Wild Thing

Joe Francis has a gift. He can make more than half the girls he meets take their shirt off. He can make half of those girls take their panties off, too. He can make a straight-A student, prom queen, wife- and mother-to-be go outside a club with him, lift her skirt and show him the goods. All it takes, Francis has found, is a camcorder and one magic line: "Do any of you girls want a T-shirt?"

The shirt is nice enough, a little white cotton tank with the logo of Francis' company stenciled on the front in red: GIRLS GONE WILD. It's a brand that's become ubiquitous thanks to the late-night TV commercials selling the video series that Francis dreamed up. His company doesn't release sales figures, but it's been estimated that it sells 2 million tapes a year — 2 million hour-long looks at naked college girls set to bad club music, costing anywhere from $9.99, to $29.99 for the wilder "uncut" versions.

Girls Gone Wild videos might not be PBS documentaries, but they're not hard-core pornography, either. "A lot of guys aren't turned on by nasty sex chicks with tattoos and piercings, and they're not turned on by the airbrushed, unattainable Playboy girls, either," says Francis, yelling to make himself heard over the din in a massive nightclub in Panama City Beach, Florida, in March. "What we offer are girls you can touch. You can touch our girls!" He laughs.

Two tall blondes walk by, amazonian in strappy black stilettos.

"Do any of you girls want a T-shirt?"

They teeter to a stop and squint at Francis — not in a way that's wary or untrusting, simply curious. At twenty-eight, he resembles Jimmy Fallon with a better body, and he has the same way of punctuating each comment with a giggle.

"What do we gotta do for it?" asks one of the blondes.

"All you have to do is flash," he says.

If they don't walk away right now, they're going to do it — the half of the female college-age population that won't give it up doesn't stay to chat. "It's like the girl who says she's not going to have sex with you and then does," is how Francis puts it later. "She goes, 'I shouldn't, I shouldn't, I shouldn't,' but you know she's going to."

"I haven't got any boobs," wails the other blonde.

"No, your breasts are beautiful," says Francis. "Plus, we like nipples, too."

It takes just a few minutes to parry their other concerns: No, showing their tits doesn't make them sluts; yes, if they flash and sign a model release, they might actually appear in the video; no, there's no guarantee they'll be in it, but seeing that they're both so adorable, Francis doesn't think it'll be a problem.

"Is my dad going to see it?" one girl asks, not sounding weirded out by the prospect. "He and his friends always watch Girls Gone Wild."

"Great," he says. "Now get naked."

The flash itself takes much less time than the negotiations, but once the girls lift their metallic halter tops, some college guys appear to cheer them on. Francis tells the girls to do it again, and inspired by the camera and the swarm of boys — or maybe just by some innate girls-gone-wild-ness — they flash again, Francis counting to ten very, very slowly as their blue eyes shine with excitement.

He tells the girls to "smash boobs together," which they seem happy to try, and next they're kissing.

"Can you go downtown, too?" he asks, and then both girls are dropping their pants. There's an ear-splitting cheer as it becomes clear that neither one of them is wearing underwear, and another yell when it's revealed that they're both hairless. By now, the crowd is pressing in so close it's hard to breathe, the guys screaming like it's a rock show, and from the balcony of the club a girl yells, "Jenny! You fucking hooker!" to which Jenny responds by flipping her off, even though the girl clearly doesn't think Jenny is a hooker, because soon she has her shirt off, too. But then the first two girls have had enough, and in an absurdly anticlimactic moment — but this is always the way it ends, because how else can it end, really — they simply lower their tops and zip their flies and walk off into the humid night.

Francis takes a big gulp of his drink and leans back against a wall. The crowd disperses. One kid with an upside-down visor sticks around. "Dude," he says to Francis, "are you taking résumés?"