How it started
Early life
The Mitchells' father Robert (known as Bob), from Oklahoma, was a professional gambler. He and his wife Georgia Mae settled in Antioch, California, near San Francisco. According to the Mitchell brothers' biographers, they had a relatively stable childhood; the boys were popular, and some of their childhood friends became important members of their porn empire. Both attended public schools and graduated from Antioch High School.
Jim, a part-time filmmaking student at San Francisco State University in the mid-1960s, aspired to become an "important" director like Roman Polanski and headed a clique of classmates with similar ambitions. While in school, he worked at the Follies, a cinema showing brief, plotless films featuring naked performers, and observed that each night the theater was filled with masturbators who arrived simply for the onscreen nudity. He therefore perceived pornography as a potentially lucrative career opportunity for himself and Artie, who had been discharged from the United States Army.
From Wikipedia’s article on Mitchell brothers, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2