IF ANY ONE THING seemed to fly in the face of TDC efforts to present “The Beach” as a family-friendly, affluent-attracting playground for the settled-yet-sophisticated, it was Spring Break. During those few weeks in March and April all the plans to create an upscale image were seemingly set aside as local businesses and chambers of commerce concentrated on turning a profit. In no place was this more apparent than at Panama City Beach, and it was there, around the turn of the century, that it got out of hand.
First, a little history.
By the 1980s, going to Florida for Spring Break was more popular than ever. Meanwhile, according to Time magazine, many south Florida communities, tired of rowdy kids and the turmoil they caused, “began to question why the heck they had invited such unruly houseguests in the first place.” For Fort Lauderdale, 1985 was the last straw. When nearly four hundred thousand students descended on the town, local officials responded with stricter laws against public drunkenness and the mayor went on ABC’s Good Morning America to tell students that they were no longer welcome. Daytona Beach offered itself as the new Spring Break capital, a title MTV confirmed in 1986, when it aired its first Spring Break special from that location. But Daytona Beach soon regretted that decision, and by the end of the decade city fathers were discouraging students from spending their holiday there. So students, at least the more affluent ones, began seeking out more exotic places, such as Cancun, for their spring romp. Meanwhile, others looked for a place closer to home, a place they could party with friends, a place they could afford, a place that wanted them. They found Panama City Beach.
Panama City Beach promoters knew, or at least should have known, what they were getting into when they decided to offer their town as Daytona’s replacement. The American Medical Association (AMA) had recently issued a Spring Break warning about “binge-drinking and risky sexual behavior” among young adults who took off for the coast. In particular the AMA expressed concern over young women who were known for their “prebreak anorexic challenges” and for “documented promiscuity” once they arrived at their destination. Even though the drinking age had been raised back to twenty-one by the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, AMA records revealed that binge-drinking and risky behavior continued. Some universities even went so far as to distribute “safe break bags,” which contained “sunscreen, condoms, and a sexual-assault manual.” No matter where the students went, trouble followed.
However, Panama City Beach promoters also knew the size of what Time was calling a “lusty young demographic” and the money it could bring to their community. In the 1990s, as states began to lengthen the school year and August lost a couple of vacation weeks, Panhandle tourism flattened and businesses along the Gulf Coast began looking for ways to recoup summer losses. They quickly focused on Spring Break. Thus began the promotion that would, in a short time, turn Panama City Beach into the most popular Spring Break destination in the nation. It would also turn the community into one of the most watched and studied. Reacting to the AMA warning, researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Stout surveyed some eight hundred students in Panama City Beach during Spring break 1995 to determine just what attracted them to the coast and what they were doing when they got there. The results disturbed parents, intrigued their college-age children, and told local promoters what they needed to do to attract these free-spending customers.
Approaching students as they sat on the beach, hung out in beachfront bars, or lay around the pools at popular hotels, researchers asked their subjects about their backgrounds, why they came to this particular beach, and about their drinking, drug use, and sexual activity. Granting that there would be some lying, the results nevertheless painted a clear picture of Spring Break and its participants. They chose Panama City Beach because it had a “good party reputation,” which they planned to do nothing to diminish. And alcohol was the fuel that fed the fire. Three out of four of the young men surveyed said they got drunk at least once a day while they were down. Forty-three percent of the women were daily drunks. One in five men said they never sobered up at all. On the average, young men consumed eighteen drinks each day, while the women consumed ten. Half the men said they drank till they were unconscious or threw up at least once while they were down. The women were more restrained—only 40 percent puked or passed out. If the weather was warm, they were on the beach by 10:00 in the morning with a keg of beer and a bottle of whiskey. If it was cold, they took the party inside.
The survey revealed “a clinically dangerous level of drinking” that put an end to the old assumption that experimenting with alcohol during Spring Break was just “harmless fun.” Interviewed by the Associated Press, the head of the research team reflected on the findings: “If you are a parent and your college-age son said to you, ‘Well, Dad I am going down for spring break,’ you would think ‘Well, in my day I went, [had] a few drinks here and there. No big deal.’ You might approve of it.” Yet, he said, “by the same token, would you tell your son, ‘Well, son, here’s a bottle of Jack Daniels. Let me see how quickly you finish it and by the time you are passed out, I will go buy another one and come right back.’” That, he suggested, was happening in Panama City Beach.
As for sex and drugs, student responses brought no more comfort to parents. About 32 percent of the students surveyed said they used marijuana during Spring Break and over half said that they used drugs more at the beach than back at school. And drugs were readily available. Fifty-two percent said they had been offered a controlled substance during their vacation but, in one of the few bright spots in the survey, only 3 percent said they had tried a new drug. The old, time-honored stereotype of drunken fraternity men proved true. Those belonging to a fraternity got drunk more than “independents,” and nearly twice as many “brothers” used marijuana than students outside the Greek world.
Then there was sex. Twenty-one percent of the men said that they had sex with a new partner during Spring Break. If a guy had someone waiting for him at home he was twice as likely to go to bed with someone he did not know than the guy who came to the beach free from “previous attachments.” By their own admission, of those who had sex on Spring Break only 57 percent always used a condom, while 43 percent said they used a condom “sometimes.” The numbers were about the same for women as for men, which left a lot to chance.
But Spring Break was more than sex, drugs, and liquor—although liquor seemed to always be involved, even when student “mischief” only included soap suds in a hotel fountain, filling the hotel pool with patio furniture, and running about playing “squirt gun war” among the cars stalled in traffic along Front Beach Road. That thoroughfare, described as “twelve miles of motels, liquor stores, fast-food restaurants, bars, arcades, miniature golf courses and adult tattoo and body-piercing shops,” was as important to the visitors as the big clubs with the DJs and the beer specials. Students wandered along this strip, in and out among the gridlocked cars, talking with other students, meeting new folks, and drinking, even though it was illegal to consume alcohol on the right-of-way. The same congestion that turned students into pedestrians also made it difficult for the police to enforce whatever laws the students were breaking. So they turned Front Beach Road into a twelve-mile party.
The police controlled things as best they could and hoped that the weather turned nasty so students would stay in the rooms and drink there rather than take themselves and their liquor to the beach or the streets. But even when it got overcast and rainy, as it did along the coast in March, students were able to create chaos, as they did over in Gulf Shores, where what went on in Florida was duplicated, though on a smaller scale. Although in 1990, Gulf Shores sent out the word that it would not “tolerate rowdies,” the “rowdies” came anyway. A couple of years after the Panama City Beach survey the Mobile Press-Register reported that in Gulf Shores over a twelve-hour period, police reported arresting twelve minors for public drunkenness and possession of alcohol. Minors were not the only problem. Police were also called to break up loud parties and alcohol-related fights, and students were arrested for crimes that ranged from indecent exposure to criminal mischief and dwi. “Everybody’s drunk,” one patrolman told the press, “and they get caught when they start getting stupid.” In the “getting stupid” category was the “slingshot,” a three-man contraption that enabled students to stand on the balcony of a condo and fire water balloons into the traffic on the road down below—funny until it was your car that got hit. Some students shot eggs instead of balloons, which for the victim was less funny still.
But not everyone saw Spring Break in the same light. Though city officials along the coast complained of what it cost their towns in time and resources, the folks who ran the chambers of commerce were of a different mind. Although they admitted that the youngsters were a lot of trouble, by 1995, the Spring Break season in Florida and Alabama was attracting some five hundred thousand students and generating over one billion dollars for the local economy. Tourist development officers loved it and wanted more. As late as 1999, Panama City Beach had no item in its budget for marketing Spring Break. In 2003, local leaders set aside four hundred thousand dollars to sell spring in the city. It worked. In a few years, spending during the seven weeks of Spring Break would represent one-third of Panama City Beach’s yearly revenue. As Florida historian, the ever insightful Gary Mormino observed, “Spring Break is to Florida beach cities what Mephistopheles was to Faust: a great deal, if you don’t mind the downside.”
The downside was why members of the Baptist Student Union and the Campus Crusade for Christ descended on the coast during Spring Break to feed students pancakes, offer them beach games such as volleyball, invite them to listen to Christian music instead of rap, and give “revelers . . . a little reminder of [their] mortality.” Organized as “Beach Reach” the purpose was to preach “without getting pushy” and suggest that self-restraint should not be “something they left at home.” Some students accepted the food—as students always do. Some students stayed on to play and listen—“it’s nice to meet good people” one burned-out breaker said. And though no poll was taken to reveal just how successful the evangelists were, the number of people who dropped by their blue and white striped tent revealed that many appreciated the food and the effort.
Nevertheless, you did not have to look far to find the historical continuity between the folks and forces that created the Redneck Riviera and the Spring Breakers who arrived in the 1990s to enjoy it. Like those who came before them, these students were down to do what they could not get away with at home. Moreover, Spring Break at Panama City and Gulf Shores was still, for the most part, a southern party, so another link with the past was forged. Students on Spring Break at the turn of the century were the latest in a line that culturally and sometimes literally stretched back to grandparents and even great-grandparents who came to the coast after World War II to get away from the pressures of home and work. From there the genealogy followed a path through students in the 1950s and 1960s who visited the beaches, danced at the Hangouts, drank beer on the sand, met and mingled on warm spring nights, and went home to Birmingham and Atlanta and Jackson and points around and between with stories to tell. Their children followed them to party at the Green Knight and the Flora-Bama, dance to the Trashy White Band, sing along with Rusty and Mike, and really put the redneck into the Riviera. It was all in the family genes. And though the older ones might read of the recent goings on, shake their heads and click their tongues and say they would have never done such, they would have, and deep down they knew it.
“GPA stands for Great Party Action.” A tamer portion of one of the posters sent to lure students to Spring Break at Panama City Beach. Author’s collection.
These were their children.
What may have disturbed parents and grandparents most about Spring Break was not the drinking or the sex, or even the drugs, but how drinking, sex, and drugs became marketing tools to attract students to the beach—and how readily students responded. Once again, Panama City Beach stands out as an example of what “pirates with cash register eyeballs” could do if allowed to do it. At the end of the century the Florida town set up a committee just to promote Spring Break and promote it they did. And so it followed that one dark, damp, cold winter day a student opened his campus newspaper and out fell a slick, colorful insert which, when unfolded, revealed a poster of a bikini-clad young lady suggesting that if “your classes have you stressed out, burnt out, studied out” then “the solution [is] Spring Break Out 2000 Panama City Beach Florida.” It was a masterful piece of advertising, created for and by the Panama City Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau. Though aimed mainly at the college-age male, promoters knew that “where the boys are” was also a draw for the girls, so they loaded up the poster with promises that appealed to both. In good Florida fashion, businesses told customers of all the wonders that awaited them.
With key words in bold, this is what the poster said:
We Have 27 Miles Of Sugary White Beaches and Emerald Green Water so you can Party Out. More Than 18,000 Rooms So You Can Chill Out. Award Winning Restaurants So You Can Pig Out. Monster Supper Clubs So You Can Blow Out [it was not clear why “Blow Out” was not in bold]. Live Entertainment and Concerts so You Can Rock Out. Nationally Sponsored Bikini Contests so You Can Play Out Your Spring Break Fantasies In A Warm and User Friendly Destination That Knows What Spring Break Is All About.
“Play Out Your Spring Break Fantasies.” What more could a winter-weary college student want?
Well, how about a Break Out 2000 Party Package?
For prices starting just under thirty dollars a student could purchase a Gold Pass Club Card that entitled the bearer to “no cover and free beer at 2 clubs every day” plus “free cover charge to Club La Vela.” La Vela, which advertised itself as the “largest nightclub in the USA,” hosted “pool side contests all day [and] super parties all night.” There, with your card, you could get “over 30 hours of free beer each week.” Throw into the mix free pizza, free T-shirts, and student discounts at a variety of local stores, and the stressed out, burned out, studied out were hooked. In the days that followed, the hits almost overwhelmed the promoters’ “killer website.”
Not everyone approved of the advertisement. Some members of the Bay County Tourist Development Council and the Panama City Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau opposed spending their money on printing and distributing the posters. They found the bikini-clad model “distasteful and unnecessary,” an interesting position in a town where taste, especially in the use of sex to promote tourism, had seldom been an issue. Critics also argued that “the long-range success of this beach cannot be based on spring break,” but it was the short-term success that supporters had in mind, so critics were outvoted. As far as Russ Smith, co-chairman of the Convention and Visitors Bureau’s marketing committee, was concerned, the poster was “as clean as it can be and still attract the attention of college students.” Attuned to his target audience, Smith told critics, “There is no reason to advertise for spring break and make it some type of family milk-and-cookies piece.” And of course, he was right.
Rolling Stone said so.
Coincidental with the circulation of the poster Rolling Stone, the magazine for the young and the hip, came out with its Spring Break 2000 issue and among “the hottest places to go” was Panama City Beach. The PCB marketing folks had done their work well.
The Rolling Stone piece caught the flavor of what was by then “America’s biggest spring-break destination,” a perpetual party where, despite the availability of “rave drinks” and drugs, “most of the 500,000 kids in town seem more interested in the local aphrodisiacs: beer and oysters”—they were their parents’ children. The magazine also provided a snapshot of what Spring Break in Panama City Beach was like at the opening of the new millennium.
If nothing else, Rolling Stone was trying to be helpful. Want a cheap breakfast, hit the All-American Diner buffet. A cheap lunch could be had at the Cajun Inn, while the best cure for a hangover was the hash at Corams’ Steak and Eggs. The bars, dance floors, open-air decks, and stages for bikini and wet-T-shirt contests at Spinnaker and Club La Vela got the usual nod, and “once you’re well stimulated, try Sharkey’s which gained fame a few years back for its faux-sex contest that looked a hell of a lot like the real thing”—a trial of skill that required participants to “form as many sexual positions as possible within sixty seconds.” “Cheap and hip hotels” were recommended, “midnight skinny-dipping” was encouraged, and breakers were told they should sample the “local cocktail,” hunch punch: “one and you’re done.” And if you were conscious and hungry, the Wal-Mart Supercenter was the best place for a “3 AM Oreo run.” As for the “Best Beach Characters,” Rolling Stone gave the nod to the evangelical Christians—the “Bible thumpers . . . saving souls in sin city. Give them credit for trying.”
And who were you likely to meet? The “typical” Panama City Beach Spring Break girl, according to Rolling Stone, was “junior education major from Auburn,” who blew off mid-terms to leave school early, checked into the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort and a short time later appeared wearing an Abercrombie and Fitch tank top and Oakleys, ready to cruise the clubs in hopes of finding that special someone who would make her the “trophy wife” she longed to be. When she returned home she would notice the rose tattoo on her ankle and go get a pregnancy test. As for the “typical” guy, he would be down from Michigan State where he majored in electrical engineering. Wearing swim trunks by Nike and a Panama City Beach T-shirt, he wandered the beach, where he developed [an] “inferiority complex” comparing himself to the muscle-bound Spring Breakers from southern schools. He spent his time drinking, hanging around, and ogling “bare chests of the best looking women he’s ever seen.” He did not get laid.
Only a veteran can testify to the accuracy of the magazine’s assessment, but one bit did ring true—the Michigan State guy could have been there. Thanks to a combination of proximity and promotion, Panama City Beach was becoming increasingly popular with Spring Breakers from the North, and though Rolling Stone reported seeing a T-shirt bearing a Confederate flag logo and the words “Like Hell I’ll Forget,” any residual redneckery of that old, damn-the-Yankee-to-hell variety was rarely evident. There were fights, “incidents” the newspapers liked to call them, but they were usually over girls, and alcohol was always involved. Regional differences were not a big deal.
The only visitors who might have clashed over such differences were high school students, of whom there were more than a few down on the coast for what was also their Spring Break. They were the ones who caused the police the most trouble. As Lee Sullivan, the former police chief and later mayor of Panama City Beach, pointed out, “college students have something invested . . . they really can’t afford to have a criminal record that would impede their futures” so they are more careful. High school students, on the other hand, don’t think that far ahead. With a fake ID and a Gold Pass Club Card they were good to go, and so they went. And some of them ended up in jail. Some of them ended up worse. Jim King, a paramedic in Panama City, knew how bad it could be. He had seen people hit with full beer cans thrown from the upper stories; he saved “a fifteen-year old girl [who] was so drunk that minutes after we got to her she went into respiratory arrest”; he treated students with second-degree sunburn, “blisters all over . . . almost like they’ve been in a fire”; and when asked if the “kids ever puke on you” he replied, “all the time.” King had also picked up the bodies of students who fell from a high-rise when they tried to “crab” from balcony to balcony—“trying to impress some good-looking honey. . . . I’ve seen them dead; I’ve seen them maimed for life. My job’s not for everyone.”
Fortunately, most of the incidents did not require King’s attention. Reinforced with units from the Florida Highway Patrol, local law enforcement knew what to expect and were ready. “We act like assholes,” a member of the city’s no-nonsense Tactical Street Crime Unit told Rolling Stone. “It’s our job. . . . [We’ll arrest you] and when the cells are overcrowded, you’ll be handcuffed to a metal rail.” And “assholes” they were, especially when the charges were serious—dwi and drugs and assaults. However most of the crimes committed by students—underage drinking, creating a disturbance, criminal mischief, indecent exposure—were misdemeanors, so rather than throw the violator in jail or cuff him or her to a rail, the officer gave the student a summons to appear in court on a later date. Of course, some wouldn’t appear. They’d go home and the case would remain open. Then, years later, when they tried to get into the military or get a job or get some sort of a clearance they would discover they still had charges against them in Panama City Beach. Settling these was expensive and troublesome, for both the lawbreaker and the law, so to move things more swiftly and efficiently state attorney Jim Appleman set up the Spring Break Court.
Spring Break Court was not created to deal with felonies. Appleman wanted to take care of “the normal peeing on the side of the highway, walking down the beach with a drink in your hand, sharing a six pack with your underage buddies”—minor infractions that clogged up the system. In the new process, when a student was arrested he or she would be cited and told to show up for court at 8:00 the next morning. And in the violators would come, high school students, college kids (with the Southeastern Conference well represented), a smattering of visitors from colleges further North (for either a fear of southern justice or better manners apparently restrained Yankee visitors), and a few good old boys and girls without institutional affiliations, come to town to see what all the fuss was about. The judge would give them the choice—a $250 fine or put on an orange vest and give the city six hours of community service. Most chose to serve the community and later that morning they went to work picking up the trash that they had helped scatter about the day before. When they were done, their record was purged, and they went back to doing what they had been doing before—but usually with a little more care. Of course, some never showed up at all. And when they didn’t officers went out to the hotels and motels where they were registered, names and addresses in hand, to locate their rooms, wake them up, and haul them off to jail for “failure to appear.” That was more serious. The fines were higher and there was a night of jail in the bargain—not the memory they came to the coast to create.
In an interesting aside, Rolling Stone added that for those Spring Breakers who were not attracted to the wonders of Panama City Beach, there was Destin, “which once harbored a solid influx of Spring-Break revelers,” but since “has lost some of its panache to Panama City.” What Destin had to offer, in addition to a few harbor eateries and some scaled-down clubs, was fishing. Whoever wrote the piece knew enough about the place to explain that the “100-fathom curve” offshore attracted everything from bottom feeders to trophy-size billfish, so if fishing was what you wanted, Destin was the place to go. Then, in a nod to the magazine’s upscale and affluent reader-ship, the author suggested that rather than venture out on a “party boat” that carried forty or so “hopefuls,” fisher-folk should “charter a boat that accepts no more than six people.” Though more expensive, “this ensures that you’ll receive decent tackle and assistance, and spend less time avoiding the seasick patron next to you.” What the author did not mention were any of the bars where charter captains and crew hung out, or the seafood dives where fried and raw were the order of the day. Instead, “before you blast out of town,” the writer advised readers, “hit the deck of the Fudpucker’s on the beach for a rummy cocktail.” If the Trashy White Band was in town, it didn’t make the list.
In comparison to what was going on in Panama City Beach and to the attention that community was receiving, Gulf Shores and Orange Beach were nothing short of peaceful. Students came in. The Pink Pony and the Flora-Bama were full and fun, crop dusters were taken out of winter storage so they could drag banners across the sky advertising specials at one place or another, jet skis zoomed across the water, the water slides and miniature golf courses were full. Yes, there was underage drinking. Yes, the traffic was horrible at times. Yes, students cavorted as students always do. Even a few of them “ran amok.” But media attention was directed elsewhere. Even the Birmingham News, which could always be counted on for a good Gulf Shores Spring Break story, sent its reporting team to Panama City Beach. And why? Largely because in one of those rare moments of “raffish Rotarian” restraint, Pleasure Island promoters had not put out the welcome mat the way Panama City Beach had.
Despite the controversy and the criticism, Spring Break Out 2000 was a financial success, and since the bottom line was, well, the bottom line, the Panama City Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau decided to do it again in 2001. So out went another insert, and soon stressed and shivering students were being told come to Panama City Beach to work on their gpa (“Great Party Action”). Although there was no bikini-clad lass on the poster, the number of “specials” that were advertised more than made up for that omission. The list went on and on: one package included “free cover at La Vela,” another let you “Gorge on all the food and drink you can handle for just $15 a day . . . [including] free beer from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. EVERY DAY,” or you could go to the Sandpiper Beacon for the “World’s largest & longest keg party, Wet T-Shirt Contest and Wet Jockey Short Contest.” And to no one’s surprise, half a million answered the call.
So the CVB put out another for 2002, and in an apparent effort to improve on the already successful formula, local establishments added specials that included “all the beer you can handle for $5” and “booze cruises,” which sent liquored-up students out on boats in the bay or the Gulf. That was too much for the American Medical Association. In a conference call with reporters around the country the organization’s chairman-elect took Panama City Beach to task for its role in changing Spring Break from “an innocent respite from academics” to an event “marred with alcohol-related deaths and injuries and sexual assaults.” One can argue just how “innocent” earlier “respites” had been, but the AMA had a point. Hoping to reverse this trend the physicians “strongly recommended” that local businesses stop promotions that encourage students to do the very things the AMA deemed dangerous. Although the Panama City promoters might be making money, the organization warned that doing it by promoting “binge and underage drinking” resulted in a social and physical cost far greater than the monetary profit.
Panama City Beach’s excesses caught the attention of some who had no intention of asking local businesses to do anything other than what they were doing. Joe Francis, creator of the popular video series Girls Gone Wild heard of the goings on along the Gulf Coast and concluded that a “wide open” Panhandle community was a perfect location for his Spring Break taping. Now it is unlikely that anyone reading this book does not know about Girls Gone Wild, but just in case, in theory the enterprise works like this: Francis and his crew would arrive at a location where young women are known to “go wild.” When the young women did, Francis and crew filmed them—topless, bottomless, and often engaging in sexually suggestive (and for some, sexually stimulating) activities. Francis claimed that he was careful to confirm that all of the girls he filmed were over the age of eighteen and had them sign a waiver saying they agree to the filming and to their “naughty bits” being shown and sold in the video.
Half-naked, thoroughly drunken women getting their pictures taken down along the coast was nothing new. Spring Break reports often included accounts of guys who walked along the beach with disposable cameras, offering “Mardi Gras–style beads for a peek of flesh” and a picture. Francis surely figured he could do the same. What the creator of Girls Gone Wild did not realize was that things were changing along the coast. Panama City Beach mayor Lee Sullivan, the former police chief, had begun trying to clean up the town’s “once-tawdry image,” and as far as he was concerned, what Francis was planning would “go counter” to that effort. Local police had already cracked down and arrested some amateur photographers and their “models” for doing what they did on a public beach, but apparently the Girls Gone Wild team figured that in the land of contests that involved “wet T-shirts” and “wet jockey shorts” the line between what was legal and what was not was blurred and easily crossed.
So it should have come as no surprise that Joe Francis would think Panama City Beach was just the place for him to do what he wanted to do.
He did not figure on Mayor Sullivan.
Panama City Beach was indeed cleaning up its act. Reacting to the AMA criticism of its promotional activities, the Spring Break 2003 advertisement highlighted concerts, great disc jockeys, lazy river rides, jet skiing, and parasailing instead of “booze cruises” and keg parties. It urged students to drink responsibly and advised those who went clubbing, “If you came with a friend, leave with that friend . . . call a cab . . . refuse a drink of any kind from a stranger . . . [and] realize that drinking laws will be enforced.” The president and chief executive officer of the tourist bureau set the tone. “We hope that students will take a minute to realize that their safety and fun depends on the decisions they make throughout spring break,” he told the press. It wasn’t “milk and cookies” they were selling, but neither was it “free beer from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. EVERY DAY.”
It was not as if Francis and Girls Gone Wild had not been warned. As soon as word got out that the operation might come to Panama City Beach Sullivan announced, “[If] girls go wild they’ll also go to jail and so will those who take videos of them baring it all.” Reminding the press of his efforts to improve the town’s image, Sullivan added, “We’re trying to have a good resort and a good tourism business.” What Joe Francis was bringing in was not something the mayor wanted his community “subjected to.”
Francis and his crew arrived amid even more “hoopla” than was “usual” even for them. What followed played out like this, more or less: Girls went wild and were filmed, just as they had at other times and in other places. Then the father of one that had been filmed with another in a steamy shower scene contacted the sheriff’s office and reported that his daughter was a minor. The sheriff’s office got in touch with Sullivan and the mayor brought the hammer down. Arrested and charged with more than seventy counts that included “racketeering, drug trafficking, prostitution and promoting the sexual performance of children,” Francis and company were hauled off to jail, his Ferrari and private jet were confiscated, and officers collected some 175 hours of video recordings of Spring Break parties, footage that “prosecutors say . . . contains alleged minors performing sex acts.”
When Francis got out on bail, he sued Bay County and everyone involved in his arrest, claiming that his First Amendment rights were violated, and into the courts it went. You almost need a map to follow what happened after that. All but six of the criminal charges were thrown out because of a “flawed search warrant,” but before Francis could deal with what charges remained the two girls in the shower scene, both seventeen, plus five other women, sued Girls Gone Wild for “emotional distress.” This landed Francis back in jail and eventually led to contempt charges for not properly participating in court-ordered mediation. Out on bail again, he was slapped with a criminal contempt order for failing to show up on time when he was ordered back to Florida. He settled the lawsuit with the girls and made bail, but before he could leave the jail, guards found prescription pills and money in his cell. The next thing Francis knew he was facing criminal charges for bringing contraband into a detention facility. Bail was denied because he had “impugned the integrity of the judicial process,” and he likely would be there still had he not been transferred to Nevada to face tax evasion charges.
Just about everybody left behind in Florida agrees that through it all the man behind Girls Gone Wild was his own worst enemy. State attorney Jim Appleman, who was close to the case in its initial phase, felt that by announcing that Panama City Beach “was wide open and he was going to do what he wanted to do” Francis was daring the mayor to stop him, and Sullivan was not the sort of person to run from a dare. From the moment he arrived, Joe Francis was a “marked” man. While not completely disagreeing with Appleman, Sullivan says it was Francis’s “arrogance and bad judgment,” his “cavalier attitude,” and his “obvious disdain” for authority that got him into trouble. Joe Francis did himself no favors by ranting on about “corrupt city officials,” the “evil” and “vengeful” “Nazis” and “cockroaches,” who he claimed were “pissed off at me for asserting my First Amendment rights against them.” Once out of Florida, Francis had a website set up to present his side of the story. He also went on the Fox News Channel to tell lawyer and talk show host Greta Van Susteren how he had been wronged by the mayor and the rest.
Sullivan, as you would expect, would have none of it. To the mayor, Joe Francis was nothing but “a soft porn director” who “gets young women to expose themselves and has it on a video and sells it to men who can’t function without that encouragement.” The constitutional argument was just an after-the-fact excuse. What really happened, according to Sullivan, was that Francis came down to what he thought was “Gooberville” and “we rained on his parade.” When he left, “Panama City Beach did not have the allure [it had] before he got here.”
Reflecting on the events and the controversy, talk show host Van Susteren brought it all into focus. It had become “a grudge match,” she said. “Joe has poked a stick in the eyes of the prosecutors” and they are “messing with him” in return. And they were. For despite all the upscale condos, the clubs, the fern bars, and the white-tablecloth restaurants, one principle of the Redneck Riviera remained intact—mess with me and I’m gonna mess back.
And as if this were not enough, there was Snoop Dogg.
The rapper, whom Francis allegedly described as a “bitch magnet,” came down with the Girls Gone Wild crew to film Girls Gone Wild: Doggy Style and was arrested for luring two underage girls to take off their tops in exchange for marijuana and Ecstasy. In response Snoop filed an affidavit saying the girls voluntarily exposed themselves. But by then Snoop was having a change of heart, at least as far as his association with Joe Francis was concerned. Surveying the situation the “bitch magnet” cut his ties with Francis because Girls Gone Wild was discriminating against African Americans. “If you notice,” he told the Associated Press, “there hasn’t been no girls [of color] at all on none of those tapes. That ain’t cool, because white girls ain’t the only hos that get wild.” He told the press that black and Hispanic “hos” have been “complaining to me like crazy” and to answer their complaints he was thinking of producing his own line of videos. That, he concluded, would “bring some flavor to the table.”
Not exactly what the advocates of affirmative action had in mind.
And thus it ended, not with bang, but with a whimper.
Joe Francis was gone and reportedly would rather stay in a Nevada jail than return to Panama City Beach to face the charges that remained. Girls might still go wild on the coast, but not in Francis videos.
Local Convention and Visitors Bureau folks toned down their Spring Break promotions. There would be no more mail-outs to colleges advertising all the booze, sex, and rock and roll anyone could want, but a partnership worked out with MTV would assure local businesses that students would know that Panama City Beach was “the premier Spring Break ‘place to be’ for the country’s college crowd.”
Lee Sullivan eventually ran for state representative, lost, and became a local Fox News talk show host. From that platform he continued “refining Gooberville” and exploring ways to “have good business without an over-abundance [of] debauchery.”
Jim Appleman retired from his position as state attorney, went into private practice, and has used his experience to become the “Spring Break Lawyer”—as attested to by billboards strategically located around town, advising students, “Arrested? Call Appleman.”
The official chosen to review the 175 hours of tapes confiscated from Francis’s tour bus watched them all and reportedly told his wife that he never wanted to see a bare breast again.
“Arrested? Call Appleman.” This sign near the Panama City clubs offers legal aid to those who need it. Photograph by the author.
They kept returning.
Always young, always happy, always a little stupid, always looking to do things they could not do back home.
Just like those who had come before them.