iProduct Placement: How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
In the celluloid version of Brit Toby Young’s memoir about life at Vanity Fair in New York, Macs are the mark of who counts and who doesn’t.
In the beginning of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, Young runs London’s no-count Post Modern Review where unpaid pundits fight over who owns the fax machine.
He gets a call from Clayton Harding, the movie stand-in for formidable VF editor Graydon Carter, inviting him to the US. Harding has what looks like a Mac laptop on his immaculate desk in every shot, it’s just never open.
As the ups and downs of the un-PC Englishman in New York continue, we know Young’s fortunes have turned around when he sits down to write a profile on a MacBook, pictured above.
Without spoiling the plot, it’s one of the more entertaining movies I’ve seen about journalism lately (look out for the cameos of IT crowd actors, btw) and arguably better than the book.
Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco native who has lived in Milan and Florence, Italy. She's written for Wired.com, The New York Times and Newsweek. You can find her on 
