I first read Toby Young's How To Lose Friends And Alienate People in 2002. His hilarious true story of leaving London journalism for New York and a prestigious job at Vanity Fair magazine was a gossipy, self-deprecating story of failure after failure. Much like The Devil Wears Prada, How To Lose was a true story of a cut-throat business, complete with high powered players and NY society, but unlike Prada, Toby never 'makes it there' - He just moves down the ladder from one embarrassing event to another, finally getting fired, as he has been from many other jobs.
In How To Lose he names the names of the rich and shameless with a big inside scoop of the Conde Nast publishing empire.
It eventually found a publisher and some success, and a bidding war began for the film rights. Turning down other offers to go with Film Four, the company immediately folded, leaving him in limbo.
In The Sound Of No Hands Clapping, Toby gets a call from an unnamed Hollywood big-wig, the kind of player with 100 million dollars films to his credit. Based on reading his book, he hires Toby to write a screenplay about a notorious record producer. Turns out it's more like a rewrite, and then just a treatment - or really a polish, but no matter, Toby doesn't get to work on it anyway. He spends his time working on a stage play of How To, tries to complete a draft of How To for the (hopefully) future film, tries to move to LA, and promotes his book in America. One hurdle is trying to figure an entertaining angle for the film, but really, he just farts around on other stuff.
Meanwhile, the other half of the book is his relationship with his pregnant wife Caroline, which must have been fascinating to go through, but for me, I'm not so interested in your pregnancy and childbirth.
Being a "highly anticipated sequel", it's strange that the cover has only praise for How To and not the contents. How To was a slow slide downhill and very funny at times, while this was only slightly amusing, and a curious wait as we watch this opportunity dissolve in his hands. There is some Hollywood and TV gossip - a little peek into the scams and shams of the moviemaking 'business', but not enough to recommend it - and a memoir of Hollywood and screenwriters is my thing!
I thought when I picked it up (and from the title) it would concentrate more on the flop that was the eventual movie of How To. It starred Simon Pegg and went straight to video.
How To Lose Friends And Alienate People was great, but the title of this book is it's best part!
Ps She had the baby.
2006 / Hardcover / 270 pages
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