![]() Kennedy believed that the social value of pornography was that it served as a shield for the rest of art and literature – meaning that if pornography could not be censored, then other forms of art would be protected as well. After a long trial, the jury became hopelessly deadlocked and the brothers escaped without conviction. Ī little more than a year later when the first case made its way to court, the trial became a local media circus as a flamboyant and wisecracking Kennedy irritated the district attorney while he challenged the legal definition of obscenity. With Kennedy and the First Amendment behind them, the Mitchells tenaciously defied authorities by continuing to show their films while being arrested dozens of times over the coming year. Kennedy had already started to build a national reputation as a resourceful political activist, and would later represent Timothy Leary, Bernardine Dohrn, Cesar Chavez, and Huey Newton. Not easily deterred, the brothers vowed during a press conference to fight back, and hired a young but fierce lawyer named Michael John Kennedy to defend them against the obscenity charges. īut just three weeks after the theater opened, plain-clothed police officers walked in and arrested 25 year-old James Mitchell – still a film student at San Francisco State University – for production and exhibition of obscene material. At a rate of one per month they churned out featurettes, which were 30 to 60 minute films that could be advertised and then shown at the O'Farrell. ![]() With the conversion of an old Pontiac automobile dealership on O'Farrell and Polk streets, they built a makeshift soundstage for filming and seating for a movie theater to provide them with that opportunity. But the brothers wanted to go beyond the production of short loops, and move on to making longer features whose distribution and presentation they could also control. īefore they decided to open for business, the brothers had been making and selling short 15 minute pornographic films called loops, which patrons could watch for 25 cents a minute in small arcades. Adult movie theater īrothers Jim and Artie Mitchell began showing hardcore pornographic films at th O'Farrell Theater in July 1969. ![]() Over decades, the events at the O'Farrell Theatre have been as much about the brothers' stubborn persistence in applying legal resources to avoid prosecution by San Francisco's vice squad and district attorney, as they were about their unique innovations for the erotic entertainment industry. The O'Farrell Theatre went through two major phases which reflected a major transition in the Mitchell brothers' business model: first as a movie house to feature their adult films, and later as a cutting-edge strip club which offered customer-contact shows with strippers. The club closed permanently in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, after a few years of struggling financially. ![]() Thompson called the O'Farrell "the Carnegie Hall of public sex in America" and Playboy magazine praised it as "the place to go in San Francisco!" Thompson, a longtime friend of the Mitchells and frequent visitor at the club, went there frequently during the summer of 1985 as part of his research for a possible book on pornography. By 1980, the nightspot had popularized close-contact lap dancing, which would become the norm in strip clubs nationwide. Having first opened as an X-rated movie theater by Jim and Artie Mitchell on July 4, 1969, the O'Farrell was one of America's oldest and most notorious adult-entertainment establishments. The Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre was a strip club at 895 O'Farrell Street near San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. ![]()
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