Bottom Feeders: From Free Love To Hard Core - The Rise And Fall Of Jim And Arti

by John Hubner

In 1973, less than a hundred years after Henry James's Daisy Miller compared the innocence of Americans with the decadence of Europeans, Jim and Artie Mitchell arrived at the Cannes Film Festival for the screening of their magnum opus. When the lights came up and the credits rolled on Behind The Green Door, the French audience showered America's bad-boy pornographers with wild applause. The formerly innocent Americans had returned to teach the Europeans about decadence.

Bottom Feeders is the compelling story of how a pair of irreverent brothers, the sons of an Okie cardshark, made pornography one more option in the mainstream consumer marketplace. It is also the story of how their moral disintegration ended in the violent death of Artie at the hands of his brother.

Award-winning author John Hubner set out to discover what kind of forces might drive a man to kill his brother. But his examination of the Mitchell story becomes much more than that. Long before mild-mannered Jim burst into Artie's house with his rifle blazing, the Mitchell Brothers had made a name for themselves as counterculture heroes who owned San Francisco's landmark O'Farrell Theatre. Riding the free-love tide of sexual libertarianism, the brothers went from distribution of topless still photos to sexually explicit films and live sex shows that forced authorities to anchor legal rulings in the shifting sands of community standards. Along the way they produced Green Door (which became a mainstream blockbuster), fought seminal court battles, launched the career of famed "Ivory Snow Girl" Marilyn Chambers, were a focal point for underground celebrities like Hunter S. Thompson, and became known as the Peck's Bad Boys of San Francisco, who responded to harassment from the mayor by putting her office number on the theater marquee. But whether you're in the vanguard or the rearguard, porn is a dirty business. Hubner discovers that the morally twisted world of porn often attracts psychologically unstab

Genres: Nonfiction

412 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my third Mitchell brothers book and I think it was the best of the lot.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating story about earthy Okie brothers stumbling into the leading edge of a burgeoning pornography industry and losing themselves in excess. Jim eventually kills his brother Artie in some heated fugue state, but also with multiple shots, precision in a scene that looks more premeditated than the prosecuting attorney was able to convince the jury. Two loaded weapons, multiple shots and only a three-year minimum at sentencing. I have seen as much on short TV presentations. This goes much more into Artie's years of drug and alcohol madness, the side effects of hypothermia and its treatment, homicidal threats he made, and his own weapon brandishing and discharing.

[Sir Michael Röhm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jim and Artie Mitchell were brothers from Oklaholma, just a few years apart. Jim was the older and more serious one, while Artie was the younger, clownish one. Together, the brothers would become infamous from their forays into pornographic films, including one of the biggest 'porn chic' films of the 70s, Behind the Green Door.

This book not only chronicles their rise from being rather impoverished sons of a docile housewife and a father who both loved his boys and made his money on card sharking, through their pornographic careers, until the tragic end, when Jim shot Artie for reasons still murky.

The brothers started out with a counterculture ethos that their father had implanted on them - fight the establishment. For their father, it meant never having a steady job and taunting the police. For the brothers, what started out as a fun way to learn how to make films by videotaping attractive 'free love' hippie chicks soon escalated into pushing the envelope, showing hard-core sex, collapsing under the unlimited sexual and narcotic freedom offered to them, and finally ending in a murder trial.

The book is well written, but it at times meanders into questioning the validity of pornography itself. While these arguments, pro and against, have their place, it breaks into the narrative. If I wanted to read what feminists and religious people have to say about porn, I would read their books, after all.

Another flaw is that the book was published in 1993 and has not been updated, as far as I can tell, despite the fact that Jim Mitchell served three years in San Quentin, established a fund in Artie's name, and died in 2007. This book does not explore Jim Mitchell's life post-sentencing, so one has to turn to the Internet to get the 'full story.'

In the end, neither brother is likable, and the entire story is basically sad and sick, but it is well told and worth reading. The people who hold men like these up as heroes are deluded.

The brothers were abusive towards women in general, their actors and actresses (these people were referred to as "meat",) their 'inner circle,' and ultimately towards one another. While they may have helped establish some landmark anti-censorship court rulings, they did so out of their own self-interest. Much like another pornographer held up as a hero, Larry Flynt, they are still scummy 'bottom-feeders' in the end.

[Nerine Dorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is definitely an eye-opening read with regard to the porn industry in the USA, spanning the 1960s to 1980s. Following the lives of Jim and Artie Mitchell, and their notorious sex club, it gives a no-punches pulled overview of how the brothers got into the business with nude photographs, porn movies and sex shows.

I find myself sitting on the fence with regard to having an opinion either way. Personally, I don't care much for porn but I do respect people's rights to watch or participate in the industry.

This book perhaps also serves as a cautionary tale about people who push boundaries. At times harrowing and shocking, it's still a fascinating read, although I do not find myself at all sympathising with Jim or Art. At the end of the day they only have themselves to blame.

[RB Love · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Mitchell Brothers is a story that could write itself and would be an extraordinary tale. This is also a well researched, well put together document. A pair of brothers raised by a flim flam man and going on to pioneer a porn empire and that's just the beginning.

[YNOT]

sofa so good,
understanding the 'NoN-BeST SeLLeR' STaTus,
th' WRiTeR has APPROaChed...
th' subjects in NoN-JudGeMeNTaL WaY...
without unnecessary glory nor villificashun...
( pls du not correct mi intenshunal mis-spellinks )