Legendary Porn Figure Jim Mitchell Dies

Jim Mitchell, the Antioch High School graduate who teamed with his brother, Artie, to build a legendary porn empire that included San Francisco's O'Farrell Theatre and several revolutionary skin flicks (including "Behind the Green Door"), and who in 1991 shot his brother dead, died Thursday night at his Sonoma County ranch home, family and coroner's officials said.

He was 63.

Mitchell, half of the eccentric Mitchell Brothers duo that became perhaps the nation's best-known purveyors of dirty films during their heyday in the 1970's and '80s, lived in Petaluma with his wife, Lisa. He suffered a heart attack, said Merle Lane, a relative by marriage.

"He was sitting in his chair and doing something, I think watching TV, and he just, 'Ehhhh.' That was it. His heart quit him just like that," said Lane.

It was a quiet ending to what once was a wild life of sex, drugs, porn film-making, strip shows, scores of arrests for obscenity and, in 1991, a Cain-and-Abel-style killing that opened the courtroom curtain to their brash lifestyle and sent Jim Mitchell to prison for three years on a conviction for involuntary manslaughter.

Since their days growing up in a working class Antioch family, the brothers were close and watched out for each other. Jim was two years older, a staunch leftist and savvy businessman. Artie was the younger, crazier and sexually voracious brother, according to a 1992 biography, "X-Rated: The Mitchell Brothers - A True Story of Sex, Money and Death," by David McCumber, a former San Francisco journalist and poker buddy of the Mitchells.