Adult-Entertainment Kings Clash
(‘Sibling Rivalry,’ Forensic Files)
In the 1970s, the world’s most famous purveyors of adult entertainment were Hugh Hefner, owner of Playboy magazine and clubs, and Bob Guccione Sr., founder of Penthouse magazine.
Around the same time, another pair was making a splash in the industry. The Mitchell brothers didn’t lounge around in silk bathrobes in a mansion the way Hefner did. And they couldn’t carry off unbuttoned shirts and gold chains the way Bob Guccione did.
Jim and Artie Mitchell looked more like birthday clowns than emperors of erotica.
‘Two’ much? But they offered a type of pornography that Playboy and Penthouse didn’t: hardcore, both live and on film. And while the Mitchells never attained status equal to that of Hefner or Guccione, they had some glory days just the same.
The Mitchells built a profitable adult-entertainment empire including one particular movie that crossed over into popular culture and elevated their status from mere porn peddlers.
Their own story, however, ended in tragedy. Jim Mitchell killed Artie, the younger brother he once cherished.
Skin in the game. The “Sibling Rivalry” episode of Forensic Files covers Jim and Artie’s rise and fall. Because it was the first time I’d heard of the Mitchells, I looked for more details to flesh out their story. So let’s get going on the recap of the episode along with extra information from internet research:
James Lowell Mitchell and Artie Jay Mitchell were born in 1943 and 1945, respectively, in San Joaquin County, California to Georgia Mae and James Robert Mitchell. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Georgia Mae was a teacher and James Robert was a card shark. The New York Times described him as someone who “tried poker for a living.”
Growing up, Artie was the outgoing son, Jim the serious and reserved one. Jim loved his younger brother and tried to look out for him all of their lives. Once, when Artie was trapped by riptides while swimming off of Ocean Beach, Jim jumped into freezing-cold water alongside rescue workers to help save him.
Brotherly love. After Jim finished high school, he studied cinema at San Francisco State College. He supported himself by giving women $10 to pose nude for photographs, and then selling the pictures at a profit to local pornographers, according to the New York Times.
Later, Jim and Artie produced peep shows — the short sexually explicit films that customers viewed via coin-operated devices at adult-entertainment establishments.
As they branched out into owning the kind of venues that bought their films, Jim and Artie remained an inseparable team who worked in harmony for many years. “They shared business decisions, friends, fishing expeditions, drugs and a desire to set staid San Francisco society on its ear,” the Globe and Mail wrote.
Fertile ground. At one point, they operated 11 adult movie theaters in California. Their jewel in the crown was the O’Farrell Theatre in San Francisco. The establishment, nicknamed the Carnegie Hall of Sex and the Cadillac of Whorehouses, kicked X-rated entertainment up a notch with nude cabaret and live in-person sex shows. It was the pornographic toast in town.
As Forensic Files noted, San Francisco was a good territory for the brothers because of its longtime tradition of tolerating sexual expression and offering adult entertainment, dating back to the Gold Rush, presumably to serve the desires of lonesome prospectors. The San Francisco Examiner would later say that the brothers “reigned over San Francisco’s flourishing pornography market.”
In fact, the Mitchells came along at the right time for the entire United States. The sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s made pornography closer than ever to mainstream entertainment. Women were even starting to accompany their husbands to erotic fare.
Great exposure. Jim and Artie began producing longer adult films. The peak of their careers came in 1972, when the Cannes Film Festival showed their 72-minute X-rated movie, Behind the Green Door. It was hardcore but, unlike most such films, this one had a plot. It portrayed a woman’s abduction and sexual awakening amid interracial and group encounters, some of which took place on a trapeze.
Behind the Green Door got an extra dose of publicity thanks to some irony. Marilyn Chambers, the star of the movie, had recently posed as a mother holding an infant for the cover of the Ivory Snow detergent box.
The Mitchells created the movie on a budget of $60,000 and it initially grossed $25 million, according to The New York Times. Despite that she had no dialogue in the movie, Marilyn Chambers became a household name.
Tied up in court. These were the glamor years of porno chic. “We were superstars,” Marilyn Chambers later told San Francisco Gate. “We rode around in limos, drank Cristal champagne and stayed at the Plaza Hotel in suites.”
The Mitchells maintained a relationship with celebrated journalist and book author Hunter S. Thompson, who worked as a night manager at O’Farrell Theatre early in his career. According to the LA Times, Robert Crumb, the cartoonist who created the Keep on Truckin’ drawing, enjoyed cordial relations with the Mitchells, and Black Panther leader Huey Newton was known to drop by the theater, which had card games and pool tables in addition to the sex shows.
Not everyone felt warm and friendly toward the Mitchell brothers, however. They had to defend themselves against almost 200 obscenity and prostitution cases from local and state governments and law enforcement, according to San Francisco Gate.
The late Senator Dianne Feinstein, who served as mayor of San Francisco early in her career, tried to shut down the O’Farrell. Local station KRON News recorded a police bust of the theater, with patrons shielding their faces from the camera.
Leading lady remunerated. By 1981, the California city of Santa Ana had filed several court actions against the Mitchells in attempts to revoke the license from their adult theater in Honer Plaza Shopping Center. As part of the trial proceedings, Judge Claude Owens had to watch such explicit films as Teenage Pajama Party and The Devil in Miss Jones, according to the LA Times. The Mitchells managed to keep the Santa Ana theater open until 1990.
In fact, they successfully defended themselves in most of the cases.
So how rich did Jim and Artie get from their films and string of theaters?
The Mitchells didn’t get to keep all of the Behind the Green Door millions. Marilyn Chambers had negotiated for a cut; it’s not clear whether or not there were outside investors who needed to be paid off as well.
Advent of video. The value of Cinema 7 Inc., the Mitchells’ entertainment company, ranged from $50 million to less than $1 million over its lifetime. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Jim Mitchell at one time drew a salary of $150,000 to $200,000 a year from Cinema 7, when it was grossing more than $3 million a year.
The 1980s brought the threat of the VCR, which enabled seekers of adult films to watch them in their own bedrooms. Still, the Mitchell brothers had a lock on live sex shoes — few consumers could stage those in their own homes.
Perhaps the real threat to having a stable business, however, was the younger Mitchell’s growingly reckless lifestyle.
“Party Artie” was overindulging in alcohol and drugs and sadomasochistic sex. Artie once took out a pistol and waved it around during lunch at a restaurant, a friend of his would later testify. He got the gun away from Artie, but Artie choked him until he agreed to give it back.
Home invasion. Jim would later say that Artie, 45, had threatened Jim’s girlfriend as well as their own mother. In an interview with Forensic Files, Artie’s former wife Karen Hassall said that Artie had refused urgings to seek help for his problems. Artie had been having violent thoughts but said he’d rather die than go to therapy.
By 1991, Artie was living in a tract house in San Corte Madera, about 30 miles from San Francisco, with 27-year-old girlfriend Julie Bajo. They met during her employment as a nude dancer at the O’Farrell Theatre.
On the night of February 27 that year, Julie heard someone enter the house while she and Artie were in bed. Sources vary as to how the intruder got in. He either kicked in the front door or walked through it because it was unlocked. Whatever the case, Julie got scared, grabbed a phone, ran inside a closet, and dialed emergency services. The recording picked up the sound of gunfire.
Julie screamed in terror.
Martyr mission? Police arrived to see Jim Mitchell, 47, limping away from the scene with a .22-caliber rifle in his pant leg. He had a revolver in a shoulder holster, according to an Associated Press account. The officers arrested Jim.
Artie, 45, lay inside with three bullet wounds including a fatal one to his head.
Jim claimed that he went to Artie’s place to force him into drug and alcohol treatment because he was out of control. He said that he took the firearms for self-defense and that when Artie approached with what looked like a gun, Jim pulled the trigger of one of his own. Jim fired seven shots. Three of the bullets hit Artie.
Inevitable end. The story made for numerous front-page headlines such as “S.F Porn King Jailed in Slaying of Brother” and “A Tale of Sex, Drugs and Brotherly Love: Dead Reckoning.”
Marilyn Chambers said that Artie’s death came as no surprise to her given his risky lifestyle. She expected him to overdose or kill himself in a car accident, she said. On the night Artie died, his blood-alcohol level was at 0.25 percent, triple the legal limit.
Yet others never saw trouble brewing. “Everyone is distraught. Everyone is just flabbergasted,” a Mitchell brothers employee told the Los Angeles Times. The employee said that he sensed no discord between the brothers.
Foolish with firearms. Regardless of any culpability, Jim Mitchell grieved his lost brother. He organized a bereavement ceremony for Artie’s friends at the O’Farrell. “As journalists, politicians, and the rest of the brothers’ coterie … nibbled on finger sandwiches, nude ‘exotic dancers’ undulated to canned music and simulated sex on a fur rug,” the New York Times News Service reported.
Jim went on trial for murder in 1992. The Mitchell brother’s mother, Georgia Mae, testified that Artie’s life was spiraling out of control. Jim’s girlfriend, Lisa, said Artie had made threatening phone calls.
Artie’s friend Donald Dossett told the court that Artie often went on alcoholic benders but the most recent one, right before the shooting, was the worst, the San Francisco Examiner reported. Artie’s personality had changed and he had grown more violent, said Dossett, a physician from San Francisco.
Animated argument. Ballistics tests as well as the audio tape analysis from the 911 call indicated that the gunfire came from Jim’s gun and suggested that Jim shot Artie in the shoulder and abdomen before Artie took refuge in the bathroom. For 28 seconds, the shooting stopped. Investigators believe that, during that time, Jim crouched down and then took aim at Artie’s head when Artie opened the bathroom door and peered out to see whether the coast was clear.
The prosecution showed computerized animated re-creations of the shooting. The defense, led by New York lawyer Michael Kennedy, countered that the video added subjective elements and that the ballistics tests used for the re-creation weren’t conducted in Artie Mitchell’s house.
Jim’s lawyers implied that Artie had a gun that night (none was found) and suggested that Artie was holding a beer bottle that Jim mistook for a gun.
Over the course of the proceedings, jury members listened 11 times to the 911 call, which demonstrated that there were enough pauses in between the gunshots to discredit any accidental shooting theory.
Sacrificed bonus. On the stand, Jim said he didn’t remember shooting Artie although he recalled firing one shot into the ceiling.
Jim cried and said he wished that he had died instead of Artie.
Kennedy also played up the love between the brothers. “Science doesn’t tell us of the workings of the heart, the workings of the mind,” Kennedy said. He countered the contention that Jim wanted Artie’s $1 million life insurance policy. The brothers’ accountant, Ruby Richardson, testified that Jim had once used his own $50,000 bonus from the O’Farrell Theatre as a gift to Artie because he needed the money more. A secretary at the law firm used by the Mitchells testified that Jim sought legal help to forcibly place Artie in rehab for his own good.
Lesser charges. Prosecutor John Posey, on the other hand, argued that brotherly concern wasn’t Jim’s motivation for his visit to Artie’s house that night. “He was tired of Artie Mitchell, his antics over the years,” Posey said. “He didn’t want to deal with him anymore.”
A jury declined to convict Jim of first-degree or second-degree murder but found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter, meaning that it was a crime of passion or perceived as self-defense. The jury also found Jim guilty of brandishing a firearm and discharging a gun in a house.
Perhaps trying to save face, Posey noted that at least the jury didn’t deem the killing a mere accident.
Here come the suits. At the sentencing hearing, Jim, who had gone free on $500,000 bail, received six years. He got out of prison in three years for good behavior. He went back to running the O’Farrell Theatre and later devoted himself to a ranch he owned near Petaluma, California.
Meanwhile, the murder prompted what the San Francisco Examiner called a cottage industry of lawsuits. It included a demand against Jim from Julie Bajo for $450,000 for her trauma from having to hide in the closet during the shooting. Artie’s children sued for an unspecified amount. Life insurance company Summit National wanted to prevent Cinema 7 from getting the $1 million dollar life-insurance award, according to the San Francisco Examiner.
Artie’s estate, which he left to his six children, included a 45% stake in Cinema 7 Inc. (worth about $270,000 at the time of his death), $38,000 in cash and bank accounts, $200,000 in pension funds, and a life insurance policy, according to the San Francisco Examiner. It’s not clear whether the $1 million policy the prosecution implied served as a motive for the murder was meant for the business or for Artie’s heirs. Legal fees to fight bids from local governments to close down their theaters ate into the fortunes of both brothers during their careers. According to the LA Times, law enforcement had been trying to shut down the O’Farrell Theatre since it opened in 1969.
Daughter’s perspective. Artie’s children eventually settled their claims out of court. Julie Bajo received at least $6,000, but it came from her appearances on tabloid TV shows Hard Copy and Inside Edition. (The Chicago Tribune reported that she made $500,000 from the shows.)
Jim Mitchell died of natural causes in 2007 at the age of 63. Two years later, Marilyn Chambers succumbed to heart disease.
In 2014, Artie’s daughter Liberty told her story via a stage show, The Pornographer’s Daughter, set in the 1970s.
By 2020, Behind the Green Door‘s gross had risen to $50 million, according to San Francisco Gate. It’s the second-highest-grossing X-rated movie of all time, right behind Deep Throat.
More on the Mitchells. The O’Farrell Theatre, the showpiece of the Mitchells’ empire, has gone through many changes over the years. I’ll write an update on its history in a future column.
In the meantime, you can read the book X-Rated: The Mitchell Brothers by David McCumber.
The Showtime movie version of the brothers’ lives, Rated X, starring Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, got bad reviews from newspapers and magazines and, perhaps as a result, doesn’t stream anywhere except possibly Showtime; you can buy the DVD version on Amazon. Or save your money and enjoy the Forensic Files‘ episode, with Peter Thomas lending his tasteful narration to the sordid saga of Jim and Artie Mitchell.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
P.S. Read Part 2: Whatever Happened to the O’Farrell Theatre?
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Tubi or Amazon
