
Stewart, already halfway to an EGOT
That’s right, Jon Stewart is going to be a film director. Starting this summer, Stewart will be taking a 12-week hiatus from hosting The Daily Show to direct Rosewater, the film adaptation of BBC journalist Maziar Bahari’s memoir Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival. Stewart also adapted the script. Ooh, a director and a screenwriter, check out Mr. Jonny ICanDoEverythingberg over here. Whatever, he doesn’t even work Fridays.
Bahari’s book tells the story of his 2009 arrest by the Iranian government while covering an election protest. He subsequently was interrogated and tortured during the next 118 days.
I’m excited to see what the funny man can do with a story this hilarious! The only casualty in this audience will be my sides!
In Stewart’s place, Daily Show correspondent John Oliver will sit at the desk of the series, which tapes and airs original episodes Monday through Thursday. [HollywoodReporter]
Here’s a little more about the book, from Amazon:
When Maziar Bahari left London in June 2009 to cover Iran’s presidential election, he assured his pregnant fiancée, Paola, that he’d be back in just a few days, a week at most. Little did he know, as he kissed her good-bye, that he would spend the next three months in Iran’s most notorious prison, enduring brutal interrogation sessions at the hands of a man he knew only by his smell: Rosewater.
For the Bahari family, wars, coups, and revolutions are not distant concepts but intimate realities they have suffered for generations: Maziar’s father was imprisoned by the shah in the 1950s, and his sister by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. Alone in his cell at Evin Prison, fearing the worst, Maziar draws strength from his memories of the courage of his father and sister in the face of torture, and hears their voices speaking to him across the years. He dreams of being with Paola in London, and imagines all that she and his rambunctious, resilient eighty-four-year-old mother must be doing to campaign for his release. During the worst of his encounters with Rosewater, he silently repeats the names of his loved ones, calling on their strength and love to protect him and praying he will be released in time for the birth of his first child.
Seems like an odd choice for a first project by a guy known mainly for comedy. But hey, Jon Stewart’s a smart guy. At the very least, it’ll probably be way better than the story of one disabled boy’s triumph of faith set during the war-torn Balkans that Craig Kilborn directed a few years back. Some people will still swear Kilborn’s is better, but you’ll know they’re just doing it to be assholes.
Picture source: Featureflash / Shutterstock.com
I kind of believe Craig Kilborn really is the character he played in Old School.
it’s pretty obvious, actually
I saw that Kilborn flick. “A Cabbage for Baldo” was soooo uplifting!
Oh, and *SPOILER ALERT* when Baldo is playing catch with his father that he barely knows who has just came back from the front lines, and they’re playing “toss the cabbage” back and forth, and Baldo throws like a girl and his father can’t catch it and it lands at his father’s feet and it sets off an anti-personnel mine and they show his dad getting blown up with that “bullet time” effect?
That was pretty sweet, right?
Get ready for this film to have its ass kissed from here to the next Oscars, regardless of its quality. There, I said it.
i said it in the WG post but i’m intrigued by all of this. i think there’s a good chance it will be a quality film and i’m also interested in seeing Oliver behind the desk on TDS. he’s a hilarious stand up and a great contributor on that show, so i think he’ll be great.
Yeah, John Oliver is awesome, as consistantly great as Stewart is on the show, it will be fun to se someone else behind the desk for a few weeks.
As I said in the WG post, Oliver has an entire other personality that he can bring out. After watching him handle hecklers (read: drunk frat boys) I think he has more than the requisite interview skills to handle the unexpected.
How do we know that “covering the Iranian election” wasn’t just an elaborate excuse to explain the scars on his back to his fiancée?
Makes more sense than voluntarily going to Iran. There are plenty of solid reasons to leave England, but that ain’t among them.
I liked Kilborn on both Daily Show and Late Late Show, and Bill F. Murray did a fantastic interview on Craig’s LLS, and it seemed like Bill genuinely likes the guy, and if BFM likes the guy, there must be something to like.
I watch Ferguson every night, and I watch Stewart every night, and I never managed to do that for Kilborn. To be fair, I dunno if TIVO even existed back then, and I do DVR Ferguson and Stewart pretty regularly, if I’m watching something else. Like the new episode of Justified for the third time that night.
Murray on Kilborn’s show: [www.youtube.com]
part 2: [www.youtube.com]
BFM whispering “vermouth” over the drink before handing it to Craig is a television moment I will cherish for my entire life, and Bill talking about Anna Kournikova “working” the white outfit is also priceless.
Uhm. Yeah, how about that Stewart? Is he funny or what? Looking forward to his hilarious take on the Iranian sex trade.
Wait, we’re talking about traps who wear rosewater perfume torturing traveling businessmen, right?
I like John Stewart, but this movie sounds like awful, Oscar-wank, material.
My concern is that StewBeef will be to film what Michael Jordan was to baseball.
Yes and yes.
Or that StewBeef will be to directing what StewBeef was to acting.
For a second there I got excited that he was gonna make a sequel to Death To Smoochy.
Just hearing those words gives me a boner.
And I thought Jon Stewart couldn’t get any more pretentious and self-important. Wrong again!
Oh…Brilliant. Now I can ignore that ludicrous boor on TWO screens.