Posts Tagged ‘Jon Stewart’

There’s a special advance screening tonight of All The President’s Men Revisited at Washington D.C.’s Newseum, co-presented by the White House Correspondents’ Association. To be followed Sunday night at 9 p.m. by the feature documentary’s Discovery channel debut.

FishbowlLA’s favorite portion of this fascinating, highly recommended retelling of the intertwined stories of the real and Hollywood versions of Woodward & Bernstein comes around the half-hour mark. That’s when Redford himself notes the irony of the media’s efforts to expose the identity of Deep Throat leading, belatedly, to a street in the Bay Area called Redford Place.

Rachel Maddow shares some great comments in the Deep Throat segment, alongside Redford, Woodward, Bernstein, Jon Stewart and Tom Brokaw. Bernstein has the funniest line, noting that the only reason the secret of the Hal Holbrook-portrayed source’s identity lasted so long is because neither he or Woodward told their ex-wives. From there, the documentary moves to Marc Felt‘s daughter Joan, who recalls what it was like for her dad’s courageous “follow the money” efforts to finally be confirmed.

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Don’t expect The Daily Show to keep you occupied this summer on those hot, concrete-baking nights. Deadline reports that Jon Stewart is taking a 12-week hiatus from the show to make his Hollywood directorial debut.

From Deadline:

Stewart has written the script, and will direct Rosewater, an adaptation of the book Then They Came For Me: A Family’s Story Of Love, Captivity And Survival. Published in 2011 by Random House, the book is Maziar Bahari’s harrowing ordeal of leaving London in June 2009 to cover Iran’s presidential elections. With a pregnant fiance left behind, the BBC journalist expected to be away for a week. Instead, he spent the next 118 days in Iran’s most notorious prison being brutally interrogated by a man he knew only by one thing: he smelled of Rosewater. Bahari wrote the book with Aimee Molloy. Scott Rudin will produce with Stewart and Gigi Pritzker. Pritzker’s OddLot Entertainment is financing the film.

Daily Show fans should take solace in the fact that John Oliver will take over hosting duties for eight weeks this summer in Stewart’s stead. So stay strong. You can handle four weeks of re-runs.

A dream year for Jimmy Kimmel is about to get dreamier.

On top of getting the news that his show will be moving in the New Year to 11:35 p.m. and hosting major powwows on both coasts (White House Correspondents dinner, Primetime Emmys), there’s now this. Per a report by Lacey Rose in The Hollywood Reporter, Kimmel will finally be afforded the opportunity to interview his lifelong idol David Letterman:

Letterman will join Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Tracy Morgan as a guests on Jimmy Kimmel Live when the ABC host brings his late-night show to his hometown of Brooklyn for one week later this month. The move is a monumental one for Kimmel, who grew up wearing a Late Night with David Letterman jacket and would celebrate his birthday with a Late Night cake.

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Here’s a vivid reminder of just how well Tom O’Neil and his group of goldderby.com editors know the Emmy Awards beat.

Thanks to a recent Skype discussion between O’Neil, Chris Beachum, Matt Noble and Daniel Montgomery about the Best Supporting Comedy Actor chances of New Girl’s Max Greenfield (pictured), the performer’s Hollywood agents realized the wrong episode had been submitted on the co-star’s behalf. Instead of “Control,” which Greenfield’s reps had selected, the DVD reproduction house somehow pressed copies of the episode “Bad in Bed.” Tipped by Gold Derby, the TV  Academy worked with the actor’s team to remedy the mistake and get new discs out to voters with special instructions in time for the September 17 deadline.

“It’s definitely one of Gold Derby’s top ten scoops,” O’Neil tells FishbowlLA via telephone. “But nothing will likely surpass our story about Katherine Heigl lashing out at her writers after having withdrawn from Emmy consideration for Grey’s Anatomy. She was ticked off at her writers, and then there was that whole backlash against her after the story broke.”

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Obviously, The Daily Show had a few things to say about Sarah Palin‘s protracted Today appearance yesterday. Jon Stewart had a pretty good rant, but we prefer John Oliver‘s shenanigans.

Pretty big target. But Jon Stewart‘s take on the latest Rush Limbaugh debacle was particularly good last night–not for its takedown of Rush, but for showing just how many media creatures have been saying the exact same things as Rush in recent weeks, in only slightly more politic terms.

The film studios have so little interest in all-black films that even Hollywood royalty like George Lucas struggled to find a distributor for his latest work, Red Tails. Lucas didn’t mince any words when explaining to Daily Show host Jon Stewart the source of the problem:

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.

Lucas spent 23 years making the film, which is based on the true story of a crew of African American pilots who fought in World War II and helped start the civil rights movement. “I financed it myself. I figured I could get the prints and ads paid for by the studios and that they would release it,” he explained to Stewart. “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 not green enough.” And by green, Lucas means profitable.

These are the same yahoos who brought us Mars Need Moms, a film that lost over $100 million. A whackadoodle story about motherless space aliens strikes these dunderheads as a better investment than a classic tale about real American heroes. Because they happen to be black.

Get it together, Hollywood.

View the full Lucas/Stewart interview after the jump.

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Jon Stewart recently sat down with Rolling Stone‘s Eric Bates to talk about his media consumption habits and how The Daily Show gets made four times a week.

Stewart’s take: “The best shows are made of the smallest moments. Donald Trump eating pizza with a fork, and making that into eight minutes of a completely overblown sanctimonious rant on the apostasy of eating pizza with a fork.”

When it comes to cheeky headlines, few publications are as consistently on target as The Economist. Today, for their wrap-up of the 2011 Primetime Emmy Awards, the austere UK mag has chosen to go with “Up Close and Impersonal.”

The article by “Prospero” wastes no time in taking down the host city. After calibrating our high density of tanning salons and frozen yogurt stores, it segues to this:

Los Angeles is a city where Michael Bay, a filmmaker lately known for directing the Transformers franchise, and the Kardashian sisters are held up as glowing examples of something, but no one really knows quite what (perhaps LA-ness?).

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The list of reporters awarded USC Annenberg 2011 Knight Grants for Reporting on Religion and American Public Life is extremely impressive. And the topics aren’t too shabby either.

G. Jeffrey MacDonald, a senior correspondent for the now online-only Christian Science Monitor, will look at the soon-to-be-cut federal program Mentoring Children of Prisoners. More than 100,000 children with incarcerated parents rely on mentors provided through this initiative connected to faith-based groups. Funding is set to be cut next month.

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