Scotty Bowers in a photo from Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (TIFF)

The new documentary by Matt Tyrnauer (Citizen Jane: Battle for the City) was directly inspired by the tell-everything 2012 memoir by Scotty Bowers, the matter-of-fact and sensational Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars. It lives up to its title. However, the movie makes a strong case that film can be the more exacting and revealing medium.

With a gosh-golly-wow vibe (and a lot of exclamation points), author Bowers the author recounted his adventures in Hollywood from the 1940s until the 1980s as a good-time guy and fixer, for $20 a night, while also naming names of the countless celebrities he had sex with, both male and female. The list encompasses some of the biggest pop cultural names of the mid-20th century. While working at a gas station, he would procure dates for the then-underground gay set, making arrangements for free, although money was exchanged for those tricking. Finding sex came easily for him. In the book, he recalled taking a nap in Griffith Park and waking up to a man performing oral sex on him. The stranger turned out to be a noted art decorator for MGM.

With the same sex-positive tone, earnestness, and candidness as in his book (this guy has no secrets), Bowers, now in his early 90s, makes it clear onscreen that he was a sexual adventurer for the thrill of it, but what is also apparent here are his contradictions and quirks. He comes across as multidimensional, as opposed to the book, where his spirits were always erect. For one, he’s a hoarder. While there’s very little reflection in his tell-all, the still-spry 91-year-old here admits that he regrets not spending more time with his first wife and their daughter throughout his Hollywood heyday.

Whether one believes all of Bowers’s bawdy tales or not, Tyrnauer adds credence to his subject’s depiction of being a one-man hook-up service by featuring other men who hustled alongside Bowers in the 1950s and 1960s. One of them, who went on to a choreography career, threw and filmed orgies; a clip of Bower in action is glimpsed, and he was not shy about his assets. (At his 90th birthday party, Bowers blows out the candles on top of a giant penis-shaped cake.)

He had quite a track record. Still, some of his accounts come across as too good to be true, or as fan-boy fiction. Even before he settled down in Los Angeles after serving in World War II as a Marine, Bowers claims to have slept with Tyrone Power and Bette Davis, among other bold-faced names. The mind almost explodes when he mentions that he had a three-way in Palm Springs with Lana Turner and Ava Gardner at Frank Sinatra’s house in the early 1950s. Of course, all those he mentions have long been dead.

Many of the stars he encountered have had their private lives scrutinized for decades, such as Cary Grant and Rock Hudson. Perhaps the biggest myth that Bowers punctures is the fabled romance between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. In this regard, Bowers is given a boost in credibility by Hepburn biographer William Mann (Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn), who backs up much of what Bowers divulges, including that the two stars did not actually live together. The late columnist Liz Smith also appears on camera, agreeing that Hepburn had affairs with women. Bowers claims that he had arranged 150 women for the star in a 39-year span, and that he often slept with a drunk Tracy.

Fortunately for those who have an appetite, the director does not include another image-shattering account from the book about a certain meal prepared by Charles Laughton. The film also steers clear of Bowers’s version of his early sexual encounters as a boy; Tyrnauer has enough on his plate just peeking into the Hollywood closet.

Those who loved the blind items in Michael Musto’s Village Voice columns will finally get relief, as Bowers and Tyrnauer don’t hold back. Fact checkers, though, may need the smelling salts.