Mantra Films
Open-knowledge reference entry
Mantra Films Inc., or Mantra Entertainment, was an American independent softcore pornography production company created by Joe Francis, chiefly for the production and distribution of the United States–based Girls Gone Wild and Guys Gone Wild media franchises.
History and organization
The company was previously known as Fall Line Entertainment. In addition to Girls Gone Wild, the company also produced the Banned from Television series in 1998, featuring raw, uncensored and graphic scenes of violence caught on camera. The company also produces "Uncensored" versions of reality dating shows such as Blind Date and The 5th Wheel, which feature extensive (mostly female) nudity and sexual content that cannot be shown on mainstream television.
The company is based on a business model of getting young women to bare their breasts on camera in exchange for a t-shirt, then selling the resulting videos directly to the consumer. In the early days of his company, Francis obtained this footage third-party, and some cameramen who sold Francis footage did not obtain releases from those being filmed. This resulted in lawsuits, one of which was settled for $10,000. Today the videos, which sell for as little as $9.99 apiece, contribute to a total sales figure of $40 million a year for Mantra Films, Inc.
Legal issues
In January 2001, Francis was found liable by a Los Angeles jury for misappropriating the idea for Banned from Television, a series of extreme videotapes that preceded Girls Gone Wild and were distributed by Mantra. The jury awarded producer Les Haber a total of $3.5 million on his claims against Francis.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mantra Films” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.