Toby Young Responds To Our EmailsEven Though He's Famous Now

We also found a photograph of Toby hanging out with
Gillian Anderson on the red carpet in Cannes,
but couldn't figure out how to upload it onto blogger.

Everyone got fired from YM's Tumblr today, so now's as good a time as any to trot out our recent interview with fellow firee the Right Honorable Tobias Young. After we were the first to break the news of the trailer to How To Lose Friends, we reached out to Toby to let him know that we had done him the honor of a YM mention. We needn't have bothered, as he had apparently already caught wind of our post via the google alert machine. Make of that what you will. In any event, Toby, good sport that he is, eventually agreed to the submit to YM's line o' questioning about the whole media thing and acquitted himself most admirably. Let's watch:

YM: You're back from Cannes, where your movie screened to strong reviews and you were generally treated like a bona fide celebrity. [N.B. This was back in May; Toby didn't get back to us until yesterday.] You getting used to the idea of being on the other side of the proverbial velvet rope?

TY: Certainly am. I wondered how long it would take a lifelong critic of celebrity to be seduced by the trappings of fame. The answer is about 30 seconds.

YM: You didn't write the screenplay for the film--I read somewhere you actually managed to get fired from that role. What was your involvement creatively (other than having written the source material)?

TY: I was originally hired to write the screenplay, but the producers fired me as soon as they read my 33-page treatment. They kept me in the loop, though. Each time Peter Straughan -- the writer they hired -- wrote a draft, they'd send it to me and I'd make reams and reams of notes. Sometimes Peter paid attention to them, sometimes he ignored them. Occasionally, I'd cross out his gags and insert my own and some of those made it into the final script. I also wrote a couple of Jeff Bridges's speeches and it's great to sit in a movie theatre and watch an actor of that calibre delivering lines you've written.

YM: Do you think the New York media scene has changed since you moved back to London? Do you think people are still as beholden to Carter and the other media titans of the 90's (Brown, Weinstein, etc.) as they used to be? (You can probably tell what we think the answer is.)

TY: The titans of the New York print media certainly aren't as powerful now as they were in the 90s, but nor are they as obsolescent as people thought they would be at the height of the dotcom boom. The problem is, the Internet doesn't stay in one place for long enough for a New Media cadre to emerge that's capable of shunting the Browns and the Carters out of the spotlight.

YM: You follow the New York blog scene at all? Any bloggers you particularly enjoy/loathe/wish you could be more like?

TY: There are a number of bloggers in my daily trawl -- Jim Wolcott, Nikki Finke, Ken Levine -- but I've never thought of them as being located in any one geographical area. That's a bit Old Media, isn't it?

YM: Do you think Gawker has changed New York? If so, for better or worse?

TY: It has turned New York into what the philosopher Jeremy Bentham called a Panopticon -- a type of prison in which all the prisoners are capable of being observed 24/7.

YM: Who's more powerful: Graydon Carter or Nick Denton? No equivocating.

TY: Who's Nick Denton?

YM: Can we expect to see any puff pieces about you in the October issue of Vanity Fair in time for the US release of the movie (assuming Carter doesn't read this interview)?

TY: That's about as likely as Graydon Carter running a nude photo of himself to accompany his Editor's Letter.