Entertainment
Heidi Fleiss to Star in Sheila Nevins-Produced Docuseries (Exclusive)
On the heels of the release of the latest Menendez brothers rehash, The Hollywood Reporter has learned that Heidi Fleiss is the next sensational 1990s news phenomenon to get the in-depth doc treatment. Sheila Nevins, the former longtime head of HBO’s documentary programming, will produce the multipart project, which is set to be helmed by Andrew Renzi, director of recent non-fiction narratives about influencer-turned-boxer Jake Paul (for Netflix) and the brand Von Dutch (for Hulu).
The so-called “Hollywood Madam,” sent to federal prison for running an upscale prostitution ring catering to the rich and famous, now lives on the outskirts of a small Nevada town, where she spends her days rescuing and rehabilitating macaws. Fleiss promises that, in an era of increasingly anodyne screen stories about celebrities which chiefly serve to burnish their brands, her own tale will be welcomely unfiltered. “I think people are sick of the docs that are infomercials — and I’m not an infomercial,” she tells THR. “I don’t care if someone likes me or hates me. I’m not now trying to reinvent myself or be seen as someone I’m not. People will see and hear the truth. Some if it is humiliating.”
Fleiss is a documentary aficionado with plenty of strong opinions about recent releases, from those she thinks are sharp and overlooked — including Tell Them You Love Me, concerning the discredited science of facilitated communication — to those that miss the mark. (Such as Mr. McMahon, about WWE founder Vince McMahon: “too many talking heads, but I was sucked in by that weird plastic surgery.”)
Fleiss’ story has been told before — by herself in the book Pandering; in the sprawling 2022 podcast HeidiWorld; in a cable TV movie starring Jamie-Lynn Sigler (“I never saw it”); and, most pertinently, a seminal feature-length cinema verite doc by the noted English director Nick Broomfield, which was released in 1996 and chronicled how her relationships with a pair of mentors, her director boyfriend and another madam, led to her downfall.
In 2008, HBO aired The Would-Be Madam of Crystal, about Fleiss’ failure to open a legal brothel aimed at women in Nevada. That’s how she met Nevins. More recently, Maggie Cohn (The Staircase) had reportedly embarked on a drama based on her life for HBO Max, but Fleiss says there’s no deal and that project is dead.
Fleiss is aware that the public’s appetite is now likely approaching its zenith for retrospections on the period when she entered headline infamy for, as she puts it, “running an illegal enterprise of consensual sex.” She contends that her own saga may be full of sex but at least there’s refreshingly little violence: “My story isn’t O.J., where his wife’s head was cut off. There’s no penis cut off, like with Lorena [Bobbitt]. Even with Tonya Harding, it’s brutal what she did.”
The new docuseries will be wide-ranging, covering her criminal case — her prosecutor was Alejandro Mayorkas, now the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security (“he had hair back then,” she jokes) — as well as her struggles with drug addiction and efforts to save exotic birds. She expects the payday for her participation in the project will allow her to make hoped-for improvements on a tree-filled Las Vegas property she says she’s purchased for herself and the more than 30 macaws under her care. According to Fleiss, she needs to leave unincorporated Pahrump, Nevada, in part because the birds, which she allows to freely fly over the town, have been under threat from neighbors: “I’ve had people shooting them. I’ve had people holding onto them — a hostage situation, like the [Charles] Lindbergh baby. I’ve had to wear a wire; the cops were involved. It’s enough.”
Fleiss’ commitment to her macaws and efforts to fund her work with them previously led her into a misbegotten arrangement with a wealthy longtime male friend. She says she’d paid off the man’s prostitution debts using her own money in exchange for the promise that he’d reimburse her by contributing exponentially more capital to her bird sanctuary. Shortly after Fleiss first told THR about the situation, in 2019, providing detailed documentation to corroborate her claim that the pal had unjustly welched on his commitment, she recanted, declining to explain the turnabout.
Heidi Fleiss with two of her rescued birds, Ajax (left) and Old Man.
Courtesy of Heidi Fleiss
Now she acknowledges this friend was the Hollywood financier Steve Bing, who died by suicide the following year. In the days afterward, Fleiss explained to THR, “I love telling people Steve Bing was my best friend. Steve Bing is my royal flush. Try and beat it.” Today, she says, “he morphed into something slowly monstrous that was hard to grapple with.”
Fleiss, who famously never spoke about her clients, avows the docuseries will include her candid reflections on the powerful men with whom she often crossed paths, both before and after her arrest, including Bing (“nobody really knew him, and I know the whole story”), the Nevada brothel baron Dennis Hof and the lawbreaking international financier Bernie Cornfield, who was at one point her boyfriend and mentor.
While her exploits date back three decades, Fleiss believes her story is both timely and timeless. After all, Fleiss observes, “right now we’re in the age of the self-invented lady boss.”
