Their notoriety significantly increased with Jim's fratricide and they became the subject of three books, X-Rated, Bottom Feeders, and 9½ Years Behind the Mitchell Brothers' Green Door and the movie Rated X.
[3] Jim, a part-time filmmaking student at San Francisco State University in the mid-1960s, aspired to become an "important" director like Roman Polanski and headed a clique of classmates with similar ambitions.
While in school, he worked at the Follies, a cinema showing brief, plotless films featuring naked performers, and observed that each night the theater was filled with masturbators who arrived simply for the onscreen nudity.
They became incorporated as Cinema 7 (headquartered in the managers' offices at the O'Farrell Theatre), and in 1972 produced one of the world's first famous feature-length pornographic movies, Behind the Green Door, starring an unknown Ivory Snow girl Marilyn Chambers in her porn debut.
[4] The Mitchells rode the porno chic wave, using some of their Green Door profits to produce fairly lavish hardcore movies including Resurrection of Eve in 1973, Sodom and Gomorrah: The Last Seven Days in 1975, C.B.
They hired Sharon McNight, a cabaret singer and frequent movie collaborator, to direct the picture and, uncharacteristically, chose to cast the film exclusively with amateur performers, despite the availability of such adult-industry stars as Lady Ashley Liberty, who had just concluded an engagement at New York City's Show World Center.
According to Artie's daughter Liberty Bradford Mitchell, the brothers were arrested and jailed more than 180 times each; the family euphemistically referred to those episodes as "business trips".
Their friends included a who's-who of pornography plus San Francisco personalities and celebrities from outside the city: Warren Hinckle, Herb Gold, Aerosmith, Black Panther Huey "Doc" Newton, and Jack Palladino.
[14] Other contributors included Daniel Ellsberg, Michael Moore, Paul Krassner, Ron Turner, Bob Callahan, Peter Bagge, Jim Woodring, Trina Robbins, S. Clay Wilson, and Hunter S. Thompson.
Meredith attended law school at her husband's expense and, upon graduating, represented the Mitchells until Jim fired her over a conflict involving his children's manners at her family's Massachusetts vacation home.
[citation needed] In 2011, Jim's son James "Rafe" Mitchell was convicted of first degree murder for the 2009 death of his ex-girlfriend Danielle Keller in Novato, who was killed with a baseball bat.
[26] In Hubner's book, the O'Farrell Theatre is a mirrored house of sleaze, filled with bikini-clad predators hustling money from men too insecure or ugly to get girls any other way.
After a highly publicized trial in which Jim was represented by an old friend, Michael Kennedy (by then a prominent attorney), the jury rejected a murder charge and found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter.
Before Jim's sentencing, numerous people spoke on his behalf (presumably appealing for clemency), including former Mayor Frank Jordan, Sheriff Michael Hennessey and former Police Chief Richard Hongisto.
The animation was produced by Alexander Jason, a crime scene analyst who had first planned to make a video to show the complex series of events that ended with Artie's fatal shooting.
[citation needed] Jim established the "Artie Fund" to collect money for a local drug rehabilitation center and for the Surf Rescue Squad of the San Francisco Fire Department.
The funeral in Jim's boyhood town of Antioch, California on July 19 was attended by around 300 people, including Mayor Willie Brown, former District Attorney Terence Hallinan, and many O'Farrell ecdysiasts.