Early Life
The Mitchells' father, Robert (known to all as Bob), an "Okie," was a professional gambler. He and his wife, Georgia Mae, settled in Antioch, near San Francisco and, according to the Mitchell brothers' biographers, provided a relatively stable childhood for Jim and Artie; the boys were popular and their childhood friends would become important members of the Mitchells' porn empire.
Jim, a part-time filmmaking student at San Francisco State University in the mid-1960s, aspired to become an "important" director like Francis Ford Coppola and Roman Polanski, and headed a clique of classmates with similar ambitions. While in school, he worked at the Follies, a cinema showing "nudies" (brief, plotless films featuring naked performers), and observed that each night the theater was filled with "horn dick daddies" (masturbators) who arrived simply for the onscreen nudity. He therefore perceived pornography as a potentially lucrative career opportunity for himself and Artie, who had just been discharged from the Army.
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