Madam Of Lies -- It's Hard To Find Truth In Heidi Fleiss' World

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XX 1/2 "Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam," documentary by Nick Broomfield. Varsity. No rating; includes brief nudity, rough language.

Nick Broomfield's 1994 documentary, "Tracking Down Maggie," which deals with his failed attempts to land an interview with Margaret Thatcher, is as funny and cleverly sustained an exercise in futility as Michael Moore's "Roger & Me."

Broomfield has aimed lower with this follow-up piece, and he gets what he's after - to a degree.

But the cat-and-mouse game that made the other film such diabolical fun is missing. In its place is a series of interviews with a lot of people who seem less than candid, and ultimately less than worthy of all the attention.

The cast of characters includes Heidi Fleiss, a high-school dropout and Beverly Hills physician's daughter whose career as a Hollywood madame was ended by former L.A. police chief Daryl Gates - whose brother was allegedly one of her clients. Gates tells Broomfield that his brother had no idea she was a prostitute.

Her bitter ex-friend, Victoria Sellers (daughter of Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland), who calls her "an ice-cold bitch," is interviewed, and so is one of Heidi's former employees, a prostitute who talks about how boring it is to watch clients do drugs all night.

Broomfield is as much the star of the movie as the people he interviews. There are several extended scenes in which he drives around L.A., doing interviews by phone or looking for streetwalkers. One threatens to spit on his camera, and another accepts payment to tell him what she knows. For that matter, so does Gates, who gets $100 for his expertise.

Also central to the story as Broomfield tells it: Ivan Nagy, the Hungarian movie director ("Captain America II"), FBI informant, alleged pimp and girlfriend-abuser who became Heidi's on-again, off-again lover.

Nagy introduced her to the late Madam Alex, a cynical Hollywood brothel operator who loathes Nagy and thinks Fleiss got in trouble with the law because she was "flamboyant" and didn't follow the code that "Hollywood doesn't want to be revealed." Madam Alex accepts $2,500 to talk to Broomfield, but there are limits; eventually she tunes him out and hangs up on their phone conversation. Nagy calls him "an idiot."

As the movie winds down, Nagy insists that he and Fleiss are still lovers. Fleiss is just as adamant that they're not. He makes a phone call to her to prove to Broomfield that they're still intimate, and they certainly sound like they're still on good terms. She denies it, and so on . . .

Just about everyone lies, and Broomfield often catches them in the act. Fleiss, who finally submits to an extensive interview with Broomfield, eventually emerges as the brightest, most engaging person here.

She's not as sleazy as Nagy and Madam Alex, and she seems relatively frank about her motives, her talent for self-destructiveness (even though she seems less than forthcoming about her relationship with Nagy) and her addiction to a business in which payment of $40,000 for a modest "fantasy party" is nothing special.

Perhaps the most telling comment is a throwaway about her previous affair with Bernie Cornfield, one of the richest men in the world: "Heidi fell in love with his lifestyle."