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.

Girls Gone Wild launched in 1997 and quickly became a spring break staple. 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. Joe Francis, the founder of Girls Gone Wild, holds a camera inside a bedroom at his home in Punta Mita, Mexico.įor 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.

Little girls gone wild