iProduct Placement: How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

About the author

nicole_martinelli

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 Twitter , Facebook and Google+.

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  • http://cultofmac.com Lonnie Lazar

    Haven’t Macs always been the mark of who counts and who doesn’t? :^)

  • http://www.zoomata.com Nicole Martinelli

    Hmm. Sure. But it’s interesting (to me at least) that it becomes short hand visual currency for Mac-haves vs. Mac have-nots.

  • http://www.filmguide.co.nz Jonathan

    There’s a subtle Mac reference in the Watchmen movie. In one of the later scenes we see a bank of TV screens, and down on the right hand side is a screen showing Apple’s 1984 commercial…

  • http://www.wickedcooltech.com/index.php/356/time-capsule-shows-up-on-life.html Chris Maxcer

    Hmm. I wonder if Apple’s been pushing product placements hard these days? There’s the late night TV mention (noted on Cult of Mac), plus I noticed a Time Capsule highlighted on last week’s episode of NBC’s Life.

    Whatever the cause, I do like to see the Apple logo!