An account of the lives of Jim and Artie Mitchell describes how the hippies found fame and fortune with their making of Behind the Green Door, an instant pornographic film classic, but lost it all when one brother killed the other.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Hubner ( Monkey on a Stick ) presents a raw, compellingly lurid account of Jim Mitchell (b. 1943) and his younger brother, Artie (b.1945), who pioneered "mainstream" pornographic films during the 1970s. Raised in an "Okie" family in California's San Joaquin Valley, the brothers started out filming "loops" of topless hippie women in '60s San Francisco, where they later opened the O'Farrell Theater as a venue for their work. As they progressed to more explicit fare, they added plots and creative camera angles as means to justify their movies' artistic merits and thus get around antipornography laws. During their heyday, the brothers tangled with antiporn activists, including Dianne Feinstein (elected to the U.S. Senate last fall) and convicted S & L felon Charles Keating, and gave porn star Marilyn Chambers her start in Behind the Green Door . Hubner concentrates on the Mitchells' headstrong, country-boy mentality as he leads up to their last act: in 1991 Jim fatally shot Artie, who had become a drug addict and alcoholic. Jim was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. In a book that no doubt will receive major local attention, Hubner neither sensationalizes nor flinches from the sordid facts in the lives of these emblematic "pornographers of the flower children."
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
San Francisco's notorious Mitchell brothers are fast becoming publishing's "Amy Fisher" story. In the wake of David McCumber's X-Rated ( LJ 11/15/92), journalist Hubner presents his own account of the events that led Jim Mitchell to murder his younger brother, Artie. (A forthcoming third version, Warren Hinckle and Susan Cheever's His Brother's Keeper , has been postponed indefinitely. ) Like McCumber, Hubner traces the brothers' journey from their Okie roots in Antioch to their years as living-on-the-edge pornographers, finally ending in Jim Mitchell's trial. However, Hubner has the advantage over McCumber of being a better writer and having better-organized material. While McCumber describes in tedious detail Artie's relationships with women, Hubner concentrates on the Mitchell brothers' career as pornographers; Behind the Green Door and its star, Marilyn Chambers, barely discussed in X-Rated , are of major importance here. The book's only weakness is Hubner's reconstructed dialog, which leads the reader to wonder where the journalism ends and the fiction begins. For true-crime collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/92.
- Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Better than McCumber's,
By A Customer
This review is from: Bottom Feeders (Mass Market Paperback)
John Hubner's book the second to cover the Mitchell fratricide(and probably the last, since there's very little left to cover). Hubner's book, unlike SF journalist David McCumber's awful "X-Rated," is objective and sociological. He has obviously read "X-Rated" and is careful to gloss over the parts McCumber covered in depth. Hubner comes across as an experienced journalist who has relatively little experience with the porn industry and sticks to the facts.I worked as a doorman at the Mitchell Brothers' O'Farrell Theatre in the mid-1980s and got a sense of how their world worked. I can imagine how difficult it must have been for Hubner and McCumber, trying to find insiders who would speak to them. Reading through both books, I saw the familiar names: Jeff Armstrong (laziest worker on Earth), Charlie Benton (most temperamental worker), Phil Brady (meanest human), Luanne Buckelew (token woman), Jim Gish, Vaughan Melendy (horniest doorman alive), Richard Mezzavilla (conscience of Mitchell Brothers), Jack Palladino (ugliest man alive and now America's most expensive private eye), Vince Stanich (always stoned) and knew that these folks weren't going to talk, period. So what the reader learns comes from the small number of former Michell employees who were willing to tell about "the Boys" and their fun. Hubner mentions Megan Leigh, the Oakland native who ran away from home at 14 and worked at a Guam massage parlor by 17. I remember her well; she danced at the O'Farrell as Eve. A tall, pimply, emaciated girl who couldn't dance to save her own soul, she had a heroin habit and quit the O'Farrell to undergo detoxification and a complete makeover. She reemerged as Megan Leigh and appeared in 117 hardcore adult movies from 1987-90. Along the way she became readdicted to drugs and, sick of being sick all the time, left an apologetic note to her mother and stuck a gun in her mouth, thereby virtually ensuring that she would never be completely forgotten.
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