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Jim Mitchell Memorial Held in Antioch
ANTIOCH, Calif. - An estimated 300 people gathered at the Higgins Chapel on Thursday to remember pioneering adult filmmaker Jim Mitchell, who died of an apparent heart attack on July 12 at his ranch near Petaluma.
Mitchell was laid to rest beside his brother and business partner Art, with whom he founded San Francisco's legendary O'Farrell Theatre in 1969. The Mitchell Brothers went on to produce such adult film classics as Behind the Green Door (starring Ivory Snow girl Marilyn Chambers and porn's first black superstud Johnny Keyes), The Resurrection of Eve and Autobiography of a Flea. The brothers' partnership ended in 1991 when Jim shot Art to death in what he claimed was a confrontation over Art's drug and alcohol abuse.Among the Bay Area notables in attendance at the hour-long memorial were former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, ex-District Attorney Terrence Hallinan, Mitchell's trial attorney Michael Kennedy, political operative Jack Davis and former San Francisco Chronicle reporter Warren Hinckle.
Porn trailblazers guessed right -- sex became big business
The death of sex impresario Jim Mitchell following an apparent heart attack last week was a major time-capsule moment. In a city that has long fashioned itself as the country's singular feel-good fiefdom of pleasure and personal liberties, Jim and his late brother, Artie Mitchell, earned the honorific of San Francisco's once-and-forever Porn Kings. Assorted mayors and scores of local celebrities had lower profiles than the balding sibs who turned the sexual revolution into a multimedia, decadeslong performance piece.
Now, in a digital age where Eros has become irreversibly virtual on the Internet, Mitchell's death punctuates the end of an era that he long outlived. Today's aspiring versions of the Mitchell Brothers wouldn't dream of investing in urban real estate or relishing public dustups with local politicians. They'd be operating under the radar, selling their Web wares from some garage in Bakersfield or a back bedroom in Fresno.
The Mitchells' inspiration, if you can attach that term to a business built on lap dances and X-rated videos, was essentially theatrical. They were the city's last true vaudevillians. That was apparent in everything from the paradoxical look of their O'Farrell Theatre on the Tenderloin's western fringe (a sleek, well-maintained warren of heterosexuality-for-sale venues adorned outside with a mighty, mock-innocent mural of whales), to their flair for publicity, to their market-savvy sense of the transgressively absurd.
