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Joan Rivers shows another side in new documentary
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Joan Rivers shows another side in new documentary
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Sun Jun 13, 2010 11:42pm EDT
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Comedian Joan Rivers arrives for the premiere of the documentary ''Joan Rivers - A Piece Of Work'' during the 2010 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah January 25, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson
NEW YORK (Back Stage) - Joan Rivers has been a lot of things. She's been a star of late-night TV. She's been a menace to celebrities on the red carpet. She's been whatever word you call people who appear on reality television shows.
Entertainment | Film | People
But Rivers got her break in show business as a comedian, and it's as a comic that she still works most, touring the country nonstop and playing weekly shows at Manhattan clubs that very polite folks would describe as "intimate."
So it's surprising when, in the new documentary "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," she says she thinks of herself as an actor first -- and that when she's on stage in front of a microphone, she's simply acting like a standup.
"When I'm doing standup, it's who I would love to be," Rivers, 77, says at the end of a long day of interviews at Manhattan's Regency Hotel. ("She's been in heels all day," a young press rep says with awe as she throws herself onto a couch and slips on a pair of flats.)
Rivers is here to shill for the movie made about her by documentarians Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg, which follows a year in the performer's life and career. Roger Ebert called the film "one of the most truthful documentaries about show business I've seen," and it's garnered so much buzz that Rivers now seems poised to be this season's Betty White, a forgotten master of her craft rediscovered late in the game.
The IFC Films release earned a strong $171,500 after opening in seven theaters during the weekend in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It will expand to the top-15 markets next weekend, and the top-50 by the July 4 holiday weekend.
That Rivers believes the real her to be an actor is revealed in one of the film's most compelling storylines, which involves her self-aborted attempt to produce and star in a play about her life and bring it to Broadway. Riding a wave of good reviews and audience love from the Edinburgh International Festival, Rivers is stopped in her tracks by mixed reviews in London. She refuses to run the risk of a similar reception in New York and kills the project, recalling over and over again the trauma of her 1972 Broadway debut, "Fun City," which closed after just more than one week.
"I don't need at this age to come into New York and pick up The New York Times and read, 'I've never liked Joan Rivers,'" she says.
But the swooning over "A Piece of Work" since its February premiere at the Sundance Film Festival has emboldened Rivers. "I may bring it in anyhow. I may sneak it in Off-Off-Broadway at a Chinese laundry somewhere. You know, let them find it."
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