Lucas Screenwriter Simon Stephenson has sued Alexander Payne for copyright infringement, accusing the director of ripping off his script while he was en route to writing the Oscar-winning film. The leftovers.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in California, Stephenson accuses Payne of transposing major elements of his screenplay, “Frisco,” into the film while adding surface-level cosmetic changes to avoid the appearance of a copy. He claims the director read his script in 2013 and again in 2019 before Payne contacted screenwriter David Hemingson to collaborate on the project.
Stephenson is seeking unspecified damages and a court order that, if granted, would prevent any further exploitation of the film. The lawsuit names Payne, Hemingson, producer Mark Johnson, production companies Gran Via, Honest Scholar and Mirax as well as distributors Focus Features and Universal Home Entertainment.
“Screenplays are often considered the blueprint for a film,” the complaint states. “The defendants constructed their film using Frisco as a model.”
Both dramas feature brooding main characters tasked with caring for teenagers, with The leftovers following a boarding school teacher and “Frisco” following a pediatrician. The latter landed in 2013 on the Black List, which rewards the best unproduced screenplays of the year.
The leftovers as of 2024, it has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including one for Best Screenplay. On the eve of the show, it was reported that Stephenson had taken the dispute to the WGA with documents that he claimed proved Payne had plagiarized his script (an interesting issue: Payne and Stephenson had both been replaced by CAA at the time, with Hemingson at WME). The guild ultimately determined that this was not the proper forum for the dispute since copyright infringement claims are not arbitrable by the WGA, although the resolution of the case remains unclear.
In recent years, legal battles over copyright infringement have become increasingly common, although it remains rare for established talents to take their complaints to court.
At the heart of the trial: allegations that Payne read “Frisco” in 2013 before developing The leftovers. Stephenson had sought Payne for the film, with the writer’s representatives passing the script to the director’s producing partner, Jim Burke, who said Payne “liked it but was not interested in producing or directing it,” according to the complaint. Years later, in 2019, according to the lawsuit, Payne received a copy of “Frisco” a second time when the project was submitted to him on behalf of Netflix.
Stephenson, whose writing credits include Paddington 2 And The electric life of Louis Wain, alleges that “stylistic traces” of “Frisco” can be seen in The leftovers. Exhibit A: The leftovers is structured by story day cards (e.g. “Day 1 – December 18, 1970”), the script introducing them with the words “Under Black”, a misnomer for “Over Black”.
“A term used incorrectly and consistently is more telling than a preference: it is a habit particular to a writer, not a choice a writer might make,” writes Julia Cherlow, Stephenson’s lawyer.
Beyond the oddity of the writing, the lawsuit points out that a vestige of “Frisco” remained in Payne’s film. In the scenario of The leftoversa character looking for a hotel room says, “I understand it’s the holidays, but it’s kind of an emergency. I’m coming to town for a medical conference.” The reference to the “medical conference”, Stephenson claims, appears in the dialogue without explanation and is never mentioned elsewhere in the script. He does, however, play a central role in “Frisco,” whose central character travels to San Francisco to speak at a medical conference, according to the lawsuit.
Among other similarities, Stephenson points out: An opening moment in which the protagonist is summoned to his boss’s office and dressed for having wronged a politician. (In The leftoversGiamatti’s character failed the son of a US senator. In “Frisco”, the protagonist doctor calls a U.S. congresswoman, who was the mother of a patient, a moron.)
Copyright law does not protect general ideas – such as incidents, characters, and settings considered standard in the treatment of particular subjects (think of a priest in a film about possession) – but only the particular expression of those ideas. Stephenson points out, among other things, substantial similarities in the plot, sequence of events and characters.
In interviews, Payne has candidly stated that he was inspired by a 1935 French film. Hakewhich also explores a teacher who looks after students at a boarding school. He said he had long wanted to make a film set at a boarding school and asked Hemingson, who had written an unproduced television pilot set at a school.
The lawsuit argues that Payne, who twice won Academy Awards for best adapted screenplay, and Hemingson may have borrowed the premise from The leftovers Since Hake, but that they took the architecture of their scenario from “Frisco”.
In addition to several Oscar nominations, The leftovers earned around $46 million at the box office. Focus Features purchased it during the Toronto International Film Festival for an estimated $30 million. It is currently available on Netflix.
Stephenson is pursuing this lawsuit amid a shift in recent years in the review of copyright lawsuits, which increasingly encourages creators to sue. Federal appeals courts have warned judges against dismissing early and imposing their views on whether two works overlap enough to warrant allowing legal action. One of those rulings — at least the third since 2020 overturning a pro-defense ruling in a copyright case — overturned a federal judge’s decision to dismiss Francesca Gregorini’s lawsuit against M. Night Shyamalan and Apple. Servant on the basis that the dismissal was premature because “reasonable minds might differ” on whether his works and those of the famous horror director are substantially similar.
But the bar for convincing a jury of copyright infringement remains extremely high. Last year, cases involving the theft of ideas against Shyamalan Servant and Disney finished Moana ended with the defense verdicts.
The last case in which a plaintiff was able to prevail concerns the Water shape. A settlement was reached after a federal appeals court in 2020 revived the trial of the estate of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Zindel, which alleged that the makers of the Oscar-winning film ripped off Let me hear you whisper.
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