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Joe Francis, the founder and creator of GGW , filed a restraining order against Panama City Beach officials to stay away from his cameramen while shooting.
Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story is a docuseries streaming on Peacock that explains the rise and phenomenon of Girls Gone Wild, while also unmasking their legal issues and the allegations of abuse they received from women and girls. Below are the most important takeaways from the first episode:
1. Joe Francis is the founder and creator of Girls Gone Wild.
Peacock
His father had a direct marketing business, and he was raised in Laguna Beach, where he grew up pretty affluent. Joe graduated with a business degree from USC in the '90s.
2. After college, Joe started working as a production assistant for Real TV. It was a show that showed local news footage and home videos that were "too violent or sexy to be shown on the news broadcast."
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The videos would show things like car accidents, cop chases, crimes, and fires.
3. Joe then began making compilations of Real TV's cut footage that was too risque for TV. Using this disturbing footage, he started creating and selling a series of home videos called Banned from Television.
Peacock / Joe Francis
The videos would contain footage of things like a someone having their leg bitten off by a shark or even people attempting their own suicide.
4. Banned from Television became a huge hit and Joe became a millionaire by the time he was 24.
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5. Joe said he got the idea for Girls Gone Wild while he was going through footage and came across a tape of young women at Mardi Gras who were flashing the camera.
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"It was just extra footage on a tape. And I called the guy and said, 'Do you have more of this?' And he's like 'yeah.'" Joe explained. He said he then drove to every video store from San Diego to north of The Valley just looking to see if anyone was already doing something like Girls Gone Wild. "It was like, no one is doing this? I was just like, oh my God. And it turned me on, like honestly, to see these girls on spring break, and see these things, cause it was reality."
6. Joe started a company called Mantra Films and decided he would sell the tapes through infomercial space. He eventually found the opportunity for this ad space on Howard Stern's show, because it was a controversial show that aired late at night. After that, the ads started showing on other cable networks like Comedy Central and Fox Sports.
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7. In the first two years, they sold so many tapes that Girls Gone Wild made $20 million.
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8. The women in the videos were not professional performers, they were "real" girls, who were typically white and around 18.
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9. Some of the GGW videos allegedly featured minors. In 1999, the company sold a video that included a 16-year-old girl named Lori flashing the camera while on spring break. They were sued, Lori received a small settlement, and she was removed from the videos.
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At this time, Joe didn't seem to know where all the footage was coming from. Independent cameramen found girls to film and brought the footage back.
10. By the early 2000s, they ran into issues with licensing footage from third parties, so the company took over filming themselves. They owned three million-dollar tour buses that toured the country and did events every night. Each bus had three to four cameras. They also had a jet to fly them around the world to places like Jamaica, Cancun, and other popular spring break destinations.
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11. GGW would try to find places in the country where there would be a lot of spring breakers. They wanted to have their events in cities where they thought girls would be bored like West Virginia, Southern Florida, and Texas. They avoided New York and Los Angeles.
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12. One woman named Trista recalled being 19 years old, intoxicated on spring break, and having no memory of being filmed by the GGW crew. One night, while in Cancun for MTV Spring Break, she remembers being approached outside a club by the camera crew while she was drunk, but claims she didn't remember much after that. Months later, she and her friends were watching TV when a GGW commercial came on with her featured in it. A few weeks later she also learned that she was on the cover of one of the tapes.
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She said that after she was on the cover, people would post pictures of her family online to identify her.
13. Todd Julian, an attorney in Phoenix, Arizona, filed a lawsuit against Joe Francis in 2003 and the GGW franchise. His client wanted GGW to stop using her image after she was featured in one of the tapes lifting her shirt at a frat party. The judge ruled in Joe Francis' favor.
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Julian explained that the judge's reasoning was, "There is no expectation of privacy when you're flashing in public." Julian added, "And because they're not celebrities, because there is no inherent value to their image, they are not entitled to any type of compensation for the use of their image."
14. In 2002, MGM was in talks with Joe Francis to make a GGW movie.
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15. The GGW tapes were not just footage of women flashing the camera. The tapes also included hardcore sex scenes between women. On the tapes, women would be shown giving each other oral sex or masturbating.
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16. Some of the guidelines for the GGW cameramen seemed to suggest coercing women who were hesitant to flash the camera. Documents show the cameramen were told to be aggressive and persistent.
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17. Marc Schmitz, a former GGW cameraman, claimed said that it was normal for the cameramen to get women drunk before filming a scene.
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18. When the GGW crew went to spring break in Panama City Beach, Florida, in 2003, then-Mayor Lee Sullivan saw Joe Francis and told him to leave town. Panama City Beach is a small, very quiet town that would get rowdy every year during spring break, much to residents' disdain. The partying was only made worse with GGW there. Former Mayor Lee Sullivan also took issue with women exposing themselves in public places for GGW.
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19. While in Panama City Beach, Florida, the crew was under constant surveillance by the police. Helicopters hovered over their parties and they were constantly tailed by police.
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20. Joe Francis then filed a restraining order against Panama City Beach officials to stay away from his cameramen while shooting.
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21. And finally, Joe Francis and Lee Sulliivan went on Greta Van Susteren's show and debated the issue. Joe argued that his First Amendment rights were being violated by the police because he was making a documentary about women's breasts.
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