For a man who built his career on getting others to expose themselves, Joe Francis has largely kept himself out of the spotlight for the last decade. The creator of the Girls Gone Wild franchise made millions of dollars in the late 1990s and early 2000s selling VHS videos of women flashing their breasts - and more - on camera through wall-to-wall late night TV advertising.
However, after being convicted of assault in 2013, Francis served 270 days in jail before leaving the United States. A decade later, he agreed to give a rare interview to reporter Scaachi Koul, and the resulting nine hours of conversation at his home in Punta Mita, Mexico form the basis for the tell-all new Peacock documentary series Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story.
The series makes for fascinating viewing, not least because Girls Gone Wild arguably acted as a precursor not just for OnlyFans and Instagram fame but for reality television as a whole. Prior to his creation of the series, Francis was a business graduate from USC who spent his early years working as a production assistant for Real TV. The series collected together shocking or explicit newsreel and home video that was deemed too scandalous for regular news programmes, but was still acceptable to be broadcast. What Francis soon realized was that there was still plenty of X-rated footage that even Real TV couldn’t show, so he began making compilation tapes of clips deemed “too hot” even for Real TV. The resulting brand, known as Banned from Television, was a series of mail-order VHS tapes that made him a millionaire by the age of 24.
It was in 1998 that Francis stumbled across the idea that would become his calling card. While looking for footage for Banned from Television he came across a clip of a group of girls at Mardi Gras being given strings of beads in exchange for flashing their breasts. “It was just extra footage on a tape,” recalls Francis. “I called the guy and said: ‘Do you have more of this?’ He said: ‘Yeah.’ I drove to every video store from San Diego to north of the Valley, looking for anything like Girls Gone Wild. Nobody was doing it. I couldn’t believe it. I was just like: ‘No one is doing this? Oh my God’. It turned me on, honestly, to see these girls on Spring Break, ‘cause it was reality.”
Francis started selling adverts for Girls Gone Wild videos during Howard Stern’s boundary-pushing talk show, and before long his ubiquitous adverts had spread to Comedy Central, Fox Sports and other late-night channels. They couldn’t sell videos fast enough. By 2000, after just two years of operation, Girls Gone Wild had made $20 million.
The appeal, as Francis saw, was that the women featured could be your neighbours. “He wasn’t selling perfect beauty,” observes journalist Amy Wallace. “What he was selling was: the average American nice girl really, really wants to be naughty. The realness of it was the draw.”
But it was this same “realness”, this blurring of the lines between real life and televised entertainment, that lead to serious questions about the ability of the women in the films to consent, and whether they really understood what they were getting into. One woman interviewed in the documentary, Lori, recalls going to Spring Break in Lake Havasu, Arizona at the age of 16 and being asked to flash her breasts in exchange for beads. At the time, she thought nothing of the guys filming it. It was only months later that she found out from school mates she had appeared on Girls Gone Wild. Shockingly, when one teacher found out he asked her to sign his copy of the VHS tape. “I was so humiliated,” says Lori. “I just didn’t want to face it.” Eventually, a lawyer helped her get herself removed from the videos when he pointed out that, as she was only 16, the films constituted child pornography.
Despite this lax attitude to age-of-consent rules, Girls Gone Wild only grew in popularity. By the early 2000s, they had a fleet of million-dollar tour buses traversing the country to film at nightclubs and parties every night. They specifically targetted smaller towns in West Virginia, southern Florida, Texas where they felt the girls would be more easily convinced. “New York and LA? Ain’t nobody going on Girls Gone Wild! It’s a different mentality,” points out a former production supervisor named Solo. “We hit the towns where we thought the girls were bored.”
For a time, Girls Gone Wild seemed to be riding the crest of a wave. Celebrities like Jessica Simpson, Jason Biggs and Kim Kardashian attended their parties, while Brad Pitt was pictured wearing one of their distinctive branded red-and-white caps. Even serious legal troubles seemed to bounce off them. When Attorney Todd Julian filed a lawsuit against Francis and Girls Gone Wild in 2003 on behalf of a client whose image was being used in the adverts that aired on late night television every day, the judge ruled in Francis’s favour and said there could be no expectation of privacy when you’re flashing in public.
However, it was later that same year that things started to turn sour for Francis, when he decided to film footage in Panama City Beach, a small Florida town popular with Spring Breakers but nevertheless in the Bible Belt. “I should never have gone to northern Florida,” Francis laments during the interview. It was there that Mayor Lee Sullivan took a dislike to Girls Gone Wild’s tactics for soliciting women into appearing in the videos. Dislike is putting it mildly. “I’d pinch that little sh**’s head off and crap down his neck if I could,” says Sullivan of Francis.
Francis at first tried to push back against the police crackdown on his cameramen, suing them on the basis that they were violating his first amendment rights to free speech. Sullivan hit back hard, and had Francis arrested for racketeering. Francis eventually plead guilty to record-keeping violations, and was fined $1.6 million as well as being sentenced to community service in 2007. His fall from grace continued in 2013, when he was convicted on charges of false imprisonment, assault and dissauding a witness all stemming from a 2011 incident where he’d brought three women back to his home.
In the years that followed, Francis faced further charges of child abuse and prostitution related to the filming of underage girls in Panama City Beach. Today, Girls Gone Wild seems like a grubby reminded of a less-enlightened time when reality television was still an unchartered frontier, but it’s hard to argue with this documentary’s assertion that Francis’s exploitative VHS empire had a defining impact on the video-obsessed world we all now inhabit.
Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story will stream on Peacock from December 3
