Joan Rivers can be both alienating and endearing, often within the span of two sentences. Love her or hate her, it’s impossible not to respect the unstoppable comedian, red-carpet interviewer, reality show contestant and QVC pitchwoman, to name just a few of her endeavors over the course of five decades in show business.
Rivers takes her latest turn in the spotlight in “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” an exhaustingly candid portrait by respected social-issue documentary makers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg (“The Devil Came on Horseback”). The filmmakers followed the comic for the entirety of her 76th year, a daunting proposition that Rivers agreed to — on her terms, naturally.
“I’d just seen two biographies that I despised, that told you nothing, one about a fashion magazine and the other about a fashion designer,” Rivers recalled during an interview in a San Francisco hotel suite. “I don’t want to say which two. So when Ricki and Annie approached me, I said, ‘I’d love to do it, but I don’t want it to be talking heads saying, ‘Oh, Joan Rivers is my friend.’ I gave them full access.”
Rivers sat with her back to the window, ignoring the stunning view from high atop Nob Hill in order to focus on her interviewer. As is clear from the first few minutes of “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” (which closed the San Francisco International Film Festival last month; hence Rivers’ visit), the task at hand is always her priority. The 84-minute documentary also catalogs the energy and persistence required to maintain a career in a youth-obsessed culture.
“It’s not just a day in the life of Joan Rivers,” she declared. “It’s the work and the backstage and the business and what you have to do to keep it going and fighting the age thing and fear.”
One doesn’t associate fear, or self-pity, with this archetypal tough cookie. She owns a framed copy of a letter written by Helen Keller, who serves as her point of reference and, characteristically, also pops up in a joke in her act.
“I don’t have any role models,” Rivers said with a short laugh. “Anyone that survived a concentration camp. And was able to come back and make a life. I had a neighbor, when I first got married, who had been on a train to Auschwitz with her mother. And the mother pushed her out of the cattle car and said, ‘You’ll be safe because the SS won’t admit they lost a little girl, and the Germans won’t shoot a little girl.’ And she never locked her door in New York, and she said to me, ‘I’ve been through it all.’ She went on, got married, had children. How do you live and go on? Those are the people you have such respect for.”
Rivers has endured her own miseries, of course, notably the 1987 suicide of her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, in the wake of her short-lived late-night talk show on Fox. But she downplays her suffering, then mines it for a joke.
“I wasn’t watching my mother starve or my father being beaten on the head,” she said. “You think about ups and downs, it’s nonsense: ‘Gee, I gained four pounds.’ ‘Gucci’s out of the shoes. It’s a bad day. They didn’t have my size.’ ”
This is vintage Rivers, pairing tragedy with banality, the important with the trivial. She fervently believes that her way of making people laugh also gets them to think.
“I never get on a soapbox onstage,” she declared. “But I do make a few points. I’m glad to remind [audiences] about Mel Gibson, glad to remind them about Hitler, glad to remind them about Anne Frank. But I’ll do it in a way that she was a whiner, ’cause she had a very good apartment. Which in New York is true. It would go for $3,000 a month. She had an eat-in kitchen, and they’re complaining.”
For every Jewish listener or reader who finds that offensive, she’ll get an “amen” for her unwavering stance on Israel.
“It’s very easy to still hate Jews,” Rivers asserted. “Nobody would raise a finger if Israel went under. Not a finger. If Israel had the earthquake instead of Haiti, I don’t think Brad Pitt would have been standing out there screaming and crying with Angelina. You can tell me I’m wrong. Let’s hope we never have to know. I think the Obama administration’s treatment of Israel is outrageous. Outrageous. When we are the only sane nation in that part of the world.”
Never one to mince words, the comedian set the record straight about her main quibble with “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.”
“What they didn’t get in the movie is I do have friends,” she said with a raspy laugh. “You don’t see me having dinner with somebody, or going to the theater. It looks like, ‘My God! This woman walks alone.’ ”
“Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” opens Friday, June 11 at the Embarcadero Center Cinema in San Francisco and June 25 at the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley and the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.