The Other Hollywood (58 page)

LOS ANGELES/SAN FRANCISCO
1991

TOM BYRON
:
Jim Mitchell was a cool motherfucker. I worked for him only once, on a movie called
Grafenberg Girls Go Fishing
. We went out on a boat and had this big orgy in the fucking hull—the girls were being loaded down in a fish basket. And they had a fucking chef cooking fucking lobsters and steaks. It was one of the best fucking shoots I’ve ever been on. And fucking Jim and Artie had all the best fucking pot, man. We’re all stoned—eating and fucking.

It was phenomenal.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
I loved the Mitchell brothers. They were like my brothers. What was the problem? Well, we were all doing coke. I mean, I was doing like ten theater shows a day. Grueling stuff—fist fucking, balls up my butt. I was just,
bhfoo!

And, you know, when you’re doing that stuff you don’t eat a whole lot, ha, ha, ha. So I was a skinny little thing, and there was a lot of drugs and a lot of alcohol. It was just a mad scene, just, you know—mind-boggling. Made a lot of money, though. Those were the days.

BANA WITT (ARTIE MITCHELL’S GIRLFRIEND)
:
I was never comfortable around Artie; he was so supercharged that I’d get breathless. As soon as I heard his voice, my heart would start racing; I’d have to pee. Almost a panic response. He was—so exciting, you know?

I was pretty good at pretending to be cool, not saying anything, but inside I didn’t feel cool at all. I was just like, “Whoa, this is so heavy.”

PATRICK COLLINS (PORNOGRAPHER)
:
I loved the O’Farrell Theater. You could
do a lot there, man. There were no windows; you could go stick the pussy in your face. It was a good time.

JACK BOULWARE
:
Jim was much more of the hands-on, day-to-day guy running the O’Farrell. Artie seemed a little aloof to me the few times that I saw him. They always had a bunch of other people around. But it was still a good time. They would invite people up to the theater and shoot pool and have a few Heinekens. But—as it happens with everybody who had a great time in the sixties and seventies—it can’t last forever, you know?

BANA WITT
:
After I did my first sex scene for the Mitchell brothers, everybody was doing amyl nitrate, and I was lying on my back, and I said, “Hey, give me a hit.”

So this girl spills the whole bottle up into my nose. I was epileptic at the time, and I just freaked. I started rushing. And the burning—it singed the membrane, you know?

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
I broke up with Chuck Traynor around 1979 or 1980. And my boyfriend, Bobby—who was also my bodyguard—and I went to the O’Farrell Theater a bunch of times; that’s when we got busted. I went out in the audience and let somebody touch me, and there happened to be a vice squad there. They were planning on arresting me anyway. Fortunately there were no drugs or anything like that, but Bobby did have a gun on him, which wasn’t too good, ha, ha, ha. My arrest was the biggest news of the decade there, you know?

BANA WITT
:
That day, it just so happened Jim had asked for a gallon of water on the set. So he grabbed the water, and he started flushing my face with it. I thought, “You better call an ambulance.” I was completely panicked; I thought I was gonna go into a big-time epileptic fit.

They put me in a spare room, and I laid down. After a while Artie came in to see how I was, and we started talking, and then we started fucking.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
The O’Farrell was packed the day after we were arrested. And they put the mayor’s phone number up on the marquee—“Call Mayor Dianne Feinstein.”

The Mitchells just had a great sense of humor. And all these reporters wrote articles, and I’m in jail with my fur coat and nothing else on, and they want to take pictures. I took a mug shot with every cop in the place, and they’re going, “I’m really sorry we had to do this.” And the next night they were all back enjoying the show.

BANA WITT
:
Sex is so great on amyl, and I had just had a megadose, but I was also potentially injured. Showed what a psycho Artie was, you know?

But we had absolutely fabulous sex. I mean, I was so high, and I was just hooked on Artie after that—for the rest of my life.

JACK BOULWARE
:
Journalists would come from all over the world, and the Mitchells had this policy of just inviting them in—so they knew they always had the media on their side. For a time, they even employed Hunter S. Thompson. He was working on a book called
Night Manager
, which never materialized. But there’s a very nice photograph of Hunter in the theater with a cast on his leg.

BANA WITT
:
Hunter Thompson—that guy scared me so bad. He’s so high-energy and narcissistic; he gives me the runs just being around him. And there was always so much coke around, so I was even more stressed.

ALEX CASTRO (SAN FRANCISCO CAB DRIVER)
:
I was a driver for the Mitchell brothers, and one night I picked up Hunter Thompson at the theater, and it seemed like it was a party night.

He was going to do some sort of reading on Broadway, at a theater there. He was reading a book or something. And he was with this other guy who was a PR guy or something, and they had this huge bottle of champagne in my car. We went over to the reading, and of course there were a lot of literary types there.

BANA WITT
:
I didn’t really know who Hunter was until Artie started hanging around with him. I hadn’t read
Fear and Loathing
.

Artie said, “Oh, Hunter Thompson’s down here, and I want him to meet the world’s greatest poet, so you know, come on down.”

So I get there, and of course there’s just, like,
plates
of cocaine, so I did about ten lines. Well, I’m not so communicative on coke; when I do that much I stutter, and it’s hard to talk. And Artie’s like, “Recite some of your poetry for him.”

ALEX CASTRO
:
Needless to say, they were kind of shocked when Hunter brought out all these dancers from the Mitchell brothers’ theater onto the stage, and they started doing their thing—you know, seriously getting down.

Were the girls getting naked? They were getting more than that….

BANA WITT
:
So I did a poem, and Hunter says, “Well, I wish I could write poems that good; I can’t write poetry at all.”

Artie’s like, “Well, do another one,” and so I did another one, but it just felt so weird.

ALEX CASTRO
:
Anyway, after the reading—or whatever it was—they went around North Beach, and as the night went on, they got pretty heated. And eventually the public relations gentleman said, “Let’s call it a night.”

Hunter didn’t seem to like that very much. He ended up punching this guy out.

BANA WITT
:
I wasn’t attracted to Hunter at all. He was so speedy, I couldn’t imagine sleeping with him. The guy is just so wired, you can’t even imagine him being
horizontal
—let alone relaxed and affectionate.

JACK BOULWARE
:
The Mitchell brothers were still very much prevalent in the San Francisco scene in the early 1990s, and they went out of their way to support younger artists and publishers. If somebody had a political cause and needed a space to throw a benefit, they would open up their theater. They weren’t making films so much anymore, but they were definitely around.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
Artie got out of hand. As the years went by, the alcohol and the drugs consumed him. He would get really mean and angry, and Jim really had to take over the operation. A couple of times, Artie was not allowed in the theater. I think they came to a point where they were about to break up. Jim just didn’t want to have anything to do with Artie because Artie was just impossible.

Eventually Artie’s whole family—including his mom—begged Jim to help him; they wanted to get him to rehab. Artie would have none of it.

BANA WITT
:
Artie was very sadistic, but he had a totally gentle, sweet side. But when he was drunk he could be very emotionally cruel. So in the early years he played at keeping me strung out—which kept the sex just fabulous because I never saw him more than one night in a row and usually never more than five or six times a year, you know?

Over seventeen years, sometimes it was just two or three times a year, sometimes as much as a couple times a month; by the very end, it was several times a week.

TOM BYRON
:
The last time I ever saw Jim and Artie together was at an
AVN
Awards Show. I was cohosting, and I sang the opening number, “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” Had my fucking Bon Jovi look on. I’m backstage, waiting to do my presenting thing, and Jim and Artie were presenting an award, and Artie was fucked up out of his fucking mind. Jim’s going, “And the nominees are…And the winner is…”

Artie grabs the fucking envelope, rips it up, and says, “GUESS, MOTHERFUCKERS!”

Someone had to whisper to Jim and tell him the winner. It was really embarrassing.

BOB CALLAHAN (WRITER/JOURNALIST)
:
One night I was out with Jim and Artie at a little party we had for a local boxer and a bunch of boxing
writers. Artie was drunk and making an ass of himself, trying to pick a fight with this boxer.

Jim never showed his emotions much, but I could see he was heartbroken. He just looked at me and said, “God, it drives me nuts to see my brother like that. I built an empire with this guy, and now he’s like a Telegraph Avenue street babbler. He doesn’t even know how fucked up he is. He’s got to get into a hospital.”

TOM BYRON
:
Later, while the show was still going on, Artie came backstage and said, “Hey, Tom, c’mere. See that girl over there? That’s my daughter, man. She really wants to fuck you.”

I went, “Uhhhhhh, no, man, I’m already committed tonight. I already got something going on, you know?”

He goes, “Are you sure? ’Cause you could, man. She thought you were hot up there singing, man. Sh-sh-she really wants to fuck you.”

I said, “Artie, man, how you doing? You doing all right?”

Artie goes, “Oh, yeah!
Yeah!
You wanna tootsie? Tootsie? Tootsie? You want zoozkie?”

I went, “No, man. I gotta go back onstage.” That was the last time I saw him alive.

JACK BOULWARE
:
I threw a publishing party at a bar in San Francisco, and Jim Mitchell showed up with his girlfriend. He was a really nice guy. I bought him a drink, and we talked about smuggling Cuban cigars. That was really the first time I had ever chatted with him at any length.

Jim was very supportive. He was buying ads in a publication I was editing. He was just very enthusiastic and excited that people were still raising hell in San Francisco. Jim and Artie Mitchell were publishing a small anti–Gulf War newspaper called
The War News
and a bunch of sixties radicals were contributing to it.

TOM BYRON
:
Later on, I was looking for a fucking cigarette, and Jim handed me a Marlboro.

I said, “Thanks, man.” I looked down; then I said, “Hey, Jim, how you doing?”

He goes, “Oh, good.” Then he says, “Fuckin’ Artie. That fuckin’ Artie, man.”

I said, “Yeah, all right, see ya later, Jim.”

Those were the last words I ever heard from Jim Mitchell—“Fucking Artie!” Two months later Jim shot him.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
I think Jim went over there that night to scare Artie, but I think Art surprised him when he came down the hall. And Jim just
started shooting. And the bullet ricocheted and went through his eye—and Artie was dead.

JACK BOULWARE
:
Two weeks later, I opened the newspaper and saw that Jim had killed his brother.

I was shocked. The whole city was shocked. They were such a part of the fabric of the city. I think people who lived here thought they’d always be around because they contributed so much local color to the city. They were fun-loving guys, you know? They weren’t moody or weird or creepy porn people.

They were fun-loving porn people.

TOM BYRON
:
Oh, dude, man. Joey Silvera called me up and said, “Hey, hear the news, man? Artie got shot. I guess Jim did it.”

I went, “What? Oh,
fuck!
”

Then I was like, “Oh, well. What are you gonna do?”

JACK BOULWARE
:
Tensions were clearly increasing between the two brothers. I don’t know why. Does anybody really know why? Only Jim Mitchell knows why he would leave his office with a loaded .22, drive across the bay to his brother’s house—which is dark, no lights on—bang on the door and start shooting.

Jim kills his brother and then walks away—he was trying to stick the rifle down his leg when the police caught him. I mean, that’s what some people call “Okie Justice.”

ROGER YOUNG
:
I wasn’t too surprised when Jim shot Artie because I kind of followed their lifestyle and what they were doing. Again, I wish we’d gotten more involved. Because one of the Mitchells threw a birthday party for his daughter—Artie had them all in this spa together—and was accused of fondling one of the other girls. They were all underage—eleven or twelve. I was aware that there was something going on.

JACK BOULWARE
:
Jim was out on half a million dollars bail, and he continued to run the theater until his court date came up. Then he went to trial, and it was somewhat of a circus. People were covering it from a lot of different publications. And of course they found him guilty; they’d caught him red-handed.