People like Heidi Fleiss tend not to stay in the spotlight once the initial frenzy surrounding their infamy dies down. It’s a little hard (though maybe not impossible) to imagine anyone making documentaries or writing lengthy magazine features about John Wayne Bobbitt or Joey Buttafuoco these days. But even 15 years after her initial arrest for running a high-priced prostitution ring in Los Angeles, Fleiss still generates plenty of interest, and the documentary Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal (HBO, July 21, 9 p.m.) does a good job of showing why she’s still such a fascinating character.

Part of the reason that people haven’t forgotten about Fleiss is that she won’t let them; rather than disappear into some low-profile job after serving her prison time, Fleiss has jumped from one notable venture to another. She ran a lingerie store in LA, published a book on her exploits as a madam and has for the last few years been touting her plan to build a brothel in Crystal, Nevada, that would cater exclusively to straight women. It’s this quixotic quest that provides the narrative thrust for Madam, which opens in 2006 with Fleiss packing up her possessions and moving to Pahrump to start pursuing her latest dream.

Directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato have turned kitschy, sleazy figures into entertaining documentary subjects before with their films The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Party Monster and Inside Deep Throat, and they do the same for Fleiss here. She comes off as a poignant and tragic figure, if a little deluded, in her new life in Pahrump, dealing with brothel licensing issues, legal entanglements, a hostile potential business neighbor and her own personal demons. “Eight days sober” is how Fleiss describes herself during the sit-down interview weaved throughout the film, shot in December 2006. Although she asserts that she wishes to put her substance-abuse problems behind her, she’s clearly under the influence of something in much of the candid footage, and the movie leaves out the fact that she was arrested for drug possession this past February.

Other than that, though, Bailey and Barbato certainly don’t spare Fleiss, showing her for the lost, mentally unbalanced but strangely sweet woman she is. A large part of the documentary is dedicated to Fleiss’ friendship with her neighbor, an aging former brothel madam with an extensive collection of exotic birds. Fleiss takes to both the woman and the birds immediately, and when her neighbor passes away, she inherits the pets and becomes something far more mundane than a former madam-to-the-stars: the local crazy bird lady.

There are a few nice visual touches that give the movie an added sense of emotional power, but mostly Bailey and Barbato get their richest material from simply following Fleiss around and listening to her talk. Even as obvious as it is that her “Stud Farm” will probably never get off the ground, or as pathetic as her denials about her drug addiction (to what she calls “crystal methane”) are, or as disturbing as her overly plastic-surgeried face appears, it’s hard not to like and even sympathize with this damaged but doggedly optimistic woman. Fifteen years after pimping her way into America’s hearts, she proves all over again that she deserves her place there.

The bottom line: ***1/2