Reviewed by Magdalene Meretrix
(11/8/00)
Have you ever wondered what's Behind the Green Door?
Rated X is the story of the Mitchell Brothers, the San Francisco porn tycoons responsible for the O'Farrell Theatre and numerous porn movies including the infamous Green Door that launched Marilyn Chambers's career. Not only will this movie show you what's behind the Green Door, it will show you how two brothers built a porn empire from the ground up.
You probably won't see this movie in your local theater because it was made for the cable channel Showtime, but the good news is that it has been released on video. I rented a copy of Rated X at my local Blockbuster. I'm used to getting edited versions of films from Blockbuster, but with full shots of not just tits and ass but penes and vaginas, I don't think this one got cut. If it did, I'm not sure I'd survive viewing the director's cut.
The movie centers around Jim and Artie Mitchell and begins near the end of their story. Jim is in his house on a stormy night listening to his brother on the answering machine. "Pick up, Jim. I know you're there! You know, those cigarettes aren't going to kill you, brother. I am."
From such overt foreshadowing that leaves the viewer tuned in to the dynamics of the brothers' relationship, the film skips back to the Mitchell boys' childhood. The first thing we learn about the boys is that Artie is an imp and a troublemaker and his older brother Jim takes responsibility for Artie, often trying to bail him out of bad situations.
The casting for this movie was superb. Tracy Hutson looks remarkably like the Ivory Snow girl, Marilyn Chambers. Even more remarkable is Charlie Sheen's resemblance to the real Artie Mitchell. Charlie's performance as the rambunctious Artie is set off beautifully by his real-life brother, Emilio Estevez, who played Artie's more sensible and moderate brother, Jim.
Time moves quickly in this movie, covering over three decades in just under two hours. The next time we see Jim he is a student in film school where the other students admire his work but the professor lectures him about the cheap thrill of nudity and accuses Jim of creating pornography rather than art. Deciding that his talents are wasted in school, Jim sets out with some of his classmates to open his own film studio.
In the beginning, Jim uses pornography to finance his more serious film work. Before long, though, the pornography takes over and becomes the serious film work itself. It is about this time when Artie shows back up again. Following their childhood patterns, Jim takes Artie under his wing again, turning the production of pornographic film into a family affair.
It becomes even more of a family affair when the Mitchell brothers rent their first theatre in order to show their own films. Jim and Artie's parents come to visit the theatre and their father, J.R. becomes especially interested in the business. Although the movie doesn't mention the fact, the O'Farrell Theatre was initially funded with $10,000 that Jim and Artie borrowed from their parents. Things seem to be going well for the Mitchell family but we can see the seeds of Artie's descent as he indulges more and more heavily in drugs and alcohol.
Not only is Artie spending most of his time high, he makes life difficult for Jim, accusing him of wanting to see Artie fail and of never having anything good to offer his brother. More and more, it seems that there is nothing Jim can do to please Artie and lay his self-doubt to rest. The Sheen brothers play the Mitchell brothers with great sensitivity and depth and I found myself increasingly drawn into the drama between these well-developed characters.
As a veteran of the sex industry myself, Rated X gave me pause for thought. It isn't uncommon for strippers to resent the men who own the bars, theaters and bookstores where we work. We use our sexuality to earn a living and hand over half our money to a man who couldn't possibly understand what it's like for us. It's no wonder that the women who dance naked amongst strangers nightly sometimes grumble about the "fatcats at the top who sit on their asses while making money off ours."
The story of the Mitchell Brothers made me stop and think about that grumbling. Once the brothers opened their theater, they began a tiresome cycle of arrests, raids and court dates. The police began harassing the brothers just three weeks after they opened their theater and the O'Farrell was only showing soft core movies at the time. The persecution went on for eleven years, costing the city of San Francisco hundreds of thousands of dollars. The city wasn't the only one who had to pay, though. The lawsuits and repeated arrests cost the Mitchell brothers dearly, too.
Seeing the scene where the Mitchells were arrested for the thirty-somethingth time, I suddenly realized that I was watching a movie about freedom fighters. Never mind the fact that the Mitchells stood to make a profit off their work if the city would just back off long enough, these boys were out there fighting for freedom of speech and human sexuality. As an individual sexworker, I hadn't stopped to really think before about all the risks and sacrifices those "fatcats" had to make. Running an adult-oriented business isn't cheap under the best of circumstances and the Mitchells didn't always appear to be operating under the best of circumstances.
I enjoyed the movie so much that I read more about the Mitchell brothers after seeing it. While the movie depicted the brothers as groundbreakers in the industry, it left out a few details that I wish it had included. For example, the movie failed to mention that the 1986 sequel to Behind the Green Door was the first safer sex adult movie. And for those who would brand the Mitchells as sexist, it's important to note that their 1976 movie, Autobiography of a Flea, was the first adult movie directed by a woman.
As the film moves past the brothers' successes and deeper into their personal lives, both brothers are progressively going bald. In a later interview, Emilio Estevez said of his skin-wig, "I've never felt so unsexy and sort of undesirable in my life." It was Sheen's character however, who demonstrated those feelings of insecurity. Artie appears to be losing more than his hair -- he's losing his grip as well, becoming more insecure, unstable and unreliable. Artie's uncontrollable anger goes from bad to worse until we finally arrive at the opening scene again. "Those cigarettes aren't going to kill you brother, I am."
It's hard to spoil the plot of a movie based on a notorious situation. All the same, I'll leave you dangling. Sure, you could go look in the newspaper archives to see how the story ends, but you owe it to yourself to watch the movie anyway.
In my opinion, this movie should have been released in theaters. Boogie Nights has paved the way for serious movies about the sex industry and Rated X was produced, directed and acted with every bit as much class and attention to detail as movies with much higher budgets. If you want to see a drama about some of the major players in the adult industry, turn on Showtime or go to the video rental store and check Rated X out.
