![]() Meanwhile, Francis became a legend in Bel-Air, a friend to the Kardashians, Paris Hilton’s boyfriend (briefly), a gadabout with a private jet.īut by 2014, the brand was dead, in large part because free sites like PornHub made a mail-order DVD company look, by comparison, dated and unsexy. Being a girl gone wild was simultaneously an honor and a scarlet letter. ![]() The company’s ads blanketed the media landscape, promising a continual flow of videos featuring wild young women - who looked like the girls you knew - taking their tops off and writhing around naked in hot tubs. Francis had, in a sense, created his own kind of Playboy Enterprises for a generation hooked on MTV. By the early aughts, as Girls Gone Wild pivoted into DVD releases and pay-per-view events, Francis’ company was a stunning success, making $20 million in the first two years of operation.įor a time, Girls Gone Wild had a cultural hold over America’s late teens and early 20-somethings well beyond the confines of traditional pornography. His COO, Scott Barbour, brought another reality television influence to the business: His father, Malcolm Barbour, co-created “Cops,” on which Scott briefly worked. When it launched in 1997, Girls Gone Wild was at the forefront of something huge, years before celebrity sex tapes proliferated (consensually or not) and just five years after “The Real World” premiered on MTV. I created reality television.”įrancis didn’t create reality television, but he certainly found a marketable and profitable byproduct. “It turned me on to see these girls on spring break because it was reality. It was like, ‘No one’s doing this?’” Francis told me in an interview last fall. It gave him an idea: What about a show like this, but for boobs? “I couldn’t believe it. Francis came up with the idea while working as a production assistant for “Real TV,” a syndicated show of cutting room floor clips considered too grisly to air. It was a simple concept, but one that revolutionized porn, female sexuality and the concept of fame itself. “All you had to do was say the name, and I was right back there with that little cockroach bastard.”īefore Francis crossed paths with Sullivan, one of the most colorful mayors in modern American history, he had built a direct-distribution porn empire on the backs of coeds willing to bare it all for tank tops emblazoned with a brand that would become ubiquitous by the mid-aughts: Girls Gone Wild. “I hate that son of a bitch so bad,” Lee Sullivan, the former mayor of Panama City Beach, Florida, told me during one of our interviews last month. For that, you can thank Joe Francis - a man who still elicits visceral reactions from those who knew him. The heyday of the Girls Gone Wild series is long behind us, but - unfortunately - the legacy remains.For women, culture is split into two eras: before you could flash your breasts on camera during spring break for a modicum of fame, and after. ![]() But Francis’s ties to numerous celebrities are also well-documented - something Blackford Newman told The Guardian she hoped to address in the documentary. More recently, he was arrested on charges of domestic violence. There’s also Francis’s history of physical abuse, including his 2013 conviction for assaulting a trio of women. Some of the women she spoke with for the documentary spoke of never giving permission for their images to be used in the series before winding up featured there regardless. What Blackford Newman describes in the interview is a system of unethical behavior and outright physical abuse lurking just below the surface of the series. “here are people whose lives are still being impacted,” the film’s director, Katinka Blackford Newman, told The Guardian. (It’s part of TNT’s Rich & Shameless series.) A new article at The Guardian explores some of the documentary’s findings - and the word “nightmarish” would not be an exaggeration. But the series’s legacy isn’t just one of rampant sexism and awful taste, and a new documentary offers a look into just how bad things got.Īs befitting an exposé on all things Girls Gone Wild, the documentary is called Girls Gone Wild Exposed. The very existence of the Girls Gone Wild franchise definitely falls into that category we’re a long ways from “hasn’t aged well” when we talk about it. There are some moments in pop culture history that seem, in retrospect, like an utterly horrible mistake on the part of all involved, creators and viewers alike.
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