Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam

Those who take a look at this hoping for a wild romp thru a world of sex, drugs, big money, celebrities, and California sun-baked sleaze are in for a little surprise. Yes, there is some of that, but mostly this is a mind-boggling tale of screwy relationships and endless back-stabbing. Heidi Fleiss, the daughter of a liberal doctor and a prostitute turned madame, is at the center of this story. Her prosecution made headlines in the early 1990s, and this movie attempts to understand her and her labyrinthine relationships with sleazy charmers like elderly Madame Alex and second-rate producer-director Ivan Nagy. Broomfield and his crew do a good job of trying to come to grips with this odd, and very L.A., cast of characters, many of whom seem unable to not perform when a camera is turned on them. Interesting secondary characters pop up, like a shadowy underworld character named Cookie; L.A. police chief Darryl Gates, who accepts a nice cash sum before his interview; crooked top detective Mike B. (can't think of his name right now); and porn stars Ron Jeremy and Tisa. At the end, it is still not clear who has done what to whom and why, but you do have some insight into the dark side of the sunny Southland.

I felt so trashy while watching Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madame, yet it was so engrossing I just couldn't help continuing on. It's an expose of a woman who ran a high class prostitution ring in LA in the early 90s. Nick Broomfield interviews his subjects (call girls, the director of Starsky & Hutch, an elderly madame who looks and acts exactly like the Egg Lady in Pink Flamginos, a gruff voice on the phone belonging to "Cookie" the bodyguard, and eventually Heidi herself) again and again, eventually trapping them all in a web of lies. It's impossible to figure out who is telling the truth, if the people involved are just having a chuckle at Broomfield's expense, or if they're all so wigged out on coke that they legitimately have no idea what is going on.

In exchange for interviews, Broomfield actually hands his subjects huge wads of cash on camera, so at first he seems like the sucker (or, oddly, like he's applying the prostitute/john relationship to the structure of his documentary), but really he's buying a career move while they're just making themselves look silly. Overall I think Broomfield had the last laugh by exposing how absolutely ludicrous some of these Hollywood types are.

Broomfield is a shameless sensationalist, but he certainly knows how to bring out the hilarity and surreal nature of otherwise serious subjects.

Broomfield takes a look at Hollywood decadence, not just the world of porn here. This documentary should be viewed by anyone who still has naive notions about Tinseltown i.e. what really goes on behind the scenes.

Heidi Fleiss is interesting, I suppose, with her boundless naivety (while fancying herself a sly vixen) and greed, but it's really her Hungarian pimp/porn-master/sex-partner and other lesser-known seedy individuals (like the fat old madam who hates both the Hungarian and Fleiss) who catch one's full attention here. These people make Ron Jeremy look utterly dull by comparison (yes, he's in this, too - no surprise there). Even a forgotten Peter Sellers daughter makes one or two appearances, letting us see what happens to some of the offspring that aren't as lucky as David Arquette or Anjelina Jolie. The mad relationships between various inidviduals here almost make for a sort of soap-opera: there is treason, bickering, back-stabbing and all that other stuff. Wonderful.

It's just a pity that the movie was made before Fleiss hooked up with Tom Sizemore. Having him scream into the camera would have been fun.

Not a minute of this film is dull.

Intrepid documentarian Nick Broomfield looks to uncover the real story behind the notorious Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss in this fascinating, repellent film.

Broomfield is, as usual, totally fearless, and uses his oh-so upright British bearing ("I'm doing a piece for the BBC")to mask the fact that he's a complete gutter-crawling slimebag, able to hold court with the sleaziest characters imaginable. At first, Fleiss won't grant Broomfield an interview (she is arrested for violating her probation shortly after he arrives in Los Angeles) so he pursues her friends and associates with tunnel-vision tenaciousness.

All the neon slime is on display here: pimps, hookers, adult film stars, drug dealers, crooked cops, shady figures of all shapes and sizes. Broomfield goes after them all without fear.

The two people he spends the most time with are Madam Alex, a creepy old-world crone from Hungary who controlled the Hollywood flesh trade before Heidi stole it from her, and Ivan Nagy, a smiling, brutish pimp-drug-dealer-movie-director (also Hungarian) and Heidi's ex-boyfriend who also (supposedly) was the one who narc'd on her to the police. The two spend their time on camera telling wild, half-baked stories and making accusations against each other that criss-cross and contradict so often that eventually it becomes clear that they ARE ALL lying to some degree.

Fleiss does finally give Broomfield an interview and she comes off quite well. Intelligent, lively, and a keen observer of human nature, she clearly is no dunce, although its tough to believe she could actually go toe-to-toe with either Nagy or Alex.

In the end, because he's on screen so much and is such a persistent presence, "Hollywood Madam" is more about Broomfield and his relentless desire to get at the truth than anything. At times, one can only marvel at the audacity of this guy: whether badgering known drug-dealers and pimps until they all but plead with him to GO AWAY, or making what amounts to crank calls to an underworld enforcer (and possible ex-Moussad hit man) Broomfield walks through it all with a zeal it is hard not to admire.

This is an odd documentary because, as a previous reviewer said here, you don't want to watch but you do. You're drawn in by director Nick Broomfield's smooth and ever-so-earnest British-style interviewing techniques while forgetting that he's talking to extremely unpleasant and even odious people (including Heidi Fleiss herself).

This Hollywood madam was apparently at the top of the heap in her 'profession,' and it's a tribute to her manipulative skills (I guess) that she was able to do it. She must also be a terrific actor: she looks at times like a wounded little girl, so it's hard to imagine how she was able to reach the 'top,' if that's the word. That's one of the keys to this woman's character, it seems to me: she is such a sleazy opportunist that she seems capable of talking herself into, or out of, anything. If this is true (and the evidence in this film would indicate that), how or why would we believe ANYTHING she says, including her more-or-less 'confessional' at the end? This is a hard-core, professional liar at work.

Fleiss is just one of a cast of people in this film who deliberately and systematically deceive each other, so much so that they have lost touch with what is, or isn't, truth. They no longer know where the line of truth is, and their own glaring self-deception is evident in Broomfield's camera.

You're left quite exhausted by the talking heads, and you realize that the documentary has little redeeming value -- we don't know anything more about who these characters REALLY ARE than when the film started.

In short, everyone is lying here, everyone is driving the viewer down a very convoluted series of rhetorical streets, everyone is playing that famous 'blame game'. What this film needs is some kind of resolution, some denouement. We don't get one, but we still watch. It's interesting to observe ourselves being manipulated by professional liars, and also interesting to see that director Broomfield emerges as a pretty nifty manipulator himself.