Friendo: “I think the alleged “line-by-line” Holdovers/Frisco plagiarism claim really needs to be seriously questioned.

“Is there a single line that has been cited?

“The Holdovers is a movie defined by its dialogue. The writing is fantastic. The voice of the Giamatti character. The words of…everybody.

“The accuser (i.e., Frisco author Simon Stephenson) said that The Holdovers ripped his script off ‘line-by-line.’ And Variety included this angle without questioning it.

“But is there even a whisper of truth to this charge? That, I think, is the point that needs to be made.

“Because if it’s just the plot, it came from that 1935 French movie, Marcel Pagnol‘s Merlusse. (It really did.) If it’s just other elements of the “concept”…well, Hollywood movies lift stuff like that from other movies every fucking day.”

Nothing to do with Barbie will ever be funny…ever. Certainly not in terms of Jimmy Kimmel‘s opening monologue this evening. What abotu this movie is the least bity amusing or laugh-worthy? Nothing. All I can think of is that famous shot of that reprehensible pink lampshade guy. Talk about depressing.

Barbie is not funny, and it never will be.

Problematic Bill McCuddy Barbie joke, written for Kimmel:

Kimmel: This year I’m on a first-name basis with every woman in the audience. I’ll prove it.
(CUT TO Margot Robbie) Hi Barbie.
(CUT TO Meryl Streep) Hi Barbie.
(CUT TO Octavia Spencer) Hi Barbie.
(CUT BACK TO KIMMEL, HE’S NOW JUST RANDOMLY POINTING AROUND THE ROOM)
Hi Barbie, Hi Barbie, Hi Barbie.
I also know some of the men. (sheepishly) Hi Ken. (CUT TO Ryan Gosling)
I also know Alan. Where’s he?
(CUT TO THIRD KODAK BALCONY)
(Michael Cera is waving his hands)
Cera: “I’m up here!!!! Jimmy! Jimmy?”
Kimmel: (IGNORING) I guess he couldn’t make it.

I fell hard for Cameron Crowe‘s Almost Famous nine or ten months before it opened in September 2000, or when I came across a 1998 draft of the script (called “Untitled”, 168 pages). I didn’t just like or admire it — I was blown away, head over heels.

I was generally delighted with the film but it didn’t get me off like the script did because it felt a little too compressed here and there. It ran 122 minutes, in part because Dreamworks producer Walter Parkes kept insisting on “shorter, shorter, shorter.” Plus the film didn’t include a “Russell Hammond confesses all to Rolling Stone editors” scene that I thought was perfect.

I’ve had Almost Famous on my best of the 21st Century list for two decades now as it’s 90% of a great film, but I didn’t completely tumble until the 162-minute “director’s cut” bootleg Bluray came out in 2011.

I attended a big Almost Famous press shebang during the 2000 Toronto Film Festival, and a moment from that event is burned into my memory. I was shuffling into the main restaurant where the party was taking place, and in a center booth I saw L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan chatting with Crowe and then-wife Nancy Wilson. And I was almost startled by a look in Turan’s eyes — a look of absolute rapture that reminded me of a ninth-grader swooning over his prom date and dreaming about some act of exquisite erotic kindness that might be in the offing later that evening.

Turan, in short, was making goo-goo eyes at Crowe…talking to the man of the moment was filling him with awe and joy and ecstasy, and his eyes…his eyes were doing ring-a-ding-ding backflips. Turan was in love…completely fluttering with feeling.

And at that very moment I made a mental note to myself, to wit: “Don’t ever give anyone slavish goo-goo eyes for any reason or under any circumstance…show respect and admiration but keep your cool…hold on to your dignity. Because if you don’t show a modicum of restraint the filmmaker will remember those goo-goo eyes, and if you don’t goo-goo him the next time he’ll know you don’t like the new film as much as the older one, or he’ll conclude that you were being a phony the first time.”

Let this be a lesson to us all. The next time you find yourself chatting with someone you genuinely admire, don’t flash the goo-goo eyes!

Remember that climactic boardroom scene in The Social Network when Mark Zuckerberg says to Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (aka “the Winkelvi”) — “If you could’ve invented Facebook, you would’ve invented Faceook“?

Yesterday Tatiana Siegel’s shocking 3.9.24 Variety story explored a claim by Frisco author Simon Stephenson that The Holdovers director Alexander Payne and/or the film’s screenwriter, David Hemingson, plagiarized portions of Frisco almost on a scene-by-scene, line-by-line basis.

Hollywood Elsewhere’s response to Stephenson: “If you could’ve written The Holdovers, you would’ve written The Holdovers.”

HE read a 2013 draft of Frisco this morning, and I’m not claiming that Stephenson is totally out to lunch on this matter. Yes, there’s a cetain thematic similarity and similar story strands shared by Frisco and The Holdovers.

Frisco is essentially a spiritual rebirth story in which Jeff Willis, a morose 50something Seattle pediatrician, is reawakened by Amy Morrison, a 15 year old terminal cancer sufferer, and how it all comes together during a brief shared trip to San Francisco.

In certain ways The Holdovers tells the same kind of story — Paul Giamatti‘s Paul Hunham, an ascerbic classics professor at a private Massachusetts boys school, experiences a spiritual reawakening while looking after a bright but contentious senior, Dominic Sessa‘s Angus Tully, and how it all comes together during a late-second-act trip to Boston over the Christmas holidays.

And yet Frisco and The Holdovers are also strikingly similar to (a) Johanna Spyri‘s Heidi (i.e., young girl reawakens the humanity of her grumpy grandfather), (b) Gus Van Sant and Mike Rich‘s Finding Forrester (’00 — a talented young writer of color reawakens a hermit-like, J.D. Salinger-like writer, and (c) Martin Brest and Bo Goldman‘s Scent of a Woman (’92 — private-school kid reawakens the heart and soul of a bitter retired military man).

Another similarity that hit me this morning was (d) Morton DaCosta, Betty Comden and Adolph Green‘s Auntie Mame (“Live a little!”) except this time the Rosalind Russell role is handled by Amy, the cancer kid. But the mission is basically the same.

Just as Mame eventually saves Patrick Dennis (author of the original 1955 book, and played by Roger Smith) from a life of conservative suffocation, Amy the cancer victim saves the morose and timid Willis from a life of terminal resignation and boredom.

For me, the key difference between Frisco and The Holdovers is that the latter is wise and well written and recognizably human and specific in dozens of different ways while Frisco is somewhat generic and plodding, not to mention awkwardly written here and there and occasionally speechy in a way that almost makes you groan.

I was a script reader in the mid to late ’80s, and I’ve read hundreds of interesting but not-quite there scripts in my time. Frisco is definitely one of these.

It’s not awful but it is, I feel, on the mediocre side. It needs a major rewrite or whatever. And it’s really whorish, I feel, to use a terminally ill teenager as the driving spiritual engine of the piece. And to throw in the lore of San Francisco beat generation mythology (City Lights bookstore, Jack Kerouac, Neal Casady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Howl”) as icing on the spiritual cake….well, okay, but it struck me as a bit precious.

Frisco is primarily composed of a series of vaguely awkward, on-the-nose, “this is who I am and what I want or need” scenes…essentially a lot of cliched material about a midlife crisis of the spirit (including an impending divorce) and how a 50ish guy is gradually rescued.

The on-the-nose theme of Frisco is “stop being morose, celebrate your time here on earth, we’ll all be dead soon enough.”

I’ve just finished reading a mind-blowing Variety article by Tatiana Siegel (posted on 3.9 at 10:13 am) that contains chapter-and-verse charges of plagiarism against either Holdovers director Alexander Payne or Holdovers screenwriter David Hemingson, or both.

The complaining, allegedly plagiarized screenwriter is Simon Stephenson, who has a “story by” credit on Pixar’s Luca (’21), an “additional material” credit on StudioCanal’s Paddington 2 (’17), and a “screenplay and story by” credit on an Amazon original feature titled The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (’21).

The particulars are too voluminous to be recounted or even compressed here, but the basic allegation is that Payne read a very similar 2013 script by Stephenson called Frisco, which was on the 2013 Black List roster, and that (this is directly from the Siegel article) “Payne had [read] the Frisco script in both 2013 and again in late 2019, right before Payne approached Hemingson about collaborating on [The Holdovers]. That contention seems to be backed up by emails involving several Hollywood agencies and producers.”

The Siegel article contains a 33-page “Introductory Document” titled “FRISCO and THE HOLDOVERS,” and it pains me to admit that it seems — emphasis on the “s” word — fairly damning in its particulars.

I can only urge HE readers to go over the Siegel article with a fine tooth comb and try to assess the evidence as best they can.

Speaking for myself I find the mere suspicion of the great Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska, Downsizing, The Holdovers) having deliberately engaged in out-and-out plagiarism just inconceivable. It can’t be what it seems. It just can’t be.

First-rate auteurs and their collaborators simply don’t behave this recklessly and foolishly, especially when there’s a paper trail and chapter-and-verse evidence this vivid and specific. Stealing from a 2013 Black List script is just insanity…self-destructive insanity.

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Showbiz 411’s Roger Friedman is “hearing rumors” that Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry, Stop/Loss) is either hoping or planning to direct a remake of Lawrence Kasdan‘s Body Heat, the 43 year-old, sexually charged, Floridian film noir that existed in a world that didn’t have air conditioners.

Heat costarred William Hurt and Kathleen Turner as thirtysomething lovers Ned Racine, a not-smart-enough attorney, and Matty Walker, a married, heavy-breathing sociopath who’s breathtaking in bed. Ted Danson, J. A. Preston, Mickey Rourke and Richard Crenna (as Matty’s rich husband) costarred.

Friedman speculates that Racine and Walker could be played by some hot hetero twosome. Perhaps Matthew McConaughey and Florence Pugh, he imagines.

But of course, if and when Peirce, a queer filmmaker, manages to arrange funding for a Body Heat remake, the extra-marital lovers would be women…certainly. Given the same-sex storylines being favored in elite film circles these days (Love Lies Bleeding, Drive Away Dolls), there’s no way the new Body Heat lovers would be straight.

Friendo: “First they did the ‘remake every movie with a black person’ and now they’re doing ‘remake every movie with a gay person’ You know what would be good with four gay people? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

But not in theatres, unfortunately. Reactions from last night’s SXSW debut screening assert that it’s emphatically a film to see half-drunk from an eighth-row seat, sprawled.

Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin attended game #3 of the 1959 World Series — Los Angeles Dodgers vs. Chicago White Sox. Construction of Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine had only begun a few months earlier and wouldn’t be finished until early ‘62, so the Dodger home games happened at the L.A. Colisseum. This was the first World Series played on the West Coast.

HE approves of The Last Days of Saigon, a forthcoming five-part series about numerous desperate, last-minute scrambles to save lives as North Vietnamese forces approached the South Vietnamese capital in April 1975.

Phillip Noyce will direct with showrunner Stuart Beattie having written major portions of the script.

Noyce’s The Quiet American (’02), a first-rate remake of the 1958 original, was set and shot in Vietnam. The Last Days of Saigon will reportedly be shot mostly in Australia with some location work set aside for Southeast Asia.

The series will presumably play like a dramatic narrative rendering of Rory Kennedy‘s excellent doc, Last Days in Vietnam.

Posted on 6.13.14:

“I felt profoundly moved and even close to choking up a couple of times while watching Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam yesterday at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

“The waging of the Vietnam War by U.S forces was one of the most tragic and devastating miscalculations of the 20th Century, but what happened in Saigon during the last few days and particularly the last few hours of the war on 4.30.75 wasn’t about policy.

“For some Saigon-based Americans it was simply about taking care of friends and saving as many lives as possible. It was about good people bravely risking the possibility of career suicide by acknowledging a basic duty to stand by their Vietnamese colleagues and co-workers and loved ones (even if these natives were on the “wrong” or corrupted side of that conflict) and do the right moral thing.

“Kennedy’s incisive, well-sculpted (if not entirely comprehensive) 98-minute doc is basically about how a relative handful of Americans stationed in Saigon — among them former Army Captain Stuart Herrington, ex-State Department official Joseph McBride and former Pentagon official Richard Armitage — did the stand-up, compassionate thing in the face of non-decisive orders and guidelines from superiors (particularly U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Graham Martin) who wouldn’t face up to the fact that the North Vietnamese had taken most of South Vietnam by mid-April and would inevitably conquer Saigon.

“It was obvious as hell to almost anyone with eyes and ears, and yet Martin and other officials, afraid of triggering widespread panic, wouldn’t approve contingency plans for evacuation until it was way, way too late. So the above-named humanitarians and their brethren decided it was “easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask permission” and did what they could — covertly, surreptitiously, any which way — to save as many South Vietnamese as they could.”