The documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work opens with a lingering full-screen closeup of the right half of the comedian’s 77-year-old face. Without makeup. Post all those surgeries and injections. Her veins are spidery, skin blotchy and pale, locks damp and plastered against her skull, upper lip seemingly immobile, eyebrow so thin you can count every hair. It’s arresting — a statement of intent on the part of filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg that their picture will not just be about surfaces.
Then, as Rivers begins slathering on lipstick, mascara, powder, foundation thick as paste, images of her younger self start appearing as shadows, along with voices from her past: Johnny Carson saying she’s going to be “a big star,” Ed Sullivan describing her as his “daffy little friend,” an introduction calling her “the groundbreaking female comedian.”
By the end of the accolades, she’s fully made up — the Joan Rivers we know — ready to talk trash, but first she has to wade through trash, down stairwells piled high with junk, through backstage hallways with peeling paint, onto a tiny dilapidated stage in Queens.
“This is my career,” she moans in that familiar rasp. “How depressing is this? Forty years in the f___ing business, and this is where you end up.”
Rivers no longer plays Vegas as often as she once did. Those dates are now taken by Kathy Griffin, one of a whole generation of female comedians who looked to her for inspiration. But there’s still a Joan Rivers industry headquartered in her wildly baroque Manhattan apartment. Gold, white, pink — “this,” she says, “is how Marie Antoinette would’ve lived if she’d had money.”