THE AUTHOR Toby Young has clinched an £800,000 deal to turn his bestselling memoir into a Hollywood film that producers hope will be a male version of the Bridget Jones blockbuster.

Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax films, is understood to be investing £50m in the film based on How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. It will see Young — famously short and bald — being played by Hollywood pin-up Jake Gyllenhaal, best known for The Day After Tomorrow and Donnie Darko.

Weinstein believes the film could match the success of Bridget Jones’s Diary, based on the book by Helen Fielding.

“They are both very definitely on similar lines and they are both distributed by Miramax, so I suppose you could call me Midget Jones,” said Young, who is 5ft 8in.

The story is based on Young’s two-year stint as contributing editor of Vanity Fair, the American magazine, in the late 1990s and his repeated unsuccessful attempts to seduce women from his glamorous New York circle of friends.

His brushes with modern American political correctness are painfully recounted. On one occasion he arranged for a female stripper to perform in the building not realising that it was Bring Your Daughter to Work Day in the office.

Young, 40, the son of the late Lord Young, the creator of the Open University, is now back in England as the drama critic of The Spectator. He says he hopes his film will be a little more successful than his editing career in the US.

He lives in London with his English wife, lawyer Caroline Bondi, and their baby daughter, and is currently playing himself in a stage version of the book at London’s Arts Theatre. He says he is “flattered” that Gyllenhaal is being lined up for the film.

“Anyone who hasn’t met me and then sees the film will be very disappointed when they find out what I look like,” added the writer once described as a “bald homunculus” by Peter York, the style critic who bankrolled the Modern Review, which Young edited for four years before his stint on Vanity Fair. “It is the most flattering piece of casting since Colin Firth played Nick Hornby in the film version of Fever Pitch.”

Those being considered for the part of Young’s wife — whom he met in America — include the British Hollywood actresses Catherine Zeta-Jones and Kate Beckinsale. Tracey Ullman is being tipped for the part of Tina Brown, a former editor of Vanity Fair and a long-standing bête noire of Young.

However, perhaps most attention will be on the casting of Graydon Carter, Young’s fearsome former boss at Vanity Fair who fired him. Their feud appears to be simmering still. Only last week Carter described Young as “the most asinine person” he had met.

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