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:

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Jon Stewart recently revealed during a live appearance with Stephen Colbert that Hugh Grant was his all-time, least-favorite Daily Show guest and was banned from the show after an appearance to promote Did You Hear about the Morgans. I accidentally read it as “Hugh Jackman” at first and I was like, “Whaaat? That’s insane!” And then when I re-read it and it was Hugh Grant, I was like, “Oh, well… yeah, that makes sense.”

Stewart’s least favorite guest of all time is Hugh Grant, “and we’ve had dictators on the show”. Grant spent his time at the studio complaining that he had other places to be. “He’s giving everyone sh*t the whole time, and he’s a big pain in the ass,” Stewart recalled.
Grant also complained to the staff about the clip that was selected of the movie he was promoting, Did You Hear About the Morgans? – a clip that was obviously supplied by the film’s publicist. Stewart recalls Grant angrily asking “What is that clip? It’s a terrible clip.” “Well, then make a better f**king movie,” Stewart said, adding that he would “never” have Grant back. [ThirdBeat]

To be fair to Hugh Grant, imagine having to do 10 straight hours of interviews about this movie:

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If our commenters are to be believed, Jon Stewart DID attend plenty of punk shows in the 80s, but according to what seems like fairly solid research by RVAMag, the above picture purported to Jon Stewart at a Dead Kennedys show is actually of Red Cross/Prevaricators bassist Alford Faulkner.

Doug Dobey confirms what I was already pretty sure about–that is not Jon Stewart but former Red Cross/Prevaricators bassist Alford Faulkner. The process of nerding out took place in multiple posts on my blog this morning: first one, second one, third one, fourth (and hopefully last) one. But hey, this was fun, right? –Andrew [RVAMag]

Maybe this is just me not wanting to let go of something so awesome, but considering Jon Stewart was originally misidentified in the photo by the original photographer (and I doubt he’d just assume a guy was Jon Stewart unless he’d remembered him being around at some of those shows), I think it’s almost more important to note that it could’ve been him as it is to point out that it wasn’t. I bet we’re still gonna live off the fat of the land, just like he promised, with super-furry rabbits in every color.

I usually don’t post on Fridays after Weekend Movie Guide goes up, and I usually leave the Jon Stewart stuff to the TV bloggers, but I couldn’t not post this.

Irish Willis Peele snapped a lot of photographs of Virginia “speed punk” band Front Line back in the 1980s, including this one, from a Dead Kennedys show in Richmond, Va. Peele says the guy in the center is William and Mary student Jon Leibowitz — who later moved to New York and now has a pretty successful comedy career under the name Jon Stewart. In case you’re wondering, it adds up — Stewart was at William and Mary until 1984. [Gawker]

I heard the Misfits were scheduled to play the same show, but backed out when the college ran out of soup.

Sidenote: Patton Oswalt also went to William and Mary. That should definitely be the first two bullet points in the brochure.

UPDATE: So I guess it’s not him. Oh drat.

George Lucas was on The Daily Show the other night, and while it was sad watching Jon Stewart have to pretend that nerds still think of Lucas as the hero who created Star Wars, and not as the villain who keeps trying to retroactively f*ck it up, Lucas (Ol’ Cat Eater, I like to call him) did a wise thing. With his new movie Red Tails coming out (you can watch the first seven minutes after the jump), which he didn’t direct, though he did apparently direct some of the re-shoots, including “small character moments” (a terrifying prospect, like having an autistic kid rewrite your dialog), he talked less about the movie than he did about the difficulty of getting a film with an all-black cast made in Hollywood. Wait, whaaa?

“We’ve been working on it 23 years. I financed it myself, and I figured I could get the prints and ads paid for by the studios, and that they would release it, and I showed it to all of them, and they said noooo. ‘We don’t know how to market a movie like this.’

“It’s because it’s an all-black movie. There’s no major white roles in it at all. It’s one of the first, all-black action pictures ever made.

“It’s a reasonably expensive movie. See, normally black movies, Tyler Perry movies or something, they’re very low budget, and even they won’t release his movies. It goes to one of the lower, not-major distributors, and they do well, but they do a certain amount of money, and they know what that is, and this cost more than what those movies make. And they don’t believe that there’s any foreign market for it. And that’s 60 percent of their profit.”

For a guy I normally ridicule for stuffing endless handfuls of nerd-money into his bulgy neck pouch, this was a brilliant move. Now, it doesn’t matter how corny and derivative it is, you have to go see it just to prove big, racist Hollywood wrong (meanwhile, I like to shout “HOW YOU LIKE THAT, MR. HITLER?!” every time I cut a fart). Already I’ve seen black comics I know talking up Red Tails on Facebook because of this, which is pretty weird for a hokey WWII movie. I can’t even say Lucas is lying (though I will say that I don’t remember Michael Bay ever talking about how hard it was getting Bad Boys made), even though 23 years ago would’ve been just a couple years before Tuskeegee Airmen came out (which got Laurence Fishburne a Golden Globe nomination, so it’s not like people hadn’t heard of it), which is essentially the exact same movie as this, and that could’ve been part of studios not wanting to release it. Because it’s probably mostly true. Studios always have some retarded voodoo math they do, because it keeps up the pretense that you can predict this stuff with numbers, which is far better for your job security than risking having an actual opinion on anything. So now, instead of George Lucas: Cheesy Movie Dork, he gets to be George Lucas: Champion of the Black Man, and no one can fully deny it. And so I guess there’s nothing left to say except well played, you fat overrated hack.

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