Flash in the Pan

MGM is going wild. The studio has purchased the feature film rights to ''Girls Gone Wild,'' the popular home video series that features everyday women flashing the camera at ''party till you puke'' events like spring break in Florida or Mardi Gras in New Orleans. While the racy tapes, sold on infomercials, are unrated, the movie will be a fiction feature with an R rating, according to the Hollywood Reporter. If it's a hit, it'll be the first installment of a new franchise for the studio.

Joe Francis, creator of the home video series, will serve as executive producer on the movies. He told the Reporter that MGM convinced him it was ''the right place to go right now with a chain of franchise pictures,'' citing the studio's success with the soon-to-be-sequelized ''Legally Blonde'' and ''Barbershop.''

Francis said the first ''Girls'' movie will tell the story of a group of college coeds vacationing in Panama City, Fla. ''It's going to be a fictionalized version of 'Girls Gone Wild,' with love stories and everything in between,'' he told the Reporter. ''We will take elements of the core product and bring it to the silver screen, which we all know takes a hell of a lot more creativity. And at the end of the day, all I want is a great movie. I don't need the money and would never want a piece of garbage with my name on it.'' No, he's not kidding.