Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam

Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam

I dread to see the day when things actually work out for Nick Broomfield. The day when he gets every interview he wants for his documentaries, doesn’t run out of money, and the day when his (sometimes frankly ludicrous) conspiracy theories are proven 100% correct by all parties involved. For it is the beauty of the Broomfield documentary that everything that can goes wrong, does. His films are seemingly all about chasing his chosen subject for an interview that either never takes place or takes months to arrange after numerous false starts. In lieu of these delayed/non-existent interviews it is the colourful characters that he meets, usually somewhat peripheral to the subject’s life, and the interviews he has with them that really make his films as entertaining as fuck. Remember the scary looking guy in Kurt & Courtney? The one who claimed Courtney Love paid him to off Kurt? There’s a 99.999999999% chance he was full of absolute shit, but it matters not. What matters is that for better or worse he has become a part of Broomfield’s adventure. It doesn’t even matter that half of these nutters probably make up stuff just to get some cash (and they do get paid – instead of shying away from this fact he is only too willing to lovingly portray them as the whores they are), the truth is they make for a great documentary.

Heidi Fleiss is no different. The truth about this infamous Hollywood Madam is basically irrelevant. What matters is the back-and-forth contradictory stories and sparring between the two great influences in Heidi’s life: her much older former lover/pimp/ex-Hollywood director of shit like Captain America, and her bed-ridden former Madam/current business rival. Both claim the other is the cause of the downfall of Fleiss (Broomfield pretends that the documentary is about discovering how an innocent girl like her could get mixed up in this crazy world of whoring. Sure it is.), but both sides of the story lead to the same shadowy underworld figure that the film takes an interesting detour to try and chase down. Classic Broomfield. Always playing the innocent, the idiot Brit, he is at his passive antagonising best here, and it is great entertainment wondering how his subjects don’t realize he is constantly provoking them – in fact in Heidi Fleiss most of his interview subjects have the smug look of people who think they are playing this hapless filmmaker instead of what is obviously vice versa. Great stuff.