Will Simon Pegg soon be too big for nerds like us? His career is really taking off lately, and that’s not even counting the fact that he stole M:I:III from its rightful star. Pegg’s latest foree into starring vehicles will find him learning How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, a movie trying to cash in on our new magazine journalism fever inspired by sleeper hit The Devil Wears Prada.
The film is an adaptation of Toby Young’s memoirs about his time at Vanity Fair as a contributing editor. It’s one of those books that gets called “savage,” and it paints incredibly unflattering pictures of the magazine journalistic establishment, Conde Nast’s Graydon Carter and humanity in general. This is the kind of book that the people at Gawker probably memorized, and I bet they’re even now jerking themselves silly over the news.
Pegg will be playing Young, who in reality is an Englishman who also had bad experiences at some UK papers. Because of ridiculous legal issues, all names will be changed in the movie, so Vanity Fair will be called Sharps Magazine and so on and so forth. I guess that give the filmmakers more room to be cruelly slanderous.
How to Lose Friends will shoot in the UK and New York City this spring. It’s being directed by Robert Weide. This is Weide’s first feature, but he has a good background as a director for Curb Your Enthusiasm. I hope he can make us feel half as uncomfortable in this movie.