Once upon a time, sixteen years ago, a movie came out called Coyote Ugly. It's forgotten as a film, but as a franchise, it's global. That's because of Lil Lovell, who own the Coyote Ugly franchise.

If you haven’t seen it or don’t remember, it’s a romantic comedy about a girl who moves to the big city with dreams of making it as a songwriter. Until she does, she gets a job in a little bar in New York’s East Village, where brash, sassy women pour straight liquor down patrons’ throats while dancing on the bar. The movie went on to gross more than $113 million worldwide.

That’s where the success story of the real-life Coyote Ugly Saloon — really run by Liliana “Lil” Lovell— begins.

Lovell took what was essentially a free global marketing campaign and capitalized on it. Coyote Ugly is now a chain of 21 locations — 14 in the U.S. and seven abroad — with gross sales for 2015 of almost $30 million. And that’s about to grow, a lot. Coyote Ugly just inked its largest franchise deal to date, which will bring 15 locations to Japan.

“There was no part of me that ever thought Coyote Ugly [the bar] would be the vehicle that I would do nationally or internationally,” Lovell told me from her home in San Diego. “When the movie came out, it was, ‘Why waste a $100 million movie?’”

Or a huge international trend.

Lovell isn’t a big fan of the movie made about her bar. In fact, she’s seen it once, at the premiere, and that was plenty — mostly because the movie’s not really about her bar.

And that bar has been her life for the past 23 years.

Lovell started bartending in college. Then, when she got a job on Wall Street, as an assistant at D.H. Blair, she kept bartending because her $250-a-week salary wasn’t going to cut it in New York City.

After a year of getting home from her bartending jobs at 5 a.m., only to get up for her Wall Street job at 7, she was done. But she made a deal with herself: If she was still bartending when she turned 25, she’d go back to 9-to-5.

“I had put that discipline on myself. And then the opportunity for Coyote came up,” Lovell said.

She pounced. And because of the network she’d built in the New York City bar scene, Coyote Ugly opened 23 years ago with a line down the block. A few months later, it was written up in the New York Times.

Her concept was unique. She put only women behind the bar — a rarity at the time — and those women had to have a certain something, “a natural charisma,” to earn a spot back there.

Then, in 1997, Elizabeth Gilbert, pre-“Eat Pray Love,” wrote an article in GQ about her stint behind — or rather on — the bar at Coyote Ugly and about the woman running it. The movie wasn’t far behind.

When the film came out, people were clamoring for a piece of Coyote Ugly.

Lovell wanted to grow, but she wanted to be careful, too.

“A lot of Coyote is about intuitiveness, to have your intuition know who to hire, understand a situation, read your customers. Those are things you can’t necessarily write in the manual because it’s learned. And that’s more about training than anything,” she said.

That training preserves the integrity of the brand.

“When I say integrity, I mean finding the managers who can uphold what I see and what I do. There’s a fine line between having girls be sexy and strong and have them just be sexy. And that’s a big line to me,” Lovell said.

Because the women are the stars of the bar, and they need to own it — in their own way, she said.

“We have girls who went on to become doctors or lawyers or own their own businesses, so they are strong women,” she said.

Even when people reach out because they want to buy their own Coyote Ugly franchise, she wants to make sure they aren’t simply wooed by the movie.

“I’ll ask, ‘Have you bartended? Waited tables?’” she said. “I’m preaching that you have to work from the bottom and move your way up. That’s how you earn it.”

Much of her corporate team now has been with her for years, working their way up from the bar level. Her director of operations, for instance, has been with her for a decade. He started as the assistant manager of the Coyote Ugly in Austin.

She looks for the same commitment among her franchise owners.

Each of them, no matter what country they’re in, must come for two weeks of training in San Antonio and Austin. Then they come back annually to maintain that training.

“I want to make sure that they’re loyal and they truly understand the brand,” she said.

Now there are franchise locations in Russia, Ukraine and Germany, with deals signed for several bars in the United Kingdom, Kyrgyzstan and, as of this week, nine in Japan.

A “B” movie, a lot of work, and some smart decisions. Look what one can accomplish! 

American Bars salutes Lil Lovell and her Coyote Ugly empire. Isn’t American culture wonderful!