On the evening of April 14th local time, the 76th Writers Guild of America Awards ceremony was held simultaneously in Los Angeles and New York, and the 2023-2024 Hollywood awards season finally came to an end. "The Alliance", which was previously involved in plagiarism, won the Best Original Screenplay Award; the Best Adapted Screenplay Award went to "American Novel", which has already won an Oscar; in terms of TV series, "Succession" and "Bear's Restaurant" also won in their respective categories.
According to convention, the Writers Guild of America Awards should be announced before the Oscars in March each year. However, due to the strike of the Hollywood Writers Guild last year, the organizers announced as early as November 2023 that the 2024 awards ceremony would be postponed for a month, that is, held after the Oscars, which is somewhat embarrassing.
However, at the awards ceremony that night, the organizers and award-winning guests were proud of the success of last year's Writers Guild strike. Host Niecy Nash-Betts also said in her opening monologue show, "Last year, there were 312 union strikes in the United States, and Hollywood experienced two of them, which lasted 148 days, setting a record. We are fighting for our rights to equal pay for equal work and equal voice, and for our right to write 10 episodes for a full season. Thank God, we succeeded. Otherwise, how can "The Crown" tell the audience what happened to Diana and her children later?"
Stills from "School Alliance"
As for the award results, "The Judgement of the Fallen", which won the Best Original Screenplay Award at this year's Oscars, was not eligible to participate in the competition because the two creators were not members of the union. David Hemingson's "School Alliance" defeated heavyweight works such as Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach's "Barbie" and Celine Song's "The Past Life" to win the most important Best Original Screenplay Award of the night.
When accepting the award, Hemingson thanked the film's "great cast and brilliant director" for bringing the story to life, and he singled out "my mother who raised me, my uncle who saved my life, and my father who instilled in me a love of words and taught me integrity."
David Hemingson, 59, was originally a lawyer. He decided to change his career when he was nearly 30. He started as a screenwriter's assistant and participated in the creation of many TV series such as "How I Met Your Mother" and "Bad Girl in Apartment 23", but he was not successful. In 2017, he wrote a TV drama script about boarding school life based on his own personal experience. It was chosen by director Alexander Payne, and the current "School Alliance" was created. In other words, the first time Hemingson came into contact with a movie script, he won the Writers Guild Award, the National Society of Film Critics Best Screenplay Award, the Boston Society of Film Critics Best Screenplay Award, the Seattle Society of Film Critics Best Screenplay Award, and an Oscar nomination. He can be said to be a late bloomer who came from behind and got ahead.
However, in March this year, Variety and other media reported the explosive news that "The League" was accused of plagiarism. It turned out that as early as January this year, Simon Stephenson, a Scottish screenwriter who had participated in works such as "Paddington 2", "Summer Friends" and "The Passionate Life of Louis Wain", filed a complaint with the Writers Guild of America, accusing Hemingson's script of plagiarizing a large amount of content from his script "Frisco".
The story goes back to 2005, when Hollywood executive Franklin Leonard founded a website called "Script Blacklist". Every year, he collects industry opinions and selects the best scripts of the year that have been written but not yet made into movies. Oscar-winning films such as "The King's Speech" and "Argo" that are now well-known to everyone were originally on this "blacklist", which attracted the attention of the industry. On the "blacklist" in 2013, the third place was a script called "Frisco" written by Simon Stephenson. According to the description of the website, its story tells the story of "a pediatric allergist in his forties who is facing divorce and accidentally meets a 15-year-old precocious girl with advanced cancer, and learns a lot of life lessons."
According to the evidence provided by Stephenson, his agent sent the script to director Alexander Payne of the same agency as early as 2013, but the latter showed little interest after reading it. In 2019, the script was recommended to Netflix, and the relevant person gave it to Payne again, asking if he had any intention of cooperation, but the latter still expressed no intention to shoot.
Looking up Frisco on IMDB PRO, the film is still in the "Development" stage
In this way, Simon Stephenson's script "Frisco" has been shelved to this day. Recently, he watched "The League" in the theater and was surprised by the film's "story, characters, structure, scenes and dialogues". Many parts of the film are very similar to his own script, and some lines are even copied word for word. So he contacted the Writers Guild to protect his rights. However, for more than two months, the relevant personnel of the Writers Guild have always stated that the union will not intervene in the matter, and out of sympathy, recommended a lawyer to Stephenson, suggesting that he should directly resort to legal means.
After the news broke, the Writers Guild, the producers of “Alliance,” and even director Payne and screenwriter Hemmingson all refused to be interviewed by the media. However, looking back at what director Payne said during the film’s promotional roadshow, although the screenwriter of the film was only named David Hemmingson, he actually participated in the entire writing of the script of “Alliance,” and his initial inspiration came from the old French film “Merlusse” that he saw at a film festival more than a decade ago. Since then, he has always wanted to make a movie set in a boarding school. In 2018, he saw Hemmingson’s script and felt that the idea was very compatible, so “Alliance” was born.
Combining various objective evidences, Payne did read Simon Stephenson's script beforehand. As for the similarities between the two scripts, there are many gray areas where opinions vary. In any case, since the Writers Guild is unwilling to intervene, Stephenson is left with only legal recourse.
According to past cases, such script plagiarism lawsuits often require a lot of time, energy and financial resources, so most screenwriters are reluctant to choose this method. A more famous case was in the 1990s, when screenwriter Art Buchwald accused Paramount's "Coming to America" of plagiarizing his ideas. Although he eventually won the lawsuit and received $825,000 in financial compensation, it took seven years; and Eddie Murphy, who was accused of plagiarism, never apologized for the incident and always insisted that the ideas came from him.
