STUDIO SYNOPSIS
This funny fish-out-of-water tale tracks the outrageous escapades of Sidney Young, a smalltime, bumbling, British celebrity journalist who is hired by an upscale magazine in New York City. In spectacular fashion Sidney enters high society and burns bridges with bosses, peers and superstars.

ABOUT
First published in 2001, Toby Young's memoir, How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, charts Young's move from London to New York to become a contributing editor at the highly prestigious Vanity Fair. Fired less than two years later, the memoir hilariously captures Young's failed attempt to take Manhattan by storm.

Toby Young reminisces: "Things really didn't work out for me at Vanity Fair, and one of the reasons was that I was just completely naïve about what being a journalist in New York was like. I had seen films like, His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story, and I was expecting the corridors of Vanity Fair to be full of these debonair wits, trading wisecracks in-between sips from the hip flask. It was actually this incredibly rule-bound society -- much more rule-bound than the culture I'd come from. We have this idea that America's this great informal place, it's like one giant speakeasy where everyone is completely themselves. But London's quite like that; New York is nothing like that. New York's much more like London was a hundred years ago, and I felt almost like I was Austin Powers who'd come of age in this kind of permissive, swinging '60s era who'd been teleported back in time to the Victorian era."

A SPIRITUAL POINT OF VIEW
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