Heidi Fleiss, The Would Be-Madam of Crystal chronicles the infamous Hollywood Madam's attempt to open the first legal brothel for female clients in the tiny desert town of Crystal, Nevada.
Heidi Fleiss, The Would Be-Madam of Crystal chronicles the infamous Hollywood Madam's attempt to open the first legal brothel for female clients in the tiny desert town of Crystal, Nevada. Leaving behind her glamorous life in LA and the memory of three years in the penitentiary, Heidi soon discovers that she faces a mountain of opposition, including the need to convince local authorities she's fit to run a brothel despite being a convicted felon. In an unexpected twist, Heidi befriends her next door neighbor, Marianne, a now-destitute and bedridden former Madam who lives alone with a dazzling collection of exotic birds. As Heidi's problems mount, she finds herself irresistibly drawn into Marianne's world despite an avowed aversion to emotional attachments. Priding herself on self-sufficiency, Heidi ultimately struggles alone with her inner demons -- including a predilection for methamphetamines -- as she tries to keep her dream in sight through a combination of grit, humor and sheer perseverance.
Heidi Fleiss, the former Hollywood Madam turned laundromat owner whose attempt to build a brothel for women in the tiny Nevada town of Crystal was the subject of World of Wonder's poignant 2008 HBO doc Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal, has announced she's abandoned that enterprise. Instead, Fleiss, who lives in nearby Parhump, says she wants to sell the 60 acres she bought in Crystal and focus her attention on the alternative-energy industry. "That's where the money is," she says. "That's the wave of the future. I don't want to work so hard and deal with the nonsense in the sex business." And now, rather than building a brothel, she's thinking of erecting her (wet) dream home, something along the lines of Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Ennis House, the Mayan-inspired hilltop mansion overlooking Los Angeles. (Source)
"To Bailey and Barbato's credit, their documentary Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal neither sneers nor chuckles at Fleiss, even as it watches her go through a thoroughly dispiriting and self-induced collapse," says Chris Barsanti, succinctly summing up the poignantly funny documentary in a thoughtful review on Contactmusic.com. The DVD is available now on Amazon.
"While [the film] allows viewers to see the train wreck coming in agonizingly slow motion, and makes no bones about what a terminally confused and thoughtless creature Fleiss appears to be, there is little sense of schadenfreude here. What could have been another sickly addition to the ranks of works celebrating and mocking celebrity devastation becomes instead a rather sad portrait of slowly encroaching, drug-addled dementia."
The poignant, funny documentary Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal premieres tonight on HBO after pleasing and disturbing folks at the recent Los Angeles Film Festival. In honor of the film's TV debut, we suppose, Defamer stopped by World of Wonder's Hollywood Boulevard headquarters to ask how directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato survived the time they spent in the Nevada desert with their notoriously difficult subject. It's Defamer''s Five Questions post, but it seems like more. (Photo: Craig L Moran)
RB: We were filming at a time when Heidi was struggling with addiction, and we're not really into making "addiction" films. It's not really our oeuvre.
FB: No film is easy to make, but this one was especially difficult to make. As a documentary filmmaker, you're kind of a sponge. You soak up whatever the person is going through, and Heidi was going through lots of nasty stuff. It wasn't a very pleasant experience.
RB: You'd sort of get contact highs and contact lows.
"She does not edit herself. In a world where everyone has their own reality show, in a world where we all speak 'television' fluently, Heidi continues to speak her own language." – Randy Barbato about Heidi Fleiss, the subject of his and Fenton Bailey's doc, Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal, to The Hollywood Reporter. (Doc airs July 21 at 9PM on HBO. See also: NY Sun and SF Chronicle)
Popbytes' MK watched a copy of the WOW documentary Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal last night, and "I freakin' LOVED it," he tells us, "and cried my eyes out when she talks about her bird Dalton dying. I swear I was never a bird lover but after owning my parrot Max for a little over a year – they are AMAZING creatures – smart & loving!" Read what he has to say about the movie, which premieres on HBO on July 21.
Five months after her arrest in Pahrump, Nevada, where she's still attempting to open a brothel to serve women, Heidi Fleiss has been formally charged with unlawful use of methamphetamine and possession of the painkiller hydrocodone without a prescription. Both charges are felonies and stem from her arrest in early February when she was pulled over on suspicion of DUI and cops discovered unmarked prescription narcotics in her vehicle. "And that's all that's in there?" she joked to a Las Vegas newspaper when asked to comment. "That's a good day." She said she'll be entering rehab for the third time, possibly next week, because "I have a bit of a substance abuse problem." That problem is evident at times in Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal, the funny and poignant World of Wonder documentary that screened recently at the Los Angeles Film Festival and premieres on HBO July 21. "I'm not going to watch it," she said, "because I know I look like a maniac at times." (EOnline)
In today's New York Post, Adam Buckman reviews Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey's Heidi Fleiss doc, which premieres on HBO July 21. He seems to like it:
"AS if the story of Heidi Fleiss could not get any stranger, I submit for your approval Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal. Be prepared for the documentary event of the summer season. Get ready to 'cross over into...The Twilight Zone.' Those were the words of Rod Serling almost 50 years ago, but they surely apply to the present-day world of Heidi Fleiss, the infamous Hollywood Madam who is now the Birdwoman of Pahrump, Nev." (Continue reading)
We have three pairs of tickets for the 10PM screening tomorrow of Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey's Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal which just premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival. That's tomorrow, June 28, at the Landmark Theaters on Pico @ Westwood Boulevard in Westwood. The first three people to send an email to wowreport@worldofwonder.net with HEIDI FLEISS in the subject line will win the tickets. It's that simple. Go for it.
Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey's documentary Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal, which screens June 26 and 28 at the Los Angeles Film Festival (and airs on HBO July 21), is, says Gabriel Snyder in his "Wonder Boys" piece on the filmmakers in the new W magazine, "a character study of a person who has been vilified in the public eye. It doesn’t shy away from Fleiss’s unsavory side: Her narcissistic attachment to her tabloid persona is front and center, as is her apparent drug abuse, but so is her humanity. In fact, the film is surprisingly sympathetic; one memorable scene shows Fleiss befriending an elderly woman in a nursing home." (W via Defamer; photo at left: Sian Kennedy)
Virtually on the eve of World of Wonder's Heidi Fleiss documentary premiering in the "Guilty Pleasures" program at the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 26 and 28, comes this glowing review from Film Stew, an excerpt from which follows:
What’s most remarkable about this latest work from the dynamic documentary duo of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato is the film’s unvarnished candor. With the passage of time and a few more hard knocks, Fleiss is obviously willing now to let it all hang out, in a way that was only hinted at in Nick Broomfield’s earlier 1995 documentary Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam. Commingling a gossamer black and white sit-down interview with snippets of Fleiss’ very unglamorous attempts to get her stud farm off the ground in Pahrump, Nevada, The Would-Be Madam of Crystal amounts to one of the most memorable L.A. scandal postscripts ever captured on film. Imagine O.J. Simpson unburdening himself during 18 holes of Florida golf, or Robert Blake resurfacing from some hideout with Baretta bravado, and you begin to get a sense of how special this latest B & B concoction is.
World of Wonder's observational documentary, Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal, which spends time with the infamous Hollywood Madam in the Nevada desert as she attempts to open Heidi's Stud Farm, premieres at the Los Angeles Film Festival (June 19-29) as one of its "Guilty Pleasures" screenings. (Defamer)
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