There has been a lot of fuss locally over the July 8 “Girls Gone Wild” visit to the downtown Charleston club Banana Joe’s. The GGW producers recently declared the show a “huge sucess” and want to come back. Charleston Mayor Danny Jones and others let it be known it wasn’t quite the event they wanted downtown. The mayor was so worried about the event he had a special police brigade stationed on the corner at Banana Joe’s after his fire department shakedown turned up no code violations. It was announced today that Banana Joe’s has apologized for the event, and that city officials would not require the club to get a special permit as an adult entertainment establishment for what transpired that day.
Of course, there was a media frenzy the day GGW came to town. The local TV stations ran interviews with the mayor and outraged citizens. They hung around the parking lot and grabbed anyone they could find for comment with the GGW buses in the background to give the visuals some “oomph.” But while the local media talked about the decline of Western Civilization with patented reporter concern, yours truly was getting the inside scoop on the bus with the creator and president of “Girls Gone Wild,” Joe Francis.
Francis doesn’t travel on one of the two GGW buses. He flies in on either his Gulfstream jet or Falcon to the gigs and hangs out with the crew in the buses once he arrives. The posh rides are outfitted with DVDs, X Boxes, wet bars, bedrooms, bathrooms, couches, tables and everything else my apartment needs.
Francis himself seems like a pretty laid back guy for a fellow who is now a very wealthy man from his GGW earnings, which are dependent on convincing “real” local women to show flesh in front of his cameramen. Francis knew I was not just a local reporter (I freelance for THE national celeb mag, named after you and me)–so the shmoozing was going both ways. We hung out most of the night, drinking his Grey Goose and Jack Daniels. Francis was multi-tasking, talking girls into the back of the bus where the GGW filming went on while was giving me my interview.
“First of all, a politician’s best move is to come out and trash ‘Girls Gone Wild’ when we come into a town,” he said. “This is par for the course. Your mayor comes out strong with the religious groups and the conservatives because we are an easy target. But hey, I want to interview you at the end of the night and ask you if you’ve witnessed anything criminal or disgusting here,” he went on.
I decided to take him up on that one. So, here’s the skinny. The women coming onto the bus had to sign release forms, show two forms of ID, and pass an on-site sobriety test of sorts before they were allowed into the back of the bus. It certainly seemed like they were consenting adults willing to display flesh in exchange for t-shirts and hats. When two ladies went back together for an extended shoot (the kind that has gotten GGW associated with hardcore) I remember thinking: “These girls aren’t `California pretty,’ like ones depicted on the GGW commercials…They’ll NEVER make the cut.”
Francis doesn’t seem to care. He will film anyone doing just about anything and leave it to his army of editors to decide what gets thrown out in the wash, so long as the girls are college age non-professionals (that means no strippers). GGW will give you a hat and shirt and save your naughty night for future generations to peruse. Pornographer or not, Joe gets the better end of the deal and is the stuff of parental nightmares.
So, I get a rude awakening this morning from my eds at “the big one,” the celebrity magazine named for you and me for which I am a freelancer. New York Post gossip queen Cindy Adams wrote the following in her column today:
