Without Flinching

Nick Broomfield is among those filmmakers who have been breathing new life into the documentary form, showing us not only that truth really can be stranger than fiction, but also more absorbing. There’s a hard-hitting reportorial quality to Broomfield’s work, and he sometimes appears in front of his camera as part of his relentless investigative process. He never avoids tough questions, and is no stranger to controversy, during filming or after. It’s not without reason that the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s retrospective of some of the documentarian’s films, which starts tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater, is called “Nick Broomfield: Driving ‘Em Crazy.”

It opens with Broomfield’s arguably strongest, most accomplished films, “Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer” (1992) and “Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam” (1995). Absolutely compelling, “Serial Killer” is an example of the documentary as a work of investigative reporting at its sharpest. Broomfield digs into the sensational case of Wuornos, dubbed by the media as “America’s first female serial killer” and uncovers justice that is dubious at best. Wuornos, a prostitute, is shown to possibly be covering up for her lesbian lover in the slaying of seven of her johns. An array of people cashes in on Wuornos, a worn, frayed, sometimes fiery woman who is nevertheless articulate and even persuasive in her own defense. (Wuornos is awaiting word on her attorney’s motion for a new trial.)

“Aileen Wuornos” inevitably brings to mind Errol Morris’ expose “The Thin Blue Line,” for it also has real-life characters a novelist would be hard-pressed to invent, most notably the “born-again” horse breeder who adopts Wuornos for reasons that remain murky, and Wuornos’ flashy, publicity-seeking ex-rock-musician attorney. Whereas Morris’ style was cool, detached neo-film noir, complete with re-created scenes, Broomfield’s is jaggedly urgent and shoot-from-the-hip, for he frequently filmed people who tried to stop him.

Watching Broomfield’s fascinating “Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam” is like reading a convoluted Raymond Chandler mystery that takes us into the seamy side of Hollywood. The people Broomfield tracks down so implacably are so shifty, so ominous or simply sad, yet so compelling that at times it’s hard to remember we’re not watching fiction.

And yet in a sense maybe we are. Truth, in real life, is harder for Broomfield to pin down than it ever was for Philip Marlowe, and he has plunged himself into a world of people practiced in projecting the views of themselves that serves them best. The three central figures of the Hollywood prostitution scandal of the ‘90s are notorious, although largely forgotten by now. In addition to Fleiss herself, they were her onetime lover, veteran TV director Ivan Nagy, and the legendary late Madam Alex, Elizabeth Adams, who was Hollywood’s reigning madam for some 30 years until her death at 60 in June 1995. Many others in the Hollywood-Beverly Hills demimonde, including a jailed cop, appear before Broomfield’s cameras; Madam Alex and former L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates are shown accepting cash payments for participating in the documentary before they start talking.

Broomfield does a good job of suggesting how the likable daughter of a successful and respected Los Feliz pediatrician ended up in such big trouble. (In September 1995, her father was placed on three years’ probation, fined $50,000 and ordered to serve 625 hours of community service for conspiring to hide the profits from his daughter’s call-girl ring.) Heidi’s mother tells Broomfield she and her ex-husband raised their five children with a ‘60s-style, do-your-own-thing philosophy. At 16, Heidi dropped out of school; she says the late playboy-financier Bernard Cornfeld had given her a Rolls-Royce Corniche and $1 million for her 21st birthday.

Quickly, Fleiss, who has had drug problems, became caught up between two personalities far more powerful than she: Nagy and Madam Alex, who insists that Nagy, using an elusive Israeli-born “enforcer,” stole her business and set up Fleiss’ call-girl ring. The way Madam Alex--and others--tell it, Heidi started cutting Nagy out of her profits, proved to be a poor informant to the police and became much too flamboyant in a profession that requires discretion.

Broomfield himself seems to have become obsessed with Fleiss’ obsession with Nagy, although it does provide a dramatic finish, inviting us to ponder the endurance of emotional bonds, no matter how destructive. Yet the real point in investigating Fleiss’ life is to reveal what a powerful magnet Hollywood continues to be, with countless “hopefuls” becoming “party girls” and winding up on drugs and in prostitution.

The most recent and highly publicized of Broomfield’s documentaries is his 1998 “Kurt and Courtney,” which screens Saturday, preceded at 7:30 p.m. by the 20-minute, 1971 “Who Cares,” a highly personal impression of a group of Liverpudlians transplanted from their old neighborhood to a suburban high-rise housing development. Courtney Love attracted tremendous publicity to “Kurt and Courtney” by attempting to prevent its release at the very moment she was working hard on an image make-over. Broomfield’s probe into whether Kurt Cobain’s 1994 death was in fact murder and not suicide doesn’t go anywhere, but virtually everyone Broomfield talks to paints Cobain as a gentle, troubled soul and Love as a ruthless self-promoter.

Sunday at 7:30 p.m. brings “Soldier Girls” (1981), which Broomfield made with Joan Churchill. It’s a revealing, unsettling account that focuses on three young women as they undergo basic training at Ft. Gordon, Ga. Only one of three makes it, with a Latina and an African American undergoing merciless treatment before they’re finally released. No one could doubt that Army service requires discipline and physical rigor, but the spectacle of women undergoing the same treatment as men calls into question the validity of the extremes of the entire process. In short, “Soldier Girls” is an important document in the changing role of women in American society and what those changes reveal about our culture and its presumptions. “Soldier Girls” will be followed by “The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife” (1991), a documentary on Eugene TerreBlanche, a South African white supremacist leader that also ended up a study of his conflicted chauffeur and the chauffeur’s wife, who’s indoctrinating her children in racial hatred.

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The archive also launches the second part of its “Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance: Musicals From Around the World” series Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the James Bridges Theater. It begins with Vincente Minnelli’s “The Pirate” (1948), in which Judy Garland stars as a young woman who dreams of eloping with a dashing pirate (Gene Kelly). Based on an S.N. Behrman play, it’s set in the West Indies and boasts Cole Porter songs. It was a bit too heady a brew for ‘40s audiences, but it’s a favorite of director John Landis, who is presenting the film. It will be followed by Minnelli’s 1955 film of the musical version of “Kismet,” the choice of director Francis Ford Coppola (who will not be present). (310) 206-FILM.

Meanwhile, at LACMA (5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.), “All Singing! All Dancing! All New York!” continues Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., highlighted by the appearance of Betty Garrett, who stars with Janet Leigh and Jack Lemmon in “My Sister Eileen” (1955), which screens with “Two Tickets to Broadway” (1951), starring Tony Martin and Leigh. (323) 857-6010.

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The strongest film previewed in the ongoing Israel Film Festival at the Monica 4-Plex (1332 2nd St., Santa Monica) is “Aaron Cohen’s Debt,” a taut, gritty suspense drama about a middle-aged factory technician who is abruptly taken into custody by police. Moshe Ivgi’s Cohen, who is behind in his child-support payments, does himself no favors by not taking the cops seriously. By the time he’s behind bars, they’re not about to listen to him when he insists he needs medication for his ulcers, setting the stage for a nightmare involving bad luck, bureaucratic overload, indifference and outright police brutality. You wonder whether Cohen will survive the night as his daughter (Avital Avergil) struggles desperately to get him released. Made for Israeli TV, the film marks a formidable debut for producer Galia Bador, director Amalia Margolin and writer Alon Bar (an AFI alumnus now adapting his script for an American version of their film). “Aaron Cohen’s Debt” screens Saturday at 5:15 p.m. and April 13 at 2:30 p.m. (877) 966-5566.

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Kevin Hynes’ “Mic and the Claw” (Fridays and Saturdays at midnight at the Laemmle Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood) is an amiable comedy about rock ‘n’ rollers on the skids. They’re shipped off to a mountain cabin by their manager to work on a their comeback album. Michael Scott’s Mic and especially Jon Jacobs’ Claw are pretty funny in a film that’s several cuts above the usual midnight fare. (323) 848-3500.

On Friday, the Nuart (11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A.) presents a new 35-millimeter print of Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” for a weeklong, 50th-anniversary engagement. Who can forget Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond, a silent-movie queen living in moldy ‘20s splendor, sustained in the illusion of enduring stardom? Or her ensnaring of a struggling screenwriter (William Holden). That the film is often so funny in puncturing her delusion of grandeur makes her fate seem all the more tragic. (310) 478-6379.