How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (film)

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is a 2008 comedy film based upon Toby Young's 2001 memoir of the same name. The film follows a similar storyline, about his five-year struggle to make it in the United States after employment at Sharps Magazine. The names of the magazine and people Young came into contact with during the time were changed for the film adaptation. The film version (adapted by Peter Straughan) is a highly fictionalized account, and differs greatly from the work upon which it was built.

Directed by Robert Weide, it stars Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Danny Huston, Gillian Anderson, Megan Fox and Jeff Bridges, alongside Max Minghella and Margo Stilley. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People was released in the United Kingdom by Paramount Pictures and in the United States by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures on 3 October 2008.

Plot

Sidney Young, an aspiring British journalist who runs a failing polemical magazine, attempts to infiltrate a party organized by Clayton Harding, the CEO of Sharps, one of the most prestigious magazines in the world. In doing so, he momentarily gains Clayton's sympathy, as the latter began his own career through polemics.

Sidney is offered a job at Sharps, and moves to New York City, but he quickly earns the scorn of his colleagues, including Alison Olsen and the manager Lawrence Maddox, as a result of his rudeness, vulgarity, and general unattractiveness. Interviews with famous performers must be arranged by publicist Eleanor Johnson, who imposes restrictions on published content.