Forget hitting the ski slopes, grabbing bags of swag, or long, luxurious nights by the fire. Joan Rivers is working the Sundance Film Festival.

“It is so frustrating to be at Sundance because you can’t see anything but your own movie,” said Rivers, who attended the festival in support of the documentary “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” directed by Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg. The film premiered Monday night.

“Everybody’s saying, ‘Did you see this? Did you see this?’” the 76-year-old comedian said. “You go, ‘No! No! No!’”

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt charmed Sundance Film Festival fans a year ago with the romance “(500) Days of Summer.”

Now the “3rd Rock From the Sun” co-star is assailing Sundance crowds with a wild man role in “Hesher,” the tale of a heavy-metal anarchist who bursts into the lives of a grieving boy and his family.

A flurry of films that passed through Sundance — the teen dramas “Manic,” ”Mysterious Skin” and “Brick” — helped former child star Gordon-Levitt graduate into adult roles and showed he was more than just that alien kid in human form on his sitcom.

In the title role of “Hesher,” Gordon-Levitt bears little resemblance to the clean-cut young romantic of “(500) Days of Summer,” which earned him a Golden Globe nomination. His Hesher has long, stringy hair, tattoos everywhere and a mad-dog demeanor that shouts: “Mess with this guy at your own peril.”

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America Ferrera came to the Sundance Film Festival eight years ago as an unknown with only one professional acting gig behind her. She’s back as a star.

The star of “Ugly Betty” had her coming out party at Sundance in 2002 with “Real Women Have Curves,” the tale of a Mexican-American teen caught between her parents’ traditional working-class values and her own desire to go to college.

The film won the audience award as the festival favorite chosen by Sundance fans, earned Ferrera an acting prize, and became a calling card for a Hollywood future with “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” and its sequel, along with her TV show.

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A convenient truth greeted John Legend when the singer contacted documentary director Davis Guggenheim about collaborating on a film to examine the nation’s public-school system.

Legend had been working with the hip-hop group the Roots on an album exploring 1960s and ’70s music, which led to a discussion about the civil-rights movement and then education, which he considers the civil-rights issue of our time.

The Grammy winner whose albums include “Evolver” and “Get Lifted” thought Guggenheim, an Academy Award winner for his global-warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” was just the man to look at what’s wrong with America’s public schools.

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The recession has hit Ben Affleck. He’s out of work, saying goodbye to his beloved Porsche, losing his home, stuck moving back in with his parents.

Affleck stars in “The Company Men,” a Sundance Film Festival premiere in which he plays a man who loses all the material wealth he has accumulated after his high-paying job as a sales executive is eliminated in a round of cutbacks at his firm.

His character learns like many unemployed Americans that along with the stuff, he has lost a big part of his identity when his job goes away.

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Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival is going on the road for one night next winter.

The independent-film showcase is sending eight films playing at the festival for screenings in eight cities around the country on Jan. 28.

One film will go to each of the following cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Brooklyn, N.Y., Nashville, Tenn., Madison, Wis., Ann Arbor, Mich., and Brookline, Mass.

The directors of each film will travel along to introduce their work and answer audience questions afterward. The films will be announced after the festival releases its lineup in December.

The screenings will allow audiences around the country a taste of the festival that runs Jan. 21-31 in Park City, Utah.