“I know it all sounds crazy, like I’m just a raving lunatic,” says Heidi Fleiss. “But it’ll all make sense once it all comes together.”
Fleiss, the former “Hollywood Madam” jailed for nearly two years a decade ago, is trying to put things back together when she relocates to Nevada, where prostitution is legal. She dreams of opening a brothel catering exclusively to women with male prostitutes.
Her efforts to make this fantasy real is the subject of a documentary, “Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal,” which charts the difficulties that result — many self-imposed.
Just because she has acquired the needed acreage and hired architects to design her pleasure palace doesn’t mean she’s welcome in tiny Crystal.
In the film, Fleiss tells of a happy childhood, of being a child chess champion in Los Angeles whose entrepreneurial spirit became clear in high school when she established a baby-sitting service. But she also speaks of a weakness for crystal meth and volunteers that she’s inept at a certain sexual technique.
Maybe her Stud Farm Project is a good idea, but, by the end of the film, it remains nothing more than an idea.
Instead, Fleiss has opened a coin-operated laundry in nearby Pahrump.
It premieres at 9 p.m. Monday on HBO; check your listings.
Other shows to look out for:
It’s scientific: Everything old is new again, and that even applies to leeches, which are making a remarkable comeback, as “NOVA scienceNOW” reports. Sure, they became notoriously overused in 19th-century medicine, and their very name can be an insult.
But today they are proving useful when reattached fingers and toes become engorged with excess blood that must be drained, and they’re much less dangerous than mosquitoes and ticks as disease spreaders. The program’s host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, even wades through leech-infested waters — and lives to tell of it.
It airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on PBS; check local listings.
On the other hand: He’s a private investigator who happens to be gay, and now the third installment in the Donald Strachey Mystery franchise is set to premiere on Here!, the premium-cable network catering to gay and lesbian viewers.
The film, “On the Other Hand, Death,” based on the novel by Richard Stevenson, stars Chad Allen, with Margot Kidder (“Superman”) co-starring.
Delving into gay hate crimes, it begins with Dorothy (Kidder) and Edith (Gabrielle Rose) asleep on the second floor of their beloved farmhouse while, downstairs, a shadowy invader leaves a hateful message scrawled across the walls.
Is this a pressure tactic to get them to sell out to a big land developer? Strachey investigates.
The on-demand film premieres Friday.
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