The Slatest

Jon Stewart Will Take the Summer off to Direct a Film. His Show Will Go on Without Him.

Jon Stewart will reportedly take 12 weeks off later this year to direct the feature-length film Rosewater

Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

It looks like Daily Show fans will see what life is like without Jon Stewart this summer. Deadline reports that the Comedy Central star will take 12 weeks off later this year to direct a feature-length film. His show, however, will carry on without him for at least eight of those weeks with show-regular John Oliver filling in behind the fake news desk.

The announcement hasn’t been confirmed by Comedy Central yet, but the report makes it sound like it’s a done deal. [Update: Stewart has confirmed the report to the New York Times.] So what’s the film project? According to Deadline, it’s Rosewater, an adaptation of the book Then They Came For Me, the script of which Stewart wrote. Here’s the publisher’s summary of the book, via 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. 

A riveting, heart-wrenching memoir, Then They Came for Me offers insight into the past fifty years of regime change in Iran, as well as the future of a country where the democratic impulses of the youth continually clash with a government that becomes more totalitarian with each passing day. An intimate and fascinating account of contemporary Iran, it is also the moving and wonderfully written story of one family’s extraordinary courage in the face of repression.

Sounds like a far cry from Half Baked.