Friends and Activities Outside of Porn
The Mitchells were popular on the fringes of San Francisco's diverse society. Their friends included a who's-who of pornography plus San Francisco politicians, the late Black Panther Huey "Doc" Newton, Warren Hinckle, Herb Gold, the rock band Aerosmith, and Jack Palladino (now the world's most expensive private investigator). The late journalist Hunter S. Thompson was a close friend of the brothers, and frequently visited the O'Farrell Theatre. In 1988, the Mitchells made a 30-minute documentary about him, Hunter S. Thompson: The Crazy Never Die. Thompson claimed in his 2003 book Kingdom of Fear that he had worked for a while in 1985 as night manager at the club, an assertion repeated by some news articles.
Jim and Artie Mitchell supported various cartoonists, Dan O'Neill among them. During the 1984 Democratic National Convention, they opened the upper floor of the O'Farrell to a group of underground cartoonists, including Victor Moscoso, Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Ted Richards, S. Clay Wilson, Bob Crabb, Gary Hallgren and Phil Frank, to cover the convention for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Jim launched the publication War News to protest the first Gulf War; journalist Warren Hinckle was hired as editor, Robert Crumb designed the logo, and Art Spiegelman and Winston Smith were paid contributors. Other contributors included Daniel Ellsberg, Michael Moore, Paul Krassner, Ron Turner, Bob Callahan, Peter Bagge, Jim Woodring, Trina Robbins, S. Clay Wilson, and Hunter S. Thompson.
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Famous quotes containing the words friends and/or activities:
“I am asked if I would not be gratified if my friends would procure me promotion to a brigadier-generalship. My feeling is that I would rather be one of the good colonels than one of the poor generals. The colonel of a regiment has one of the most agreeable positions in the service, and one of the most useful. “A good colonel makes a good regiment,” is an axiom.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)