BEFORE: Another way that I've been trying to combat documentary fatique is by watching more fictional episodic TV for the duration - I started watching "Good Omens" on Amazon Prime a couple nights ago, two episodes per night, so I should be done with that this weekend, or Monday at the latest. Then maybe I'll move on to "Stranger Things" season 3, and then I still have a couple episodes of "Law & Order: SVU left from May, that should see me through the last week of documentaries, and I'll be back on to fiction movies before too long.
Joan Rivers carries over from "Serial Mom", where she played Joan Rivers.
THE PLOT: A documentary on the life and career of Joan Rivers, made as the comedienne turns 75 years old.
AFTER: I know it feels like Joan Rivers just passed away a year or two ago, but come September, it will really be five years since she died. But it was in 2008 that a documentary filmmaker decided to follow her around for a year, and it turned out that they picked a really good year - that was the year that she won "The Celebrity Apprentice", though those episodes of the show aired in 2009, and then she later came back as a boardroom advisor in the 2013 season. So this film covers some of the drama that took place behind the scenes after Joan's daughter Melissa got "fired" from the show by Donald Trump, and Joan had to keep working with/competing against Annie Duke, the famous poker player who had apparently engineered Melissa's demise. Hey, living well is the best revenge, but winning a reality TV show could be a close second.
Outside of "The Celebrity Apprentice", this documentary has a lot of footage of Joan Rivers hustling, saying that she "needs money" as she travels across the country, doing stand-up gigs in various casinos, also arranging book signings in nearby towns, and bouncing between appearances on home shopping channels, the event that awarded George Carlin (posthumously) with the Mark Twain Prize for humor, and the Comedy Central Roast in her honor. The fact that she constantly had to keep working to "feed the beast" really reminded me of those rock music docs I watched last year, where bands like the Grateful Dead or the Rolling Stones could simply never take a year off, because they had hired so many friends and family to work for them, and so if they didn't go out on tour every summer, it meant that all those people would be out of work or forced to take other jobs. So it seems that Joan Rivers and Keith Richards had a lot in common, they might love still working in their 70's, but the truth is that financially, they're unable to retire, even if they wanted to. You'd think that there would be some way off the entertainment roller coaster, but that just doesn't seem to be the case.
Of course, there's also a rundown of her career, dating back to the early days of TV with Jack Paar and "Candid Camera", but she didn't really break through until an appearance on "The Tonight Show" hosted by Johnny Carson in 1965. This led to many more appearances on Carson's show, her being named the "permanent guest host" for any time that Carson was sick or busy, and then later of course there was a notable falling out with Carson and NBC when she took an offer to host her own talk show on Fox Network. Even though that show failed, the friendship with Carson was ruined and Joan didn't appear on any NBC shows for decades, not until "Celebrity Apprentice", anyway.
There's so much of her career that they had to skip over, though - narrating segments for "The Electric Company" on PBS probably didn't need mentioning, but what about the fact that she directed a film called "The Rabbit Test", in which Billy Crystal played a pregnant man? This was years before Schwarzenegger did the same thing with "Junior"... And what about "Spaceballs"? "Hollywood Squares"? "Fashion Police"? Even her daytime talk show barely gets a mention here...
But I get it, the focus here was supposed to be on this one year in her life. After the closing credits, they showed Joan joking with ABC news anchor John Muir, and she claims that the documentary crew is secretly hoping that she'd die during the year-long filming period, that they'd get "lucky". Well, no, that didn't happen, but they were only off by five or six years. In the meantime, we get to see her here after so much plastic surgery that she really resembles the "Madame" marionette that used to perform on TV in the 1970's. It's kind of sad that she just wasn't able to grow old gracefully, I wish they could have digged a little deeper here to really get into why she leaned so hard into the botox and the facelifts, was it just because of vanity or was she afraid to appear as old as she was?
Seeing her apartment was fascinating, though, same goes for her drawers full of index cards with all of her jokes on them. I wonder what happened to her obsessively catalogued joke collection, did she will it to someone? For that matter, who's going to deliver meals on Thanksgiving by limousine to a select few homebound patients?
Also starring Melissa Rivers (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Kathy Griffin (last seen in "Streets of Fire"), Don Rickles (last heard in "Zookeeper"), Bill Sammeth, Jocelyn Pickett, Larry A. Thompson, Graham Reed, Dr. Joy Brown, Sean Foley, with archive footage of Richard Belzer (last seen in "The Comedian"), George Burns (last seen in "The Polka King"), George Carlin (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Jack Paar (ditto), Garry Shandling (ditto), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Lily Tomlin (ditto), Phyllis Diller, Annie Duke, Brad Garrett (last heard in "Christopher Robin"), Greg Giraldo, Denis Leary (last heard in "Ice Age: Collision Course"), Bill Maher (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), Donald Trump (ditto), David Muir (last seen in "Life"), Edgar Rosenberg, Jeffrey Ross (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Jon Stewart (last seen in "I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney Story"), Ed Sullivan.
RATING: 5 out of 10 filled-up datebook pages
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