Inside the Green Casket

Jim Mitchell, the man who decided that the scenes of fat hairy guys bumping uglies with overly coiffed and made up skanks should be bridged by plot development, has died at the age of 63. He and his brother Artie were producers of cheap nudie films when they helped bring porn to the mainstream with the 1972 smash Behind the Green Door, starring Marilyn Chambers, who had recently appeared on the Ivory Snow box and now showed a box of her own. The $60,000 they spent to make the movie yielded them more than $25 million. Although the movie was showed at the Cannes Film Festival and was heralded as the Citizen Kane of porn, Jim held no illusions about his role in the movie business, and said “The only Art in this business is my brother,” who he fatally shot in 1991 in a perversely effective intervention to stop Art’s drug abuse. The brothers also owned a sex theater in San Francisco that was managed by Hunter S. Thompson and introduced the lap dance to the West Coast.