Venue: Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre
Town: Tenderloin, US

The Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre was a strip club at 895 O'Farrell Street near San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. Having opened as an X-rated movie theater by Jim and Artie Mitchell on July 4, 1969, the O'Farrell was one of America's most notorious adult-entertainment establishments. By 1980, the nightspot had popularized close-contact lap dancing, which would become the norm in strip clubs nationwide. Journalist Hunter S. 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. 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!" The club closed permanently in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, after a few years of struggling financially. 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. 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. Brothers Jim and Artie Mitchell began showing hardcore pornographic films at the O'Farrell Theater in July 1969. Before 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. 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. With the conversion of an old Pontiac automobile dealership on O'Farre