Nick Broomfield, documentary-maker of Kurt And Courtney, which is now on cinema release in the US and scheduled to be screened by the BBC as part of their 'Storyville' season this summer, apparently agrees. "I went into it thinking that I would like her, and I was particularly on her side because of people like her father and her terrible childhood. Then, during the course of making the film, I met Lynn Hirschberg [who received a death threat from Courtney Love after writing in Vanity Fair in 1992 that she had taken heroin while pregnant], and she was very worried that I was going to fall in love with Courtney, and would think that she was exaggerating and being hysterical. The strength of feeling I encountered about her changed my mind. It's a much darker, more horrible world than I'd ever anticipated - a cloud of heroin hangs over the whole thing."

Broomfield, whose fame as a filmmaker resides on his wilfully intrusive documentaries about, among others, serial killer Aileen Wuornos, Hollvwood madame Heidi Fleiss, South African white supremacist Eugene Terre Blanche and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, maintains that Kurt And Courtney is less about the nature of Cobain's death (which he, in any case, firmly believes was a suicide) than about Love herself. Despite his efforts, he never managed to make direct contact with her, but what Broomfield believes to be attempts, using her control of the highly lucrative Cobain estate as leverage within the media and music industry, to thwart the making of the documentary come to form the film's subplot.

"I think the problem really was that Courtney has decided that she's a different person now, so she doesn't want to deal with anything that happened other than being with Versace, and a grieving widow," Broomfield explains. "She's been through a great personal tragedy, and that's it. She's not predisposed to go over that area of her life at all. But if I wanted to do a puff piece about her being an actor. I'm sure there would be absolutely no problem.

"I don't, in any way, have anything personally against Courtney," he continues. "I just think a lot of the things she does are quite misguided. It started off being a film about someone that I had a great deal of admiration for, and who I think is a musical genius, who had, and will have, a fantastic influence for a really long time. And then it became a story to do with free speech and censorship, and the terrifying reality of conglomerate, corporate power in the newspaper and television world, which is very well illustrated by the film."

Love's first legal assault on Kurt And Courtney did not address its intent but rather its content. Far from attempting to deprive Broomfield of his right to free speech, as Sundance Festival chief Robert Redford accused following the removal of the documentary from his film festival in January ("What I find ironic is that someone that's benefitted... from the principle of free speech would be conducting a campaign to prevent another artist from expressing himself "), her actions were those of an aggrieved copyright holder defending her property - performances of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit and Hole's Doll Parts - from unsanctioned usage. "This is not about Courtney Love," insists Pat Kingsley. "It's about Nirvana, her husband's group, and the rights were not cleared. You want to use a Frank Sinatra song in a movie, you can't do it without getting permission and paying for it, and the same applies here."

Shorn of its copyright music, the movie should theoretically have been in the clear when it was to open at a San cinema in February But no. The film's distributor received the following from Courtney Love's lawyer Michael Chodos: "We are told Mr Broomfield's movie conveys the message that Ms Love killed her husband Kurt Cobain or somehow participated in his murder. Such accusations are false and defamatory, nothing more. By choosing to display the film... (you) are liable along with (the filmmmaker) for any resulting damage." The distributor ignored the threat, and, at time of writing, the movie has now opened across the USA without any legal repercussions.

In 1994, within weeks of Cobain's suicide, the Paradigm Agency picked up the film rights to the just-published Cobain biography, Never Fade Away. Screenwriter of Colors and Bad Boys, Richard DiLello, was already on board; Evan Dando and Meg Ryan had both reportedly been lined up to star. But even a tentative approach regarding soundtrack material was furiously repelled by Nirvana's management company, Gold Mountain. "The whole idea of [this movie] is really upsetting," spokeswoman Janet Billig announced. "I can't find a word in the English language to express how we all feel about this." But she thought of one anyway - no. "We have advised our lawyers that we wouldn't want this to happen."

They still don't, and it is not only Gold Mountain and Courtney Love who are so fiercely opposed to a movie version of Cobain's life. Although Harrison insists that Krist (aka Chris) Novoselic's wife is open to his beliefs and theories (an allegation which family friends strenuously, and incredulously, deny), it is painfully obvious that the only people willing to openly discuss Cobain's death with the media are those who were not, in fact, closely involved, the exception being Broomfield's uncomfortable interview with Dylan J. Carlson.

The most pertinent questions have, in any case, already been answered: by Novoselic's decision to remain bound to both the record and the management company which, the conspiracists are still convinced, played a major part in Cobain's demise; and by his own jealous stewardship of Nirvana's legacy (he himself has described the conspiracy theorists as "obsessed"). Far from milking a fat cash cow, just two "posthumous" albums have been permitted to appear since Cobain's suicide: the soundtrack to Nirvana's graceful appearance on MTV's Unplugged, and its corollary From The Muddy Banks Of The Whiskah, an electric live anthology which caught the band at its dishevelled best - a very far cry from the respectful pause, then unceasing deluge which normally follows a superstar death. So far as the directors of Nirvana Incorporated - Novoselic, Grohl and Love - are concerned, there would be no cashing in on this legend, musically, verbally, or otherwise.

Neither Novoselic's (now-defunct) Sweet 75 nor Dave Grohl's Foo Fighters played the Nirvana card during their promotional campaigns, while Love, too, has remained tight-lipped on the subject of her husband - perhaps even too tight-lipped. Rumours, after all, were rife that Cobain played a major part in the songwriting process which resulted in Hole's last album, Live Through This, rumours which may have been confirmed in February this year when Novoselic broke his silence to confirm Hole B-side, Old Age, was, regardless of Love's solo writing credit, originally a Cobain-composed Nevermind outtake. But that, and the rest of the Hole songwriting conundrum, is another story entirely.

"What it comes down to," one of Cobain's former associates explains, "is this. Courtney has her story about her life with Kurt and what led up to his death, [Kris and Dave] have theirs, and a lot of other people, who weren't even around at the time, have theirs. And unfortunately, those are the stories which everyone hears. They're the only people who would talk to Nick Broomfield, to High Times, to Unsolved Mysteries.

"Courtney and [the band] have their own reasons for not wanting to talk, Kurt's friends have theirs, and probably the truth lies somewhere between them all. But nobody is ever going to figure it out by sneaking around and drawing conclusions, and then pulling in the same old cast of characters to shoot their mouths off.

"Right now, the only people who are talking about what happened to Kurt are people who don't know what the fuck they are talking about. But what can anybody reply to them? If you say they're full of shit, then they say you're lying to protect yourself, and the whole thing goes back and forth and round and round, and ultimately it just gives them more publicity. And of course that's all they really wanted in the first place. None of these people cares about Kurt or what happened to Kurt. All they care about is selling their books, and getting on television, and reading their names in the papers."

Or, as Courtney Love (allegedly) e-mailed to author Toby Amirault, when he asked why she had yet to sue her accusers for libel, "why havent [sic] we sued? because tyou [sic] people are not fucking worth it... leave us the fuk [sic] alone.

And if they don't "leave us the fuk alone"? Adding his own name to the flock of foes whose well-being has allegedly been compromised by their real or imaginary Love-baiting, Hank Harrison alleged "there have been a few threats," adding, "I have been told she has a contract out on me." But he consoled himself at the time, February 1996, with the knowledge that, "the more attention that gets paid to what I'm talking about here, the funnier it's going to look if I ended up dead somewhere on the railroad tracks."

As he waited for a train a little over a year later, just eight days after he submitted to, and passed, a polygraph test for Nick Broomfield's documentary, El Duce probably had a very similar notion.

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