Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

[papeetepatrick]

http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/movies/11joan.html?8dpc

I had no idea this was in process of coming into being or something like it ever could (there are even slightly crass reasons why it was possible for the filmmakers to get it done, which goes with the subject more than the creators.) But, while it doesn't quite make me want to see it, it does sound quite extraordinary. And, since we've been discussing journalism in the Arts in other threads (ballet ones, that is), I was also very impressed with this review. It's one of the best-written movie reviews I remember. There's something altogether unexpected about the whole enterprise, and that's part of what comes across; Dargis is very detailed and comprehensive. It sounds like a fine film if you can be around the subject that long, and this excerpt from the review demonstrates why it might be so exceptional:

Whatever else you want to call her — and various names spring to mind while watching the movie — she seems an unlikely fit for Ms. Stern and Ms. Sundberg, whose documentaries include “The Devil Came on Horseback,” about the atrocities in Darfur, and “The Trials of Darryl Hunt,” about a wrongly convicted African American prisoner. However improbable, the match-up works, partly because the filmmakers don’t approach her as either an entertainment industry untouchable or one of its casualties. They’re sympathetic to her, but a touch cool, and certainly not fawning, which underscores their status as entertainment industry outsiders. This is just a look at a native in her natural habitat, sequins and feathered boas included.

Manohla Dargis can definitely write.

[dirac]

Thank you for posting this - I hadn't heard about this film. I have mixed feelings about Rivers, as I do about a comic whose shtick resembles hers, Don Rickles. However, Rickles was the subject of a wonderful documentary a few years ago that I enjoyed hugely and this one sounds good, too. John Landis, who directed the Rickles movie, had a genuine affection for his subject, however. I don't understand why it's "to their credit" that the filmmakers don't make Rivers look good - what would be so awful about that? But I'll decide when I see the movie.

[papeetepatrick]

however. I don't understand why it's "to their credit" that the filmmakers don't make Rivers look good - what would be so awful about that? But I'll decide when I see the movie.

I could be wrong, but I thought Dargis was just saying that they were trying to be objective , much as she talke about their 'entertainment industry outsider status', and the 'sympathetic...but not fawning'. I thought she just meant that insiders automatically would feel that they had to make her 'look good', rather than just document her. It reminds me a little of the Riefenstahl documentary 'The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl', which even contains critique in the title (I don't happen to care for making an apology in a title personally.) Dargis also might have used that particular phrase because Rivers has spent a lot of time making people look pretty bad, most famously Liz Taylor, and also in making herself look good--literally (whether or not you think she succeeded.)

I should add that people at BT have mentioned Dargis over the years many times, and she may or may not be that impressive to everybody, I just went on about her because I thought she covered the film in an exemplary way, I don't know...I thought it gave you more to go on in making up your mind to see it or not than most reviews do. There may be many who have read her over the years who don't think she's anything extraordinary.

[dirac]

Well, Rivers' style of humor is aggressive, similar to that of Rickles, and it stands out more because she's a woman. When she started out there were not only few female comics who made jokes like a man but few female comics of any kind. I'm sure that gave her some very hard edges.

(Jokes about Taylor were rife when she was Mrs. Senator Warner and expanded like the Hindenburg. I remember Bill Murray interviewing "Taylor" on SNL, offering up adoring softball questions while Belushi as Liz chewed bovinely on a piece of chicken and started choking on a bone.)

I don't always agree with Dargis but she's a very interesting writer.

[Drew]

I don't remember Rickles ever being as self-deprecatory as Rivers. Was he? As the review points out, Rivers aimed some of her cruelest remarks at herself.

[dirac]

I think you are right about that, Drew. Offhand I recall no instances of Rickles making jokes at his own expense. I would guess that too relates to Rivers' gender. Maybe on some level it could only be acceptable for Rivers to take it out on others if she was also taking it out on herself.

[Paul Parish]

So far as I'm concerned, Don Rickles wasn't funny. he made crowds nervous, gave them the Wilis; but he wasn't funny.

Joan Rivers is FUNNY. (I didn't see the Liz Taylor interview; I guess I could youtube it, though it just sounds like a flop.)

Wit, Dr Johnson said, is the unexpected copulation of ideas. Freud said you laugh when you realize you're NOT going to have to invest emotion.

I think both are right, and Rivers's typical joke unites their insights: viz "I saw Dolly Parton last night, such a sweet girl. She had twins, you know -- you didn't know? Yeah she breast-fed them -- they exploded."

[papeetepatrick]

Wit, Dr Johnson said, is the unexpected copulation of ideas. Freud said you laugh when you realize you're NOT going to have to invest emotion.

I think both are right, and Rivers's typical joke unites their insights: viz "I saw Dolly Parton last night, such a sweet girl. She had twins, you know -- you didn't know? Yeah she breast-fed them -- they exploded."

Perfect example for different perceptions of the same thing. I didn't think it was witty, nor did I laugh. I guess I'd agree it was typical Rivers, though, and her self-loathing, total sell-out mentality is not hard to fathom. I also liked Dargis's final paragraph, where she talked about the face being made up and 'coming together' and that 'her gaze was disconcerting' and whether she was 'daring us to look or begging us' and the filmmakers 'weren't saying'. Yes, they lucked up with the timing. In the old stand-up days as far back as the 60s, she quipped 'anybody that'll gimme a buck'. I don't know if that was a Freudian slip, though. If she'd won the Donald Trump Apprentice thing in time, she likely wouldn't have done this, which may yet be her one authentic work, even if she's just the paid object.

I sort of like the idea of PBS showing it as one of their Nature series, or maybe 'Frontline'.

[dirac]

I saw this over the holiday weekend and there are worse ways to spend ninety minutes. I would have wished for more material from the early part of Rivers' career but this was still an interesting, entertaining, and to some extent revealing movie. Rivers comes across far more sympathetically than you would guess from Dargis' review although there is no special effort to make her look good on the part of the filmmakers.

[dirac]

Audio interview with Rivers and the filmmakers, Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg.

[SandyMcKean]

..........and here is a ~30 minute interview from a couple of days ago btwn Rivers and Charley Rose (primarily on this movie):

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11112

[dirac]

Thanks so much, Sandy. I'll give it a listen when I have a chance. Like Rivers or not, she's not a dull interview.

[dirac]

The Charlie Rose interview is a good one, Rose asks Rivers more about what it was like working with Carson ("Go watch 'The Tudors,'" Rivers suggests) and Rivers notes what I had heard but the documentary does not indicate, that she already knew that she had reached the end of the line on Tonight when Fox made the offer for her own show. And like her daughter, Melissa, in the film, Rivers refers to her career as a sort of independent entity, "The Career."

[dirac]

Has anyone else seen this? Would be interested to hear others' reactions.

[papeetepatrick]

A friend of mine here went just this past Friday night, but I haven't got back in touch. Will report, because I want to know what she thought about it too.

[dirac]

Thanks, Patrick, that would be great.

[papeetepatrick]

Just talked to my friend Julie R., who thoroughly enjoyed it and said it was the kind of film to see in a theater. I think I know what she means by a certain kind of docu that is better in a theater, even if it's very different from this one--Patrick Keillor's films 'London' and 'Robinson in Space', both narrated by Paul Scofield, were much better in Film Forum than on DVD. You need the space on screen which is so much bigger, plus the occasional sense of being outdoors is easier to feel (outdoors scenes in the films I mean) in theaters than on TV screens, no matter how big or even a private movie room, etc. But she thought Rivers was sad, but treated very sympathetically, and that the audience all liked it and laughed a great deal.

[dirac]

Thanks for reporting the report, Patrick. I didn't find Rivers to be a particularly sad case myself but I can certainly understand how someone might.

[papeetepatrick]

It was interesting, because Julie is maybe 28 or 29, I was even surprised she went to that, but she's smart as a whip, already a successful lawyer. But it's the generation that didn't see Rivers on the Tonight Show or probably even see much of that show she did for a year or so in the early 90s. Rivers's invective was bound to seem more inoffensive when it was not longer current. I remember in the article the phrase about her struggle against irrelevancy. And the desperation always has seemed to be there. A little more than a year ago, on a walk around the 20s here, I saw that she was appearing in a little cabaret or club for a limited engagement, which might be somewhat like when she was starting out and singers and comics do that sort of thing literally anywhere. But she's never been an automatic audience draw: Back in '92, '93, or '94, she had that B'way show 'Sally Marr, and her Escorts', and I believe it only lasted a few weeks (which surprised me, and I sort of wanted to see it, too). That's the one about Lenny Bruce's mother, and the poster had Rivers in this rather coarse fur coat or fake fur coat. Not that it might not have been better than much of what was already making big money on B'way back then, but it was still too much of a 'new york provincial' thing by then, and B'way can't usually sustain such a thing. That's what's so astonishing about 'In the Heights' already running for almost two years, but I imagine that will be a one-time thing, and nothing else (as far as I know) has followed it up as a model for 'Dominican shows', etc., even though it's still doing fairly well in ticket sales. the 'Sally Marr' show sounds more like the Off-B'way kind of show in a smallish theater from back in the 60s, the Al Carmines era, and things like 'Wait a Minim' coming from Britain.

[dirac]

As Drew noted above, Rivers was always at least as hard on herself as she was on others. But female comedians are held to different standards, even today. Rivers doesn't come across as "desperate," at least not insofar as one thinks of the "desperate" as pathetically hanging on. She rebuilt her career from a very low point, no easy thing to do in her business, and had many ups and downs. Doubtless she would have preferred it if one of her talk show efforts had become a franchise but them's the breaks. She seems to be in good financial shape and works because a) she wants to and b) she likes living in a certain style and is willing to work to maintain it.

From Forbes:

Joan Rivers was not “a piece of work” when I interviewed her recently. In fact, she was extremely thoughtful, gracious, and thankful. While Joan is known for her work as an actress, comedian, and Celebrity Apprentice winner, she is also a businesswoman. In addition to her show business career, she is active in managing other businesses as well, including her jewelry line which has been on QVC for about 21 years and has been profitable since its inception. She told me her jewelry business is the most important business in her life.

[papeetepatrick]

The desperation I was thinking of was more specific, having to do with the cosmetic surgery. I think she didn't really want to look like a clown, which she is, but rather a glamorous woman, which others can decide she is or isn't. This is because the poster at that club where she was doing a gig a year or two ago showed lips that were not just worked on, but clearly misshapen by then. The surgery has made her more of a clown, which is all right. But I don't believe that's what she wanted the look to do. So--you do too much of cosmetic surgery and it always ends up looking as if trying to achieve a look that isn't yours, at very least. It doesn't matter to me that much, but I would say that the film probably has some importance, but that I know enough about her already, since she's always as 'out there' as possible, and you see the interviews on ET and other tabloid shows, and she's always pushing for something or other. I do see that I didn't find her as offensive as some back in the days when she was really big, and that my more negative assessment came later. Her pushiness made some of her viciousness funny, just by the fact that she always laughed at her own jokes really hard.

As Drew noted above, Rivers was always at least as hard on herself as she was on others

Being as hard on yourself as you are on others does not necessarily get you off the hook about how hard you were on others, it may make it look like you were just trying to get off the hook yourself or just being a masochist, which Rivers clearly is, to some degree. That's cool, but it was always her responsibility to take those chances. To me, her contribution is very minor, and doesn't hold up with the years. I was more fascinated that they would do a documentary on someone who has already spent her whole life documenting herself, not really in the piece itself. To see it for me would just be a superfluity, since she's always been on view.

[dirac]

Patrick, we'll have to agree to disagree. I do not always like Rivers' humor but there are male comedians who have gone further and nastier and I admit I don't understand your particular animus against her, but tastes differ. To blame women in show business for obtaining plastic surgery that doesn't turn out well or goes too far, in our culture of today, is truly to blame the victim, and that is most certainly not to my taste. One of the hallmarks of River's jokes since the beginning has been her lack of conventional prettiness and as she says more than once in the film, "Nobody wants to look at an old woman." That's partially her perception but it contains more than a grain of truth. It's too bad she didn't choose to age more naturally, particularly as it robbed her face of its mobility, which is very noticeable in the film's footage of a younger Rivers. Cloris Leachman did a sensational bawdy turn not too long ago on Comedy Central's Bob Saget roast, and she seemed to have struck a happy medium.

[papeetepatrick]

Patrick, we'll have to agree to disagree. I do not always like Rivers' humor but there are male comedians who have gone further and nastier and I admit I don't understand your particular animus against her, but tastes differ. To blame women in show business for obtaining plastic surgery that doesn't turn out well or goes too far, in our culture of today, is truly to blame the victim, and that is most certainly not to my taste. One of the hallmarks of River's jokes since the beginning has been her lack of conventional prettiness and as she says more than once in the film, "Nobody wants to look at an old woman." That's partially her perception but it contains more than a grain of truth. It's too bad she didn't choose to age more naturally, particularly as it robbed her face of its mobility, which is very noticeable in the film's footage of a younger Rivers. Cloris Leachman did a sensational bawdy turn not too long ago on Comedy Central's Bob Saget roast, and she seemed to have struck a happy medium.

I don't see that it's a matter of 'male comedians/female comedians' issue. And I do not consider her a 'victim' of her own self-chosen cosmetic alteration. I am not judging her based on equally (or more, and I concede that this is surely plausible, if not probable) vicious male comedians just because you are, and I am not going to. Nor do I judge Susan Sontag's arrogance based on Norman Mailer's arrogance (if his was worse, as it may have been, that does not excuse hers, which I have witnessed in public--in all its unbelievably boastful 'glory'). I am only bringing this up at all because you are talking about 'male comedians going further' and if they have, you may be right, but I am going to judge Rivers' vicious behaviour as I choose. She has nothing to do with anything 'women's movement' because no feminists spend time talking about how ugly and fat other women are, even if men do it when they shouldn't. But tolerance for the endless jokes about Elizabeth Taylor is okay if you don't consider it a feminist issue, as is Heidi Abramovitz being a 'bow-wow' or what-have-you. As for 'my particular animus towards' Rivers, I don't have one, I just don't like her, I find her gratuitously nasty, and I do not find her a 'victim'. If she wants to get endless cosmetic surgery and then say 'who wants to smell like a middle-aged Jewish woman', let her say it, but I do not have to find it funny and I do not find that it gets her off the hook for her nastiness to other people, in this case especially other women whom I do have some respect for.

Her cosmetic surgery has been precisely like Michael Jackson's and it's been well-documented. She has always been described as doing it frequently, being 'addicted to it', and 'getting a high' from it. I don't 'blame her for it', I just said that when I saw that poster, I don't even believe that it was a look that she wanted, because one of the lips had begun to look off-balance. I am just reporting what I saw. So maybe I'm wrong, maybe she loved the look. If so, FINE.

Edited to add: At this point, men seem to get all sorts of physical enhancements and surgeries that don't 'turn out well'. And they are doing more and more of it. That's another issue, but I don't see that they are 'victims' of 'this particular society' either, it's their choice if they don't think they're 'hot enough' and go get some dumb surgery that doesn't work perfectly. It's perhaps more sympathetic when people try to 'beautify themselves' if they haven't talked about how ugly other people are, maybe that's my 'particular animus', if you think there must be one.

Could be that it's poetic justice for one's looks to be critiqued if you've managed to make a mint critiquing other people's (or making public mockery of them). It could be that Liz Taylor's overeating was a form of 'victimhood' of her looks (the social pressure of 'being Taylor', etc.) just as Rivers's cosmetic surgery didn't work, but if that's spurious, frankly I don't care about this subject that much, and have said all I have to on it. I wish I hadn't posted this topic to begin with.