover his plagiarizing tracks, when in reality, these are substantial parts of the movie. “The handful of scenes that do not feature the primary protagonist, Paul/Willis.” Yeah, there are actually quite a few of those scenes. Some important parts of the story take place without Paul. “The unspeaking sister and unseen dead son added to the Mary/Valerie character” Mary’s sister does have scenes. I guess she doesn’t speak, but the sister and especially the dead son are huge parts of Mary’s story. Her son is the defining thing about her character. It’s her arc in the story. Stephenson makes it sound like these are frivolous off-screen details. “The three brief scenes where Angus meets his father” Yeah, I guess they’re brief, but Angus meeting his father is a very important moment. It’s like the turning point that leads into act 3. And even if the actual meeting itself is brief, what Stephenson doesn’t acknowledge here is that that action affects other parts of the story. There are scenes where Angus and Paul discuss this. It’s what creates the conflict with Angus’s parents that leads to Paul getting fired. “The Holdovers has added a scene where the protagonist describes somebody powerful and well-connected getting away with plagiarizing a less well-connected person’s work, then ensuring the victim came to serious harm.” He seems to have included this part in such detail as like a gotcha? To point out the irony? I don’t even really know what he’s trying to imply. That Hemingson would add a little wink to the camera acknowledging his supposed plagiarism? Why would he write this scene if the script were plagiarized? “The only other non-transposition difference between the two screenplays is that The Holdovers has cut the strand from Frisco that features the Willis character’s family. This would have been necessary for the teacher in The Holdovers to be selected to stay at school over the holidays. The three scenes with Willis’ doctor friend have also been removed, presumably for the same reason.” Um, dishonesty alert! Misleading framing alert! Throughout this document, Stephenson strategically minimizes the fact that in Frisco, a defining element of his protagonist Jeff Willis is that he is recently separated from his wife and estranged from his daughters. It’s not some insignificant detail. That’s a huge part of his arc. His primary motivation for most of the script is to win back his wife. So we have the characters of Willis’s wife and daughters who have no corresponding characters in The Holdovers, not that Simon would tell you that. And as he references here, Willis also has a friend, Melcher, who he hangs out with and drinks beer with sometimes, whereas in the Holdovers, Paul is distinctly friendless. This would be very out of character for Paul. In general, these protagonists are not nearly as analogous as Stephenson would have you believe. Where Paul is an old soul, intellectual, lonely weirdo loser who’s never really had the guts to try to do something more with his life, Willis is a more typical Hollywood movie deadbeat divorced manchild character with an ex-wife and kids who hate him. A more modern and conventional anti-hero, I would say. They have very different behavior and styles of speaking, and they make a thoroughly different impression on the reader. While we’re at it, let’s go over Stephenson’s list of corresponding characters. Keep in mind, he calls the following characters “interchangeable,” and says that they quote “appear in effectively all the same scenes where they invariably perform identical functions.” unquote. I just described the differences between Paul and Willis, next up is Angus and Amy. For one, again, Stephenson describes both of these characters as being 15 years old, which is not true of Angus, but whatever. I mean, yeah, Amy and Angus are both smart-ass teens who are wise beyond their years and have a fraught relationship with a parent and/or step-parent, but like… What else is new? Have you ever seen a movie before? This isn’t exactly an invention on Stephenson’s part. It’s also important to note that in The Holdovers, Angus strongly dislikes Paul and is extremely disappointed to be stuck with him over the holidays, while in Frisco, Amy takes a liking to Willis early on and intentionally stows away on his trip to San Francisco. Those are pretty different motivations. Then you have "Mary/Valerie." This is one of the more ridiculous comparisons on this list. In The Holdovers, Mary is the school cook and a mother grieving the recent loss of her son. She’s sensible and kind but can be tough when she needs to be. Her main arc in the film is dealing with her grief and coming out a little stronger for having let some of it out and gotten some support from her sister. In Frisco, Valerie is a pharma rep that Willis and Amy encounter at the medical conference in San Francisco. Note that Mary is present in The Holdovers from beginning to end whereas Valerie is only present in Frisco’s second act. She’s a nice lady who likes to have a good time and doesn’t really believe in the job she’s doing. Her main arc in the film, what Stephenson neglects to mention here, is that she is a LOVE INTEREST for Willis. That is her main function in the story. See how easy it is to mislead people? Hearing that Mary and Valerie are both “kind with a cynical side, works job professionally adjacent to Paul/Willis but less prestigious, encourages Paul/Willis to go easy on Angus/Amy,” you’d think that the characters and their roles in the story are pretty similar. But the second you hear that Valerie is a love interest for the protagonist, that entire illusion crumbles. That is the bread and butter of this document. Lying by omission. "Elise/Danny." These are the respective love interests for Angus and Amy, which Stephenson seems to think is a smoking gun, despite ‘teen love interest’ being another very standard trope. Also, notably, Elise is only in The Holdovers during the Christmas party sequence, and then we don’t see her again. Danny joins the main group of characters in Frisco while they’re on their trip, and he stays with them the whole time until they leave San Francisco. "Hardy Woodruff/Margaret Brown." These are Paul and Willis’s respective bosses, they have very small parts in both stories. Again, I shouldn’t have to say this, but no one owns the idea of a boss. And again, even something more specific like a character getting in trouble with their boss for their cynical approach to their job is still a broad, common enough convention that this doesn’t constitute plagiarism. "Anne/Judy. Angus/Amy’s neglectful mother/stepmother. Appears in two main scenes in the first act that each cause an identical plot progression.” Okay. Again, a teen character having an absent parent is not unique to either of these stories. But also, no. These characters do not cause “an identical plot progression", nor are any of their scenes identical. In The Holdovers, Angus’s mother calls him in the first act to let him know that she won’t be taking him home for Christmas, meaning that he’s become a holdover. In Frisco, Amy has multiple in-person interactions with her stepmother Anne, then has a phone conversation with her after she has already joined Willis on his trip. And of course, Paul gets in trouble with Angus’s parents in the climax of The Holdovers, which does not happen between Willis and Anne in Frisco. "Hugh Cavanaugh/Handsome Billboard Man." We’re really grasping at straws now. Stephenson is saying that the former classmate Paul encounters in Boston in the Holdovers is “interchangeable” with a model that Willis sees on a billboard and later meets in Frisco. I don’t even know what to say. They are obviously different characters who perform different functions in the story. In Holdovers, Paul runs into this classmate, he’s only in this one scene, and Paul lies to him about his job and where he’s at in life because he doesn’t want the guy to judge him for never leaving Barton. In Frisco, Willis sees this billboard on his commute every morning, it’s an ad for the children’s hospital that features Willis’s wife and daughters plus this male model. Like, they didn’t think Willis was attractive enough to put in the ad. So Willis resents this model, but then he happens to run into him in San Francisco and the model tells him that his life actually sucks too and he also feels like he’s in a rut. So Willis learns an important lesson. I told myself I wasn’t gonna include my personal opinions about the quality of these two scripts in this video, but let me just say, Frisco is not a particularly subtle piece of writing. Now for the crazy kicker. “Miss Crane – is a composite created from several minor characters in Frisco.” No no no. Once again, you can’t just do that. What do you mean?! Once you’re saying that there are characters in The Holdovers that are composites of several characters in your script, it’s over. That is not provable as plagiarism. Next, this is the last part of the document I’m going to go through in detail because it’s a lengthy one, and I think it pretty thoroughly sums up the problems with Stephenson’s claims. He’s included this list of “transpositions.” Things that he believes were taken from Frisco and disguised as something else in The Holdovers. And this list is pretty funny. “Barton school vs. Portland Children’s Hospital” I mean, by this logic you could argue that any movie is ‘transposed’ from any other movie, right? What is his reasoning for these locations having any relationship to each other? ‘Star Wars would actually be just like Lord of the Rings if you changed the location from a galaxy far far away to Middle-earth.’ Yeah, because changing the location and subject matter would make it an entirely different story. “Busy canteen and empty chair in dining hall” vs. “Busy dining hall and sitting alone in lunch hall” Okay one, you can’t copyright the concept of a cafeteria. Two, let’s consider the purposes of these two scenes. Stephenson is asserting that Paul’s chair being empty in the Holdovers scene is meant to communicate the same thing as Willis sitting alone in the Frisco scene. But in The Holdovers, Paul’s chair is empty because he’s currently meeting with the headmaster, not because he’s eating by himself. In Frisco, Willis is eating by himself to communicate that he has no friends. This second comparison is meaningless. These two things do not serve the same purpose in their respective stories. “Angus calls adult ‘absurd’” vs. “Amy calls adult ‘asinine’” Early on in The Holdovers, Angus says to Paul, “Honestly, it’s a little absurd. Sir.” Early on in Frisco, Amy says to her stepmother, “I hate you! You’re an asinine bitch and I wish that you were dead!” Note how the two characters say these lines to different corresponding characters– If Stephenson’s claim that all the characters are 1:1 were consistent, Amy would say her line not to Anne, but to Willis, the supposed analog of Paul. Also, note the difference in tone between the two lines. One is attempting to be polite, one is very much not. “Insulted senator parent” vs. “Insulted congresswoman parent” In The Holdovers, there’s a line where Paul’s boss is mad at him for giving a bad grade to a student whose parent is a senator. In Frisco, there’s a line where Willis’s boss is mad at him for insulting a patient’s parent who is a congresswoman. So yes, these are superficially similar, but the main thing to remember is that again, this whole ‘guy is a smartass who’s disrespectful to powerful parents/donors/whatever’ is a pretty common trope in movies and TV. Think House MD or whatever. Which honestly, has more in common with Frisco than The Holdovers does. Plus, despite the politician parent thing and the broad strokes of the scene being similar, the crux of the scene in Frisco is that the hospital manager is threatening to fire Willis, while in the Holdovers the headmaster is just begging Paul to behave better, not really putting anything on the line. The scene in Holdovers exists more to establish Paul’s character and motivations than to set up the stakes of the story. “Paul’s holdovers vs. Willis’s inpatients” The kids holding over with Paul are the entire set-up and premise of the movie. ‘Holding over’ is central to the story. That’s the premise. It’s the title. Willis’s inpatients are just a minor part of the set up of his job. It’s not like the premise is him getting stuck with the inpatients who can’t go home for Christmas, no, the premise is that one patient, Amy, who wasn’t even his patient to begin with, intentionally tags along on his trip to a medical conference in San Francisco. These other patients are barely in the story. There are maybe two of them, and one of them doesn’t even have any lines, whereas in The Holdovers, we get acquainted with each holdover in detail. “Symbolic billboard” vs. “Symbolic cognac bottle” I mean I guess in both scripts these symbols do at first represent the protagonists’ perceived failures or dissatisfaction with life, only to later represent the protagonists taking control of their lives, but I think the actual objects of billboard and cognac bottle are different enough for this not to be very convincing. And once you take away the objects themselves, having an arc where a character is dissatisfied with life and later decides to take control of their life is obviously not unique to either of these films. “Shared interest in Ancient Civilization” vs. “Shared interest in Beat generation” This is one of the more delusional comparisons on this list, because it essentially fabricates a detail about the Holdovers that doesn’t actually exist. Show me where in The Holdovers Paul and Angus are supposed to have a “shared interest in Ancient Civilization.” Actually, Stephenson does show us where he thinks the script demonstrates this, and it’s uh… It’s Angus getting a B- on his Ancient Civ exam. I shouldn’t have to break down why this doesn’t make any sense, but I’ll do it for Simon’s sake. Angus getting a better grade than the rest of the class in this scene in The Holdovers is not supposed to convey that he has a particular interest in Ancient Civilization. It’s simply meant to convey that he’s smarter than he lets on, smarter than his peers. In fact, later in the script, when Angus and Paul go to a museum together, Paul says “What’s your hurry? I thought you liked Antiquity.” Angus says, “In class, maybe. But I never think about it unless I need to.” Paul then helps him see the appeal of Antiquity, and they bond over the new, shared understanding. It’s not that they started out with a shared interest in Ancient Civilization. This is, of course, completely different from the “corresponding” detail in Frisco, where Amy is actually explicitly into the Beat generation. It’s kind of her whole thing, while Willis seems only superficially knowledgeable about it. Early on, he actually misattributes a Ginsberg quote to Kerouac and Amy corrects him. Totally different dynamic from the one in The Holdovers. “Library and administrative hallway vs. Quiet carriage and train vestibule” Oh my god, these next two are crazy. Stephenson claims that the scenes in The Holdovers that take place in the school library and hallway are copied from the scenes in Frisco that take place in the quiet carriage and vestibule OF A TRAIN, because get this: A library is quiet just like a quiet carriage. And a vestibule is a type of hallway. I’m serious, he goes into more detail with these ones later in the document, and this is his argument. It gets even worse than that, he breaks down these sequences line by line and he’s like ‘look, in my scene, Willis is in a quiet location doing something relaxing when he’s startled by something and exclaims in a religious-based curse.’ That’s how he justifies his assertion that Willis sitting on a train and then being surprised by Amy is plagiarism-levels of similar to Paul and the holdovers sitting in a library and then being surprised by a helicopter landing. Of course, don’t forget that Paul says “What the hell is that?” And Willis says “Jesus!” Which are both religious-based curses. Check mate, Hemingson. Then he does the same thing with the scenes where Paul and Willis are trying to get a hold of Angus and Amy’s respective parents. I guess they’re slightly similar ideas for scenes, if you ignore literally all the context, but Stephenson’s main argument is that these scenes are comparable because a ‘vestibule’ is a type of hall. It doesn’t actually matter that much, Simon, because one is in a school and one is in a train. “Mug of whiskey” vs. “Insulated coffee cup” Both characters do drink whiskey and coffee respectively throughout both scripts. It’s worth noting that though Paul drinks Jim Beam consistently throughout The Holdovers, he doesn’t always drink it from a mug. That just happens to be the case in a couple of scenes, whereas Willis exclusively drinks coffee from his insulated cup. But more importantly, one is whiskey and one is coffee. They’re different. And more importantly than that, these two things are not particularly important or unique to either story. I’m not sure what else to say. Fellas, is it plagiarism for two scripts to have characters who DRINK THINGS?? “Gift of Christmas cookies vs. Twenty dollars to put in sock” Okay, this one asserts that Paul re-gifting some Christmas cookies to Mary and Angus in a laughable attempt to cheer them up is interchangeable with Willis giving Amy 20 dollars to hide in her sock when she’s exploring San Francisco by herself. Again, I don’t know what else to say, they’re just different things. They serve a different purpose. So I think that defeats the claim of ‘transposition.’ “Sharing a bottle of whisky vs. sharing a taxi” Here, Stephenson is claiming that Paul and Mary sharing whiskey while they watch over the kids is the same as Willis, Valerie, and Amy sharing a taxi, which is how Willis and Amy first meet Valerie. I feel like this one is already mostly disproven because we’ve established that Mary and Valerie are not interchangeable characters in any way, which is what this claim relies on. But these scenes also take place in totally different places in the scripts. Most of the other comparisons on his list are just so minute and nonsensical that I don’t even think they’re worth breaking down one by one– like, comparing individual lines of dialogue that Stephenson has decided correspond to each other somehow. Just to give you one example, he claims that the Newlywed Game and Weber barbecue tools in The Holdovers are ‘transposed’ from Ventran and laser branded pens in Frisco. In The Holdovers, Mary and Paul watch The Newlywed Game together on the first night of winter break and the prize of the game show is Weber barbecue tools. [Mary:] This is a re-run from July, which is why they’re playing for Weber barbecues and picnic utensils. [Jane:] In Frisco, Valerie, as a pharma rep, is trying to sell a drug called Ventran at the medical conference, and she’s giving out Laser branded pens at her booth. I have no explanation for why he would compare these things. I don’t really have a rebuttal to this point, because it’s not really a point. Like, to me, these elements in both scripts are complete non-sequiturs to each other. They’re unrelated. You can’t just take any random detail from one script and pretend it corresponds to another random detail in the other script. That’s like if I said Frisco is ripping off House MD, not because of any of their actual similarities, but because someone ate a sandwich on House once, and that’s just like how someone rides a skateboard in Frisco. You see what I mean? Non-sequitur. This ‘plagiarism by transposition’ stuff is the root of most of the evil, in my opinion. Stephenson has invented a framework that allows you to call anything plagiarism. Yes, if you changed everything about it, I guess The Holdovers could be pretty similar to Frisco. But, you know… [Gino D’Acampo:] If my grandmother had wheels, she would’ve been a bike! You know– what– you know… [Others laughing] Finally, Stephenson ends the document with this: “The evidence in this document represents only a small fraction of the overwhelming evidence that demonstrates The Holdovers has been plagiarized from Frisco on an industrial scale. Please see other documents for further and more detailed evidence.” I really do believe in hearing people out, I believe in getting both sides of a story, but I have to say, I feel like I’ve seen enough. What is to become of Simon Stephenson? It’s easy to get worked up about accusations like these. It seems like plagiarism specifically evokes a really strong emotional response in people. I think the main thing that makes plagiarism such a sensitive topic is that it plays on our egos. If we create something, especially something that becomes very popular and attracts a lot of praise from our peers– or even better, respected cultural institutions– we want the credit, right? The idea of someone else reaping the rewards we feel we’re entitled to is deeply frustrating and carries a sense of personal injustice that other crimes on a similar level of severity might not. I’m not dismissing being upset about plagiarism as an ego trip or something, I think these reactions are often justified. And obviously, in some cases, plagiarism causes more material harm, like if someone profits financially off of someone else’s work. But I am saying that maybe the uniquely emotional, personally offensive nature of plagiarism can cause people to jump the gun sometimes. Both accusers and the people interpreting and reacting to these accusations. The Claudine Gay situation is a good example of the latter. And the Simon Stephenson situation is a good example of the former. When I first started going through Stephenson’s accusations, and especially once I read the two screenplays in their entirety, there was a brief period where I became convinced that he was a grifter. I thought there was no way that someone could say these things, type these things out, without realizing how ridiculous they sounded. But the more I sit with it, I actually don’t doubt that Stephenson believes what he’s saying. I would guess that the main thing fueling his fire is the knowledge that Alexander Payne likely read his script. Without that knowledge, he might never have thought to make this case. Anyone who is not Simon Stephenson can see that these scripts share only the most superficial, generic similarities. But imagine if you had written Frisco, and you went into The Holdovers knowing that the man who conceived its premise had read your script. If you had that in your head and all of your judgment was filtered through that knowledge, I feel like that could be enough to completely warp your view of the situation. That’s one of the things that really gets me, the tone of his document and all of the emails he shared with Variety is so forceful and confident. He does not allow any room for ambiguity or benefit of the doubt. He treats his allegations as indisputable, concrete fact. Which leads me to my next point. I’m worried this scandal is going to end Simon Stephenson’s career. He really damages his credibility in this document. The way his claims are so tenuous and he makes them with such assertive conviction… makes him seem crazy. There’s not really any other way to put it. Maybe if he had approached it in a more curious or non-combative way, maybe if he had just called attention to some of the broader similarities in the stories and his evidence that Payne read Frisco, maybe if he had tried to contact Payne and Hemingson directly in private before taking it to the WGA and then the press, he probably could have preserved some good will. But as it stands right now, I worry that he might face some professional consequences over this. And that sucks! I went into this wanting to believe Stephenson. He’s not a nobody, but he’s definitely a less powerful figure in the industry than Alexander Payne. I’m not some Alexander Payne superfan. I honestly haven’t seen most of his movies, and he has some other, more troubling allegations against him right now, so believe me, I’m really not his biggest defender. And people DO get exploited in Hollywood all the time. I want to side with the little guy. But in this case, the little guy is extremely, demonstrably wrong. I also think I’d be more sympathetic toward Stephenson if he was struggling to find jobs or the work had dried up since writing Frisco, but no, in fact, a novel that he wrote is apparently getting a film adaptation soon, with Edgar Wright directing?? So it doesn’t really sound like he was in a bad place career-wise prior to this. And again, I worry that something like this Edgar Wright project might be negatively impacted by these disingenuous accusations. People talk. I wouldn’t be surprised if this gets postponed or canceled. By the way, in case this video ends up reaching a lot of people, do not use all this as an excuse to bully Simon Stephenson or seek him out or whatever. Like I said, I do think it’s probable that he thinks he’s acting in good faith, and I do wish him the best. If I were able to speak directly to Stephenson, I would say that I feel for him. It probably does feel awful to work hard on a script that’s been knocking around Hollywood for years, only for a movie with some superficial similarities to get made and do really well. Maybe he feels like the existence of The Holdovers means that he can no longer get Frisco produced. And if that turned out to be true, that would really suck. But he is not doing himself any favors by accusing Payne and Hemingson of plagiarism. I am a neutral third party, I’ve read both screenplays and his arguments in depth, and I really don’t think he has a case here. Not legally, and certainly not in the court of public opinion. As painful as it might be to accept, I think the smartest thing he can do right now, for his career and his wellbeing, is to let this go and move on. If you liked this video, you should transpose your finger onto the like button and then transpose your money into my Patreon. I’m gonna go transpose a beer into my hand.