Wild Thing

When Joe Francis is not at the home office being a global media player, he's out in the field. These days he gets around in his Falcon 20 jet (they go for around $9 million, used). While watching the Discovery Channel recently, he saw a segment about how to achieve zero gravity in a plane, and he wanted to try it himself. So next time they were flying, his pilot aimed the plane upward at a steep angle and then pointed it downward, and through whatever aeronautical juju was created, Francis found himself floating in the air.

"Going weightless in my plane is the best thing I've ever done," Francis says.

"Other than getting to see every girl in America naked."

The way it works on these spring-break treks is that Francis flies from place to place in the Falcon with two cameramen, who work alongside the dozen other shooters hired in the chosen locales — Cancún, Mexico; South Padre Island, Texas; and Panama City Beach, Florida.

In each place, Francis sets up the guys — all of whom are under thirty and are required to be single — in hotels near the wildest clubs and with the type of management that won't fuss about girls getting naked and Francis getting rich off it. Much to Francis' chagrin, he and his workers get booted out of places a lot. "Sometimes, this is the best gig in the world," says Adam, a blond twenty-four-year-old shooter with a goatee. He's sitting on his hotel room's terrace, cold Bud in hand; it's 10 a.m. and he's not been to sleep yet. "Sometimes, it's like the ninth circle of hell."

Though the cameramen complain that Francis cuts corners on expenses, they seem to like him fine — except when he shows up to shoot alongside them, because that means they'll be going sixteen hours a day. Francis has a tendency to call his employees in rooms at random hours, from wherever he happens to be, and holler, "Who's in there right now? Why are you all inside? Get on the beach! Get me south-of-the-border shots! I want taco! Go! Go!"

Francis exhorts his cameramen like a field general, but the girls don't need much convincing to do their part. The cherry on top of spring break, and a rite of passage since the mid-Seventies, has always been the wet T-shirt contest, or some variation on it, which ends up with girls getting naked. To a lot of young women, it's titillating to break the taboo and all the more thrilling to think that millions of people might see them doing it.

"I just don't see what the problem is," says Laura, a Kansas State sophomore with long blond curls who has undone her halter top and pulled off her pants. "I like doing it. Guys like me doing it. I'm not going to be at clubs with my husband when I'm seventy. My motto has always been that life is short."

"We have the Mardi Gras tape at school," says Lindsay, a pre-law major from Ohio University who's on the beach with thirteen friends in Panama City. "When we popped it in the VCR, we became totally obsessed! We're obsessed with boobs. We rate them. We get really upset when there are girls on there with small boobs, because we're like, 'Dude, what's she doing on there?' We even witnessed some not-so-cute girl licking some other not-so-cute girl's nanas!" She makes a face. "I mean, it's gross."

A recent night on the town during spring break in Panama City starts with Joe Francis making out with an array of girls at a bar, and ends with Francis, a cameraman and a pair of strippers back at Francis' room at 2 a.m. It was hard to get the girls past hotel security, and there was even a little skirmish at the front desk that ended with Francis cursing out the clerk.

Although Francis keeps a money clip of crisp hundreds for occasions exactly like this one, the girls didn't even ask for payment. Once the camera was running, they just started taking off their clothes, the brunette in black boots touching the blonde's huge fake breasts, then slowly parting her legs and playing with her glow-in-the-dark piercings. Then the blonde gets on all fours with the other girl's tongue right on her — when suddenly there's a very loud knock at the door. Six guys are out there — hotel security guards, a plainclothes policeman and two sheriffs in green uniforms and broad hats. They say that management has demanded that all of Team GGW leave the hotel immediately, even though it's 3:45 in the morning.

As the strippers dress and Francis packs, he calls his assistant in L.A., asking her to get his Tallahassee attorney on the phone, and here he mentions something about getting "aggressive" with lawsuits, even that perhaps next time he comes to town he wants the hotel renamed the "Joe Francis Holiday Inn."

And with that, Francis is slapped into handcuffs and taken off somewhere in a trooper's car to answer charges of nonviolent resisting arrest and maybe a misdemeanor for swearing in public.

Leaderless, everyone else crashes on the pullout couches. It takes ten hours for Francis to get himself out of jail, but then he turns up at the hotel in his usual high spirits. "They made me fill out a questionnaire where I had to check off what kind of car I had," he says. "I was like, 'Is there a box to check for a plane?' " (No charges were filed.)

The Falcon is ready to go, gleaming white on the runway. Inside there are a half-dozen leather seats that swivel and recline. It takes off right away and goes up really, really fast and really, really high, so that when the pilot steers downward, the G-force presses down hard on everyone's heads. Then it stops and . . . it's a plane full of astronauts, floating around the cabin. Francis does a perfect somersault, catapulting himself toward the shiny, wood-paneled bathroom, then collapses to the floor in a heap, cracking up as the plane resumes normal altitude.

"I'm so fucking amped!" he shouts.

[From Issue 897 — June 6, 2002]