Paul Dale talks to Simon Pegg and director Robert B Weide about their new film adaptation of Toby Young's biographical account of working at Vanity Fair magazine in the mid 19905, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
creenwriter. producer and director Bob Weide has spent his two score and ten
odd years genuflecting at the altar of
American comedy. A foremost knowledge on the life and work of the Marx Brothers (along with our own Simon Louyish) and. arguably. the nation‘s greatest comic author — Kurt Vonnegut. Weide has also made documentaries about WC Fields. Lenny Bruce and Mort Stahl. If he’s known at all on this side of the pond. it is for his TV work directing and exec producing Larry David‘s seminal Curb Your Enthusiasm series. In short. Weide has spent an admirably slow burn career walking. talking and standing on the shoulders of giants. And then he decided to make a film about a British celebrity journalist.
Based on Toby Young‘s memoir of his failed five year effort to ‘break‘ America as the contributing editor of (‘onde Nast Publication‘s Vanity Fair magazine and starring Simon Pegg as the young Toby/Sidney. Weide believes that How To Lose Friends & Alienate P'op/e was the
18 THE LIST 2—16 Oct 2008
perfect project for him. ‘When I lirst met Toby — he was goofy. awkward and funny and when he left the producer Stephen Woolley asked me what I thought of him. I said. "I like him a lot." Stephen started laughing and said. "I don't think anyone has ever said anything that nice about Toby before‘." Weide became aware of Young‘s more annoying tics and foibles later on but is still more benign towards the follically challenged writer than most.
‘You know all that stuff he writes in these newspaper columns about him being kicked off the set and not being shown drafts of the script. it‘s all rubbish. He had access every step of the way but that story doesn‘t lit with the belligerent loser persona/mantra he lives by.‘
As it turns out the film version of How to Lose Friends . . . is a pretty broad adaptation of Young’s book. Adapted by Brit screenwriter Peter Straughan. (Mrs Rate/Weir Ret'o/tllimt. Sixty Six) many of the situations and names have been excised for comic and legal reasons. as its