Fleiss doesn’t do herself, towns any favors with documentary

At this point, Nye County really should just ban recording equipment altogether.

It's hard for me to think about Pahrump without recalling some of the horrifying moments from "Pleasure for Sale," February's overly grim Sundance Channel documentary series set at the Chicken Ranch. Now comes "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal" (9 p.m. today, HBO), which when it isn't busy trashing the county's most notorious resident, doesn't do Pahrump or nearby Crystal any favors.

The 70-minute documentary begins with Fleiss in a posh hotel suite, needing help to free her expensive-looking heel from the cuff of her pantsuit before she can be interviewed, and it ends with her in the desert, covered in filth, picking up rocks and screaming at a burro.

I'm not sure if filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato -- whose previous documentary subjects have included Tammy Faye Bakker, Monica Lewinsky and the movie "Deep Throat" -- set out to make Fleiss look bad, if they couldn't resist once they got to Pahrump, or maybe that's really the best they could make the troubled former "Hollywood Madam" look.

But Fleiss certainly didn't give the duo much reason to be sympathetic.

According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, she abruptly shut down filming after 10 months because of a dispute over what the filmmakers could show.

And given that Fleiss, for a variety of reasons, never even applied for a license to open Heidi's Stud Farm, a Crystal brothel catering to women that was the sole reason for the documentary, Bailey and Barbato weren't left with much to work with.

As a result, "The Would-Be Madam" is as unfocused as its star. The rambling narrative somehow manages to weave together local political corruption, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bed-ridden former madam who lived next door to Fleiss, a discussion of Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree" and a commercial for Pahrump's Carlson Rock Depot.

Watching "The Would-Be Madam" last month, it seemed mean-spirited. In light of recent felony drug charges filed against Fleiss, it seems downright cruel.

Onscreen, the often-disheveled Fleiss talks openly about her drug addiction, especially "that white trash drug" crystal meth. "You can tell when someone does drugs," she says. "They just have that look." The filmmakers then cut to a shot of a dead-eyed Fleiss sporting what I can only assume is "that look."

"I don't wanna be that person," she continues. "I don't wanna have that look." But if that is indeed "that look," she wears it for great portions of the film.

It's tough to shake the feeling that Fleiss is being taken advantage of throughout the documentary. There's an unnecessary shot of a young, topless Fleiss and one of what appears to be a stray tumbleweed inside her home.

She's shown talking about how horrible she is at fellatio and making curious statements such as "I'm not a religious person, but I do feel I carry the soul of someone who was exterminated in a concentration camp."

And her interactions with the assortment of exotic birds she inherited from her neighbor, which eventually become the closest thing to a theme the documentary can muster, are bizarre to the point of being heartbreaking.

Sheila Nevins, president of HBO documentaries and family films, also gets in on the act, concluding the interview around which "The Would-Be Madam" is structured by asking "Are those your tits?" This, of course, prompts Fleiss to discuss her various cosmetic surgeries.

If Fleiss was comfortable with all this, I can't even begin to imagine what she didn't want the duo to film.

But it's not just her. Nye County suffers some collateral damage as well.

Bailey and Barbato seem a little too pleased with themselves for discovering a messy-faced little girl eating cheese and crackers inside Pahrump's Jiffy Mart.

And you can almost hear them squeal with glee as Kathy Bragg, owner of The Short Branch Saloon and a vocal Fleiss critic, takes cameras on a tour of Crystal's mobile homes and rusted-out cars, showing off a "beautiful" manufactured home and a neighbor's yard that is "really pretty when it's not brown, because she has a lawn service."

If nothing else, "The Would-Be Madam" offers viewers a sense of what might have been. The Stud Farm plans Fleiss shows off -- some of the more sexually explicit architectural renderings you'll ever see -- are gorgeous.

The swingin', Space Age design suggests the kind of place Jane and Judy Jetson might go for a little action.

And while there's no telling whether the Stud Farm would have made any money, it's a shame she never got the chance to build it.

Both the documentary and Fleiss could use a happy ending.

Christopher Lawrence's Life on the Couch column appears on Mondays. E-mail him at clawrence@reviewjournal.com.