Love, it was said, found success more by association with the rock superstar than with her own band, Hole, though she blazed her own trail as the bad girl of rock.BROOMFIELD has worked on the film for three years and says it "deals with the situation surrounding Kurt and his death" He says he did not set out with preconceived ideas. "But once I started making the film, I couldn't believe it - people seemed to adore Kurt but were enormously outspoken about Courtney In fact, I could barely stop their feelings from coming out. I think Courtney knows this."The closest encounter between Love and Broomfield came last year, at a dinner in Los Angeles given by the American Civil Liberties Union. Love had been asked to present the Torch of Freedom award to Milos Forman, the director of The People vs Larry Flynt, in which Love gave a remarkable performance as the partner of a US porn king. As the evening closed, guests were startled to see a strange Englishman advance on the microphone and start to address Courtney Love and the crowd.An ACLU foundation president, Danny Goldberg, snatched back the mike.

"You weren't invited, this is not your event, get the f--- out of here," a witness says she heard him say It was vintage Broomfield. He was then escorted out, and few of the spectators seem to know who he was or what his intentions were. The Los Angeles Times reprinted Forman's speech, but failed to note the interruption."I basically asked her whether she supported the ACLU," Broomfield says "She had said she was a great believer in free speech. Then I asked her whether it was true that she had threatened journalists in the past. She walked off." A few years earlier the former stripper, dubbed "motor mouth" in reform school, might well have given him a piece of her mind. Love, as is well known, ran into frequent trouble with the courts, accused of punching a musician here or swearing at Australian flight attendants there, taking out her anger on fans in Holland. Her reputation built on itself.But the new Courtney Love is the loving mother of Cobain's child and has left the dying grunge scene in Seattle for a home in Beverly Hills.

She hires agents and publicists picked from the cream of the Hollywood establishment, picking and choosing between film offers on the back of glowing - and well deserved - reviews of her in Larry Flynt. The transformation almost precisely spanned the making of the documentary: Broomfield is undoubtedly delving into a past Love seems eager to forget.In 1992 Vanity Fair published an article "Strange Love", by Lynn Hirschberg, which speculated on the couple's drug problems and categorised a host of other rumours from lesbian lovers to live sex on stage and worries about the health of Love's then unborn child.The blistering messages Love left on Hirschberg's message machine were "legendary", the Los Angeles Times noted last week; Love herself, in a radio interview, claimed Hirschberg fled under a table when they met at an Oscar-night party. But by 1995, in a second Vanity Fair piece, a flattering cover interview with pictures of baby Frances Bean, the story had already changed. After Larry Flynt, and a succession of awards for best supporting actress, Vogue featured "Courtney Love's Major Make-Over" and news stories were full of her cleaner image. A transformation seemed to have occurred that was only possible in America.