Sounds good
Natrick
, 12/02/2008
Billed as a 'testosterone laced The Devil Wears Prada', Toby Young's sardonic memoir of his time tackling the glossy magazine scene in New York, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People is directed by 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' director Bob Weide
According to director Bob Weide, once he took on How To Lose Friends And Alienate People he was asked how he planned to make the central character, Sidney Young, likeable. Drawing on British journalist Toby Young's autobiographical best seller, Young is 'greedy, pushy and cynical, a balding hack on the make.' The answer Bob Weide gave, 'Two words: Simon Pegg.'
In the adaptation, Sidney Young works in London editing the 'Post Modern Review', a witty, intellectual publication that simultaneously derides and is fascinated by celebrity. He is then hired by Clayton Harding to work on Sharp's magazine, after the editor is impressed by Young's disruption of a post-BAFTA party with a pig posing as Babe. He becomes close to a rising starlet, Sophie Maes, but falls for colleague Alison Olsen. Over the course of the book, a drunken Toby Young affronts Mel Gibson at the 'Vanity Fair' Oscars party, asks a strippergram to the magazine's offices on 'Bring Your Daughter To Work Day', and takes cocaine with Damien Hirst on a ruined photo shoot: it remains to be seen which - if any - of these notorious stories make it into the film.
Weide is the director of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm', the acclaimed American television series that stars Larry David as himself - that is, a semi-retired multi-millionaire. The show is partly-improvised and filmed in the style of a documentary. David's character is socially inept, neurotic and thwarted by events he is ill-equipped to handle. Weide has also directed a number of documentaries on renegade comedians, including Lenny Bruce: Swear To Tell The Truth and The Marx Brothers In A Nutshell. The script for How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, written by the Brit Peter Straughan, was pitched to Weide by his agent as a 'modernized Ealing comedy'. 'The Sunday Times' described the book as, 'The longest self-deprecating joke' since the complete works of Woody Allen.'
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