Salt Lake Tribune Review

Great documentaries can show you something you’ve never seen before and make you intensely interested in it. They can also show you something you think you know and make you fascinated by that subject in a whole new way.
Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg manage to do both with their gloriously honest documentary, “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” a movie that reconsiders the now-77-year-old comedian and shows her to be — with all due respect to the late James Brown — the hardest-working person in show business.

Don’t even try to make jokes about Rivers’ grating voice, her frequent sessions of plastic surgery or even her daughter, Melissa. Rivers knows all of them and can tell funnier ones. She keeps voluminous files of jokes in her Manhattan apartment, an opulent showcase that she describes best as “what Marie Antoinette would have done if she had money.” And Rivers is constantly writing and rewriting jokes, working small New York clubs to hone her material and keep it fresh.

Shooting two years ago as Rivers was turning 75, Stern and Sundberg find the comic at a low cycle in her career. Her TV gigs aren’t A-list, and she’s performing every casino and rinky-dink theater she can book. She’s prepping a one-woman play in London, but needs positive reviews to make it a hit and bring it to Broadway.

The film looks back at Rivers’ early career as a would-be actress who found more success in stand-up comedy. She got her first break when Johnny Carson booked her on “The Tonight Show” in 1965, and then in 1983 made her his regular guest host.

Her career took its hardest hit with what should have been a good thing: her own talk show on Fox in 1986. But the show nearly destroyed her career: Because of it, Carson cut off their friendship permanently (NBC’s late-night shows still blackball her, she says).

The Fox gig lasted less than a year, with the network firing Joan and her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, the show’s producer. And the network’s rough treatment led to another, bigger tragedy: Three months later, Rosenberg commited suicide.

Through it all, Rivers continued to perform. She’s a fighter and a survivor, and the movie heartbreakingly chronicles how she continues to ride the ups and downs of show business. (It ends just as she’s about to appear on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” where she won the whole thing.)

The movie also shows her relationship with her now-former manager, William Sammeth, who, on Thursday, filed a lawsuit against Rivers, saying she defamed him in the documentary.

The revelation of Stern and Sundberg’s movie is that Rivers today is sharper, edgier and more willing to tackle taboo subjects than comedians half her age. She’s also a lot funnier and, as one astounding scene shows, absolutely lethal to any heckler who dares encroach on her domain. In the end, “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” shows that, after all the tragedies in her life, performing is the one thing she has left.

- Sean P. Means

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