Screened at South by Southwest

AUSTIN - Your average actress, upon getting fired from a play by Woody Allen, would tie one on, sit home for a week or two, then start crafting a fantastic cocktail-party anecdote about the time Woody told her "You look retarded." Annabelle Gurwitch, on the other hand, turned that anecdote into a full-time job.

The actress and writer, stung by rejection, started by plying showbiz friends for their own humiliating tales. She then put together a stage show. She started writing a book. And now she has made a movie that, while unlikely to set the documentary market afire, is entertaining enough to succeed as a niche theatrical or TV release.

Documentarians Chris Bradley and Kyle Labrache keep things moving at a nice pace while indulging Gurwitch's possibly too frequent attempts to tie the expanding film in to the event that inspired it. (Allen-style white-on-black credits are a nice touch.) The writer may never dig very deep into the insights of some interviewees - like her rabbi's Jung quote, "Every defeat for the ego is a victory for the soul" - but she certainly has turned her misfortune into an entertainment most of us can identify with.

The film's most enjoyable section is the first, where Gurwitch sometimes seems to be following around the crew of "The Aristocrats": A half-dozen of that film's interviewees are here, along with other performers like David Cross and Anne Meara, telling of the jobs they had - working in a toll booth, tool and die manufacturing, checking coats at a nightclub - and the reasons they lost them - talking too much, being Jewish, wearing a coat hanger as a hat.

The one-on-one interviews give way to very funny footage from the stage show, after which Gurwitch begins to meet nonshowbiz folks with their own stories to tell. Smelling a project in the making, the writer begins collecting newspaper articles and interviewing policy experts.

She visits with Anita Epolito, who was famously fired by an employer who decreed that employees could not smoke cigarettes, even when away from work. She hangs out with a White House chef who was given the boot by the Bushes. Naturally, she visits a town where General Motors layoffs loom on the horizon.

If that's starting to sound like a Michael Moore film, it shouldn't. Gurwitch is much more interested in entertainment than in rabble-rousing, or even in serious investigation. Yes, the movie talks to some serious experts (former labor secretary Robert Reich, for example) and covers topics ranging from the salary gulf between CEOs and average workers to the growing industry devoted to helping companies fire their workers. But the focus is always personal: How did it feel when you were fired? Why did this happen to me? How do I move on?

The film can never stray too far from comedy. Gurwitch pulls a stunt (clearly doomed from the start) in which she gets Andy Dick a job running a taco cart; later, actor Tate Donovan stages a puppet play about some mortifying coincidences concerning a movie role he lost to Matthew Broderick.