MOVIES : A Heidi’s-Eye View : What does Heidi Fleiss think of ‘Hollywood Madam,’ a tell-all documentary about her escapades? Don’t worry, she’ll be blunt.

Heidi Fleiss. You know the name and lots of people knew the number. Unfortunately, several of those people were the wrong people, and consequently she now faces seven years in jail for pandering, conspiracy, tax evasion and money laundering.

British filmmaker Nick Broomfield lays out the whole sordid mess for our perusal in “Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam,” a documentary that opens theatrically Friday after a cable airing last year. Charting the rise and fall of a prescient high school dropout who saw an opportunity and took it, the film co-stars Madam Alex, L.A.’s late grande dame of prostitution, who taught Fleiss the tricks of the trade, and Ivan Nagy, the ex-boyfriend who testified against Fleiss in both her state and federal trials and is currently making a healthy profit on “Heidi’s Girls,” a series of pornographic CD-ROMs he produced after her arrest. Making some cameo appearances are various hookers, drug dealers, porn stars, corrupt cops, henchmen and freelance losers who keep the wheels of L.A.’s underbelly grinding.

Most of the people in Broomfield’s film, which is structured like a pulp mystery novel, come across as such accomplished liars that it’s hard to figure out who did what to whom. In an effort to get the facts straight, we invited Fleiss to view the film with us and give her reaction to Broomfield’s interpretation of recent events in her life.

Fleiss now spends most of her time strategizing with her team of lawyers in anticipation of her April sentencing and producing a line of clothing--Heidi Wear--which she sells in her store of the same name in Santa Monica. She arrives for our meeting at her publicists’ office having just come from a session with a lawyer and is clearly upset. She has just found out that her latest appeal has been denied.

“My federal case should’ve been just a tax case,” she insists, “but they also charged me with conspiracy, bank fraud and money laundering, which is ridiculous--who launders money in a bank? All I did was set up males and more-than-willing females to spend the evening together, and whether these people had sex or not is none of my business. It’s true that in doing this I became involved with some very bizarre characters, but that’s all I did.”

Rail-thin, dressed in gray sweats and much prettier in person than in photographs, Fleiss is hard to dislike. Candid, unpretentious and mischievously funny, she’s at once street-smart and surprisingly naive. She played every angle that came her way and loves to gamble for high stakes, yet she seems genuinely mystified as to why the law is mad at her. Her beeper goes off regularly during our meeting, she has phone conversations with various lawyers and bites her fingernails throughout. She’s clearly entertained by much of the film, but several passages disturb or anger her.

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The film opens with a clip of Fleiss being arrested, which elicits an incredulous laugh. “I look like Timothy McVeigh--they’ve got me shackled every way possible!” she says. From there, Broomfield introduces his supporting cast one by one.

First up is Victoria Sellers, the daughter of Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland, who’s been Fleiss’ best friend since the two met in Palm Springs when they were 16. “I love Victoria dearly and if she was my cellmate in prison I’d be fine because we’d just laugh our heads off. She’s incredibly funny--funnier than her father, in fact. She’s been sober for nine months and is a totally different person now, but she seemed so high when Nick filmed her,” says Fleiss of Sellers, who has a history of arrests and convictions on drug charges that began in 1986 and continued through last year, when she was arrested and ordered to enter a rehab program. “She’s crying here, poor thing, and she keeps repeating herself--she almost sets her hair on fire!”

Next is Elizabeth Adams, a.k.a. Madam Alex, who claims in the film to have “purchased” Fleiss from Ivan Nagy for $450 in 1989. “In a way, she carries the whole film with her lunacy,” says Fleiss of Adams, who died at the age of 60 shortly after Broomfield completed filming. “I miss her because we had a special relationship and shared things only the two of us could share--basically, I was the daughter she never got to abuse.” Fleiss laughs as Alex grouses on-screen, “Heidi had no style, she wore raggedy jeans and her hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in ages--men liked her though.” “Thank you, Alex,” says Fleiss.

Fleiss greets several new faces that pop up on-screen with the comment, “Oh, this one had a terrible drug problem.” Several women appear in the film claiming to have worked for Fleiss, but she says she’s never laid eyes on most of them. “Tons of people are going around claiming they worked for me because it’s a prestige thing. Everyone knows I was the best and I knew the prettiest--my reputation wasn’t based on nothing,” she says with pride.

Porn filmmaker Ron Jeremy appears, and Fleiss laughs, saying, “He doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about here,” as Jeremy tells Broomfield about two Heidi girls he can introduce him to.

Of the endless chain of “he-hit-me-first” tales that pervade this world, Broomfield says, “It’s impossible to say what’s true and what isn’t with these people. It’s like dealing with quicksand because they’re all great storytellers enmeshed in a demented fable that goes round in endless circles, and in listening to it you learn about the entire sewage system of Los Angeles. This is a peculiarly L.A. story,” he adds, “in that the pressures on people here to ‘make it’ are enormous. This town is a powerful ingredient in what happened to Heidi.”

Fleiss’ introduction to the fast lane took place when she was 19 and a friend took her to a party at the home of Bernie Cornfeld, a flamboyant financier who made and lost several fortunes before his death last year at the age of 67. She and Cornfeld had a four-year relationship that involved lots of travel, exorbitant sums of money, and considerable philandering on his part, which finally drove her to leave him.

“I loved Bernie more than anything and miss him very much,” she says when a picture of the two together flashes on-screen. “Through Bernie I met the wealthiest people in the world--incredibly wealthy men who don’t have time to go to a bar. Many of them are married and it’s easier for them to make a phone call and know they’ll get a beautiful girl they won’t have to put on a facade with. Everyone has fun and it’s over in the morning. Hooking on this level has nothing to do with the kind of girls you see on Sunset Boulevard. It’s highly lucrative work that’s a steppingstone to other things--girls could work once or twice a month and make six grand to put themselves through school.

“I was devastated when Bernie and I broke up, and that’s when I met Ivan,” says Fleiss, who hooked up with Nagy at a trendy L.A. club called Helena’s in 1988. “Maybe I loved Ivan briefly, but things went bad fairly quickly and then I couldn’t get away from him.”

Madam Alex says in the movie that Nagy regularly beat up Fleiss, and Heidi girl Susie Sterling says she too was threatened and roughed up by Nagy.

“He used to beat me up,” Fleiss says. “Then suddenly he decides he’s madly in love with me and wants me to be his girlfriend. I wanted nothing more to do with him, but from that point on I couldn’t get rid of him. And finally, he set me up--and believe me, he loved the verdict.

“Most of what he says in this film is a blatant lie. Ivan’s found a new partner to work with--you can see her sneak out of the frame in one scene in the film,” says Fleiss of Julie Conaster, who was arrested with Nagy in August 1993 on suspicion of pandering, though charges were never filed. “The cops don’t hassle Ivan though because he gives them valuable information.” (Nagy did give evidence to the police that was used against Fleiss in her state trial.)

“My only quarrel with Nick’s film is that it obsesses so much on my relationship with Ivan,” she says, adding that she and Broomfield have become close friends. “While Nick was making the film, he was ending a relationship with [a well-known actress]. They had a torrid romance and a nasty breakup--they were crank-calling each other and breaking into each other’s houses--and he transferred his experience onto me.”

When this comment is related to Broomfield in an interview later that week, he says, “Certainly you use things you know about in your work, but the relationship Heidi’s referring to didn’t involve anything like crank-calling, and it ended a year before I began work on this film. I believe Heidi when she says she and Ivan no longer sleep together, but they’re still completely obsessed with one another--this is the one area of her life she seems unable to be honest with herself about.”

The plot thickens considerably in the next sequence. “A person who escaped both the media and Nick’s film, but was central to the assault on me, was a scumbag named Art Natoli--he runs errands for several prominent people in Hollywood. Art had a girlfriend who he used to beat up, and she showed up at my house one time asking if she could hide from him there. Art called looking for her but I said she wasn’t there. When he found out she actually was, he told me, ‘I’m gonna take you down,’ and got a bunch of hookers to go to the police and file reports on me,” she says, citing complaints filed to the police by Natoli and his associates as one of various betrayals that led to the 1993 sting operation that resulted in her arrest in June of that year.

Midway through the film, Fleiss comments on camera that she’s only interested in old men. When asked why, she elaborates that “it’s not old men I like--it’s rich men. Money makes life easier and if I had more money I could buy my way out of this mess. Because of the huge legal expenses I’ve incurred I’ve been forced to do things for money. I’ve been offered a ton of money for my black book but I won’t sell it--the police entrapped me, but they didn’t entrap everyone in my black book. What I did instead was host a pay-per-view nude beauty pageant that airs in February, and I also did some phone sex. I had to do it because the money was very good--I’ve been forced to exploit myself,” she says with a sigh.

Says Broomfield: “The one thing Heidi takes seriously is money. She’s not at all interested in sex and once told me she thought it was completely overrated. But for her to do a nude beauty pageant and phone sex just when she’s about to be sentenced is a classic example of her staggering self-destructiveness--I can’t think of a more stupid thing to do.”

Money is, in fact, the leitmotif of Broomfield’s movie. He paid all his interview subjects for their time, and often filmed them as they were being paid.

“Look at Daryl Gates scooping up that money,” Fleiss mutters with disgust, as the former police chief pockets his $1,500 fee while dismissing Broomfield’s questions concerning allegations that the LAPD has a questionable relationship with the local prostitution community as having no basis in fact. Fleiss insists, however, that “the LAPD is deeply involved with this world. They all knew me and often drove me home, but because I wouldn’t make girls sleep with them for free, like Alex did, they decided to make an example of me.”

This is one area where Fleiss and Broomfield are in complete agreement.

“The people in Heidi’s world didn’t do anything particularly wrong--these are, after all, consenting adults,” Broomfield agrees. “What struck me as infinitely more sinister was the hypocrisy of the LAPD--the corruption that operates there, the building of files on people and use of information against people to control the city. Many police departments do those things, but LAPD took it to a new limit--they were like the FBI in the way they operated against people.

“The stuff about the LAPD was the most surprising thing I discovered in delving into this story,” continues Broomfield, who recently completed a documentary on a fetish club in New York and plans to make a film on the LAPD in the near future. “I only included a bit of what I learned in the film because our lawyers went crazy when I said I wanted to use more of it. It’s surprising how much material I got, considering that most of the people I contacted at the LAPD refused to be interviewed, and they were quite uncooperative.

“If the wider implications of this case had been fought head-on, Heidi probably wouldn’t have the problems she’s got now. She’s the only instance of a madam or pimp being prosecuted federally. Why? Ivan gets away with things because he’s always had a madam who fronts for him, and Madam Alex was an old pro who did what professional criminals do--she collaborated with the police. Heidi wasn’t a professional and she broke all the rules on both sides of the fence, and that’s why she came crashing down. Moreover, because the D.A. has been so unsuccessful in getting any high-profile convictions, Heidi’s case has taken on a significance it doesn’t deserve.

“I didn’t set out to make a crusading film for Heidi but all of us who worked on the film really liked her, and I think she comes across in it as likable,” Broomfield concludes. “I think you see that she’s not an evil, Machiavellian person, and that she spent most of the time when she was supposedly on top of the world being bounced between her mentor and her nemesis.”

As the film winds to a close, Fleiss says, “I’m willing to be punished for what I’ve done, but I don’t think it’s fair that everyone else in that world was granted immunity and I’m the only one who’s in trouble. I truly love life and the thought of spending the next seven years in a shoe box--there’s nothing to justify it. I’m so burned out, though. I just can’t fight anymore.”

Broomfield’s film concludes with an interview with Fleiss where her bravado and sense of mischief fall away for the first time, and she reveals how deeply shaken she is by all that’s happened to her. When this final sequence rolls on-screen, Fleiss looks away from the monitor and says, “This is just too sad. I can’t watch this part.”

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“Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam” opens Friday at the Nuart Theater, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles. (310) 478-6379.