Los Angeles Magazine
Guy Gone Wild
December 2002

Girls Gone Wild, the enormously popular video series in which young women are coaxed into peeling off their clothes, advertises itself as “Raw! Real! Uncut!” In titles like Girls Gone Wild: Craziest Frat Parties and Girls Gone Wild: Ultimate Spring Break, girls who resemble people you might know – in other words, not supermodels – flash their breasts and yank aside their thongs. All they’re offered in return is a little flattery (“Keep going! You’re doing good!”) and a 100 percent cotton tank top that says GIRLS GONE WILD.

“How about a good cleavage shot?” a cameraman asks a coed in a typical snippet from Girls Gone Wild: On Campus. “Okay. Now smash them together,” he says, zooming in. The girls – who are approached at alcohol-soaked events like spring break parties and Mardi Gras – are urged to French-kiss their best friends, to lift up their boobs (to prove they’re scarless, i.e., “Real!”), and to adjust their panties to show “how good you shaved.” This is more than nudity for sale. What all five Girls Gone Wild videos – which have been repackaged and reedited into some 80 separate titles – seek to prove is that nice girls secretly yearn to be naughty. It’s an idea with huge appeal: last year 4.5 million videos and DVDs sold for up to $19.99 apiece.

When you send away for Girls Gone Wild, your oder is processed at the Santa Monica headquarters of Mantra Entertainment. The company is the creation of Joe Francis, a 29-year-old USC graduate who chose the name because “mantra represents your personal truth, and to me, having my own business was my personal truth.” Mantra is a “direct response” vendor, which means its 90 employees market, sell, pack, and ship directly to customers it lures with TV ads, infomercials and an interactive Web site.

Having no middleman has helped make Francis very, very rich. He drives a Ferrari Spider and a Mercedes S-500 sedan with a GPS in the dashboard. He owns a helicopter and two planes, a Gulfstream and a Falcon. He has four houses: the one in Bel-Air, the one in Pacific Palisades, the Lake Tahoe ski retreat, and the 37,000-square-foot compound he’s building in Mexico with the 52-foot-high ceilings. “It’s like a castle,” he says, grinning.

Francis grins a lot. He is six feet two inches tall and sturdily built, with gel-spiked black hair and a heh-heh-heh laugh that would be wolfish if it were an octave lower. He loves coming to work. “I mean, who wouldn’t?” he asks, the corners of his big mouth rising. “Work” for Francis is a gleaming 12,000-square-foot suite on the fourth floor of an office park on Olympic Boulevard. It is decorated like a mod nightclub, with a silver lame couch in the waiting area and slim plasma-screen television monitors bolted to the walls. “Probably not what you

expected, right?” Francis asks as he gives a quick tour. “People are always surprised. They think we’re operating in our garages.”

Dressed in silver sneakers, with a blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt hanging out of his jeans, he appears even younger than he is. “Some people say I look 24,” the CEO, who will turn 30 on April Fools’ Day, says proudly. “But then, they’re all 16.”

Knowing 16-year-olds – or people who still think like them – is an asset, not just in the direct-to-video business but also in main-stream Hollywood. Which only begins to explain why Francis, who admits he doesn’t go to the movies much, has lately been sought out by producers, studio heads, and other grown-ups who want to be in economic sync with consumers weaned on smackdowns and vert ramps. Increasingly, Francis is becoming a sort of juvenile go-to guy: a self-made expert on arrested development. Most recently, he signed a deal to make a Girls Gone Wild feature film with MGM.

“There’s nobody else who does this as good as we do it,” Francis shrugs when asked why he’s in such demand. “Very mainstream corporate America is gravitating toward this brand because they understand that ‘Generation Y and Generation X are embracing this, and we better not miss the boat.’ “ And what, exactly, are young people embracing? Francis smirks: “Gratuitous nudity, end to end.”

You might think that the inventor of Girls Gone Wild must have been inspired by such mainstays of male fantasy as Penthouse or Playboy. Joe Francis, however, says his inspiration came not from glossy, airbrushed nudie magazines but from footage of a woman having her leg bitten off by a shark.

It was 1997, and Francis was working as a production assistant on the syndicated show Real TV, a pastiche of bloopers, gaffes, and other home video submitted by viewers. Francis noticed that a lot of what came in was too violent or risqué for television, and in this cache of forbidden footage he glimpsed an opportunity. Francis had long dreamed of owning a business like his dad, a Laguna Beach distributor of skin care products. Following a direct-mail business plan he had written as an undergrad, he used credit cards to license the shark-bite tape – as well as several car chases, a suicide with a shotgun, and a woman getting hit by a train. He spliced the footage together and marketed it under the title Banned From Television. It did $10 million in sales in one year.

Making the leap from severed limbs to bare breasts wasn’t that difficult. Francis – who counts Madonna among his role models, not for her music but for her ability to adapt to America’s changing tastes – had figured out that he needed to do more than give consumers what they wanted. He had to make them feel that satisfying their voyeuristic desires was good, clean fun. By this reasoning, Banned From Television was marketed not as a snuff film

but as amazing real moments caught on tape. Similarly, Francis didn’t conceive of Girls Gone Wild as soft porn – to this day he rejects that label. The idea, which occurred to him when he saw documentary footage of young women vamping topless at Mardi Gras, was to show what “Real!” girls can be persuaded to do for fun.

“These were just ordinary people. It was reality. I looked around the market-place, and there was nothing like it,” Francis says. “It’s every guys’ fantasy – that the girl really wants to do it, she just needs to be talked into it.”

Francis believes the hook for Girls Gone Wild – what has made it a monster seller – is the persuasive interaction between cameraman and subject. “It’s the whole push-pull,” he says. “If we just had a music track and breast after breast after breast after breast, how boring would that be? The dialogue is so important.”

Sometimes the dialogue is straight-forward, like in Girls Gone Wild: Ultimate Spring Break, when a group of people gather around a pretty brunet in a pink bikini and yell, “Show your tits! Show your tits!” More often, though, there is an exchange in which a girl explains that she’s not the type who usually gets naked in front of strangers. That’s when the cameramen earn their pay (which Francis says ranges from $300 to $1,000 a day) schmoozing girls with lines like “You’re going to be famous!” or “Can we peek down there a little bit?”

Dialogue was, of course, not what led MGM to purchase the rights to make a Girls Gone Wild feature in October. Neither is gratuitous nudity. What attracted Chris McGuck, MGM’s vice chairman and chief operating officer, was the GGW brand recognition and its loyal fan base. MGM execs are betting that a GGW film can piggyback on Francis’ proven ability to reach the one demographic – young men – that can reliably turn a movie into a blockbuster. If the first film, a fictionalized account of a spring break romp, is a hit, brace yourself for a Girls Gone Wild franchise of racy teen comedies (think: American Pie) featuring largely unknown actors (think: cheap).

McGurk is not the only suit to seek Francis out. Universal Television has hired him to assemble the raunchiest outtakes from its humiliating reality show Blind Date into a direct-to-video product. Peter Guber, the former chief of Sony Pictures who heads Mandalay Pictures, teamed up with Francis last year to form a reality-based production and distribution company, Mandalay Direct. Their first VHS and DVD title, Playboy mansion Parties Uncensored, sold 100,000 copies in just two weeks.

“I’m always impressed by somebody whose tongue, feet, and wallet all go in the same direction. Especially in this town,” Guber says of Francis. “He has a smell for the whole young market. He has entrepreneurial ability. And plus, he’s brave. He invests his own money. He’s decided he’s going to live and die by his own rules.”

But sometimes being a maverick can wear a guy down. “People come to me and say, ‘So all you do is film naked girls and make all this money?’ Like, nobody understands, like, this is a real business,” Francis says. “My cameramen are normal, good-looking guys who know how to talk to girls. But if one touches one of the girls – fired! Done! We don’t do that. We are there to do a job. We’re not a bunch of sleazebags.”

Francis wants very much to be seen as a shrewd businessman, not a B-grade smut merchant. After a few hours in his presence you begin to believe that despite the video-taped cunnilingus that’s playing like visual Muzak in his office when you walk in, it’s not flesh that really interests him. It’s money. As Guber, his friend and mentor, puts it, “If people wren’t buying it, he’d be gone.”

Which people are buying it? Francis says his core demographic is 19-to-24-year-old men, but he swears that girls love watching GGW even more than guys do. Maybe he believes this. Or maybe he just likes to say it as a segue to another favorite topic: lesbians.

“I love that customer base,” he says, his voice full of frat-boy mischief. “I am pro-lesbian a million percent. Both personally and financially, I depend on the lesbian community, or the lesbian-curious community – the girls who say, ‘I want to see what it’s like to make out with my best friend.’ “

“I like handcuffs, I like whips, I like vibrators, ice, and water,” a blond woman announces blandly from the 42-inch plasma screen on Joe Francis’ office wall. Francis has offered a treat: a preview of Blind Date Uncensored, in which a series of the TV show’s contestants talk to the camera – and each other – about what turns them on in bed. The revelations, which are edited together in rapid succession, are shocking more for the contestants’ matter-of-fact delivery than for what they say. Still, it’s hard to look away.

Francis slouches, his legs splayed, in one of four bright blue cube-shaped chairs that surround a coffee table that looks like an amoeba. The chairs swivel, and as he watches he is rhythmically spinning his a quarter turn one way, a quarter turn the other. Aside from the monitor, the only other things on the wall are two Andy Warhol lithographs featuring rainbow-colored dollar signs.

“Food is good,” another woman says, sounding like she’s reading a grocery list. “Peanut butter. Chocolate syrup.” Cut to a third woman, who says she loves “being freaky, nasty – ropes, whatever.” Another cut, to the back of a limousine, where a twentyish guy with lamb chop sideburns commands his blind date to “assume the position.” When she offers her rear end, he spanks it. “Ow!” she squeals.

Francis looks like a kid who’s aced his spelling test. “This,” he says, grinning and swiveling, “is going to be a big

seller.”

He has similar hopes for two celebrity-driven Girls Gone Wild titles – one with Snoop Dogg, which was released last September, and another with Eminem, which is still being edited. In both, the rappers serve behind and in front of the camera, because Francis thought his audience would find it hot to see girls through the eyes of a megastar. He hopes to convince Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit and even shock jock Howard Stern to shoot GGW titles as well. It’s all about expanding the brand, he says. Which is why he’s also considering a GGW book and line of cosmetics.

As GGW expands, though, Mantra’s deep pockets have attracted court challenges from women who have had second thoughts. So far, judges have tended to dismiss the cases, ruling that when you bare all in public, you have no realistic expectation of privacy, let alone profit participation. Still, Francis says, “I love the press, so we play it up.”

Francis likes to brag that “feminists love us, because girls are doing what they want to do. It’s like girls burning their bras in the ‘70s, you know? What’s the difference?” As for the fact that many women in GGW videos appear to be falling-down drunk, Francis is dismissive. “Look, if you’re drunk, you still know what you’re doing,” he says. “I’ve tried to take many girls home on many different occasions, and they were really drunk, and it still doesn’t work out. I think every guy has experienced the same

thing. I don’t care how drunk they are. They’re still going to say no.”

Where Francis does impose limits, they’re forged out of a desire to protect the brand, not the women who make it possible. “Questionable material gets cut,” he explains. “People have sex, but we cut it out. When women are too drunk, we cut. Drug use, we cut. If potentially there’s an underage girl, we cut that. And if at the end a girl says, ‘I changed my mind, I don’t want to be in it,’ that gets cut. There’s nothing legally they can do if they’re in a public place, but I don’t need a problem. I’ve got 300 girls right behind her who are going to do it. What do I care about one girl?”

The CEO picks up his desk phone and calls one of his in-house engineers. “Can you cue up the Eminem thing in my office? Where he’s on the bed with all the girls?” he asks politely. While waiting for the tape to roll, he talks about the future. “I don’t consider myself successful yet. Because true success is longevity,” he says. “But here’s my opinion: Guys will never be tired of naked girls.”

The plasma screen flickers. Six young women sit on a floral bedspread in a drab hotel room. Five are naked from the waist up, and the sixth wears nothing but a pair of panties. “Don’t be shy,” she tells Eminem, who is standing alone near the minibar. “I’m here in my underwear.” The rap star strips off his shirt and dives onto the bed. Amid the girls’ laughter, a voice can be heard

offscreen.

“All you girls said you’d take your pants off if Eminem stripped,” the cameraman says. And so begins the whole push-pull.