The Arrested Development of Joe Francis

The Sunday L.A. Times features a pretty damning, pretty damn engrossing, article about Girls Gone Wild empresario Joe Francis and written by one of my new heroes (tentatively), Claire Hoffman. The article has already been posted by a lot of blogs (353 and counting according to Technorati), so to speed thinks up I'll just start of by saying that the piece covers expected bases :

-Gen Y's acceptance of diminished privacy
-Myspace
-The subtle mutual exploitation of both the blue colar male cameramen and their exhibitionist subjects by Joe Francis and the company's profiting upper echelon
-The pervasive presence of crushed Red Bull cans
-Paris Hilton's effect on the women of Middle American bacchanalia and their schemes for super-stardom
-The less-than-surprising fact that Joe Francis has a private jet with a playstation and booze

However, in addition to all this, it gets in some real coups. First, Hoffman is present during an evening where convincing testimony would suggest that Mr. Francis had raped an 18-yr-old on the Girls Gone Wild bus. The testimony being interviews with her and her father. If I have time, I'll be watching this case. And second, she herself gets physically abused by Francis in the presence of police officers (yes!) whom she contacts and cites later in the article (sweet!).

So: Yay, Journalism!

But Also: Yay, Mitch Hurwitz and the writing staff of the much-missed sitcom Arrested Development. One of the more illuminating things about Hoffman's piece is that Joe Francis grew up in Laguna Beach, which I shouldn't have to say is part of Orange County, or the location of the show's fictitious Bluth Family. Seeing how much Joe Francis actually resembles the show's roman à clef style caricature of him, Phillip Litt, played with eerie perfection by Zach Braff (The only emotionally convincing part I've seen him play, actually.), I'm left wondering if the sunny, spoiled, middle-brow, climate of wealth in Orange County is somehow partly to blame for the scourge of Joe Francis. Isn't the lifestyle of the OC -- and Laguna Beach in particular -- the fantasy that spring breakers aspire to? I'm willing to admit that this argument breaks down once you acknowledge that Joe Francis has not yet been proven to be a never-nude. But: Come on. He even looks like Zach Braff! (see preceding photo.)

Even if some sort of trial knocks Francis down a peg, I'm still going to have to get a Tivo to filter out all the GGW ads that have made even trying to watch A Mighty Wind late at night on Comedy Central an embarassing ordeal. Can't I just watch my Christopher Guest parody of a PBS/NPR style folk-music reunion special w/o having to see drunk, sexy coed's baring all?!

Link to Hoffman's article.