Who are you wearing? Ricki Stern, Joan Rivers and Annie Sundberg do the black carpet at Sundance. AP photo. Park City, Utah By Colin Covert No joke: Joan Rivers keeps unusual mementos when someone she loves passes on. At the Sundance Film Festival for the premiere of the cinema verite documentary "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," the comedian said she asks for ashes from their cremated remains and keeps them in "little Louis Vuitton cases." Her collection includes remains from her late husband Edgar Rosenberg, her pets, and her friend actor Vincent Price. "When I'm cremated – and I hope I'm dead – I'd like them sprinkled in with me, absolutely" she said Tuesday. The new film, an account of a year in her life comes from New Yorker Ricki Stern and Edina native Annie Sundberg. It's the duo's third film at Sundance, following their 2006 debut feature "The Trials of Darryl Hunt," the story of a man wrongfully convicted of rape and murder, and their Darfur documentary "The Devil Came on Horseback." They gained access to Rivers through Stern's mother, a longtime friend, but the film pulls no punches. It's an unfiltered look at an irrepressible, profane, politically incorrect personality. The first scene is an extreme close up examination of Rivers' surgically rearranged face. At one point she asks if she can call the chic Michelle Obama "Blackie O," and she later engages in an onstage shouting match with a heckler who says a joke about Helen Keller isn't funny. She jokes about her daughter Melissa, dropping the C-bomb. Yet the movie shows her vulnerable side as well. It plays like a gene-splice of the Anna Wintour biopic "The September Issue" and "Tyson," showing us what's behind the mask of a misunderstood icon. At 75, Rivers jokes that the documentary team followed her in hopes of filming her drop dead onstage, but she remains a tornado of ambition and energy. The film shows her booking cruise ship engagements, performing in auditoriums and dumpy comedy clubs, subjecting herself to a Comedy Central roast, selling her jewelry line on QVC, doing book signings, and staging an autobiographical one-woman show in Edinburgh and London. She even turns Thanksgiving into a marathon of meals-on-wheels charity catering followed by a grand dinner in her palatial apartment, which she describes as the kind of place Marie Antoinette would live "if she had the money." The source of her energy, she said, isn't discipline but "desperation." "I always go the extra mile. I try harder because I never thought I was the brightest one in class so I worked a little bit harder. I still do it. I'm Tweeting today from Sundance. I have prepared all these stupid little jokes. I've been doing it for a month and a half. That's just the way I work. Nothing's changed" since she was a struggling comedienne in the early 1960s kicking the doors open for other female comics. Rivers was the permanent guest host for Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show" until she left NBC to host an ill-fated Fox talk show. She was snubbed by Carson from that day until he died and blackballed by the network ever since, and she takes some pleasure in watching the collapse of NBC's late night schedule. "They shoulda hired me. My ratings were always better," she said, adding sarcastically, "not that I'm bitter." Rivers stirred up controversy as the first comedienne to make jokes on TV alluding to abortion, and she said she still considers nothing off limits. "Every Wednesday night I work at this little club in New York, the West Bank. I've been doing Haiti jokes. You've got to laugh at it, it's so bad. Their major import was AIDS. You've got to laugh. We're still gonna work hard" for disaster relief, "but you gotta bring it into where we can deal with it." "I just go out there and say what I think is funny. Thank God I was born in New York, where they laugh. If I was born in Salt Lake City…it's lovely but you know what I mean. It would have taken a little longer." The film shows Rivers at vulnerable moments. As she reads unfavorable notices of her London play, she's clearly hurt. But allowing that kind of access was a given once she agreed to let camera crews into her life, she said. "If you're doing a documentary it should be a documentary. If you want to see people ass-kissing you, go watch 'Biography.'" Ever in motion, Rivers and her daughter Melissa will soon be back on TV in a reality show titled "Mother Knows Best," she announced. "I'll be moving into her house while I look for an apartment in L.A. and she's already hysterical." She'll be back on the Oscars red carpet and she's working on another book. "A million balloons, and let one stay up," she prayed.
