Themes: Rise and Fall Stories, Sibling Relationships, Drug Addiction
Main Cast: Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez, Rafer Weigel, Megan Ward
Release Year: 2000
Country: US
Run Time: 115 minutes
Plot
Having created an empire on girly shows and skin flicks, Jim Mitchell and Artie Mitchell achieved mainstream success with Behind the Green Door (1972), one of only a handful of hardcore porn movies to do so. Brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen star in the film about the life and troubled times of porn's dynamic duo. Opening with the 1991 fratricidal murder of Artie (Sheen) at the hands of Jim (Estevez, who also directs), the film flashes back to their father lecturing them on the importance of family. In 1967, while studying film at San Francisco State, Jim's professor (Peter Bogdanovich) upbraids him for including numerous leering shots of half-naked women in his student works. Soon Jim along with his brother, fresh out of the Army, starts a smut studio in an old warehouse. Their business takes off, and in no time they are being harassed by the police for obscenity. Along the way, the two hire former Ivory Snow model Marilyn Chambers, get married, and snort half of the cocaine in Bolivia. After the fleeting success of Green Door, their lives spiral into a drug-addled hell. Jim eventually bottoms out, but Artie, wracked by a profound inferiority complex, slides into cocaine dementia and begins to threaten Jim's family. Things eventually boil over, culminating in that bloody night in 1991. This film was screened at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Review
Brothers Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez always do well together onscreen; just check out their hilarious bickering in the underrated Men at Work. Like that film, Estevez directed Rated X, his adaptation of David McCumber's biography of porn kings Jim and Artie Mitchell. Here, there's an extra trait to link them in brotherhood, beyond the uncanny physical resemblance; both Sheen and Estevez sport ridiculous bald caps, the sheer artificiality of which makes it impossible to take seriously their depraved cocaine benders and violent rages. The whole film suffers from such surface flaws. Rated X thinks it's a decades-spanning tableau of the at-times glamorous, at-times tawdry, always narratively rich world of porn filmmaking, on the order of Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights. But this small film can't hide its modest Showtime roots -- it has the inescapable aura of a TV movie, which is basically what it is, despite that Sundance screening. Sheen deserves credit for acting out drug binges that may have unfolded similarly in his own checkered past, but the scenes aren't anything we haven't seen in a dozen episodes of E: True Hollywood Stories. The problem also is that Jim and Artie Mitchell weren't particularly interesting either as showmen or human beings, so their story just lies there, flat, onscreen. Sheen and Estevez do complement each other well, but none of the other elements of this scattershot production can claim the same thing. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
Terry O'Quinn - J.R. Mitchell; Danielle Brett - Adrienne; Nicole deBoer - Karen Mitchell; Deborah Grover - Georgia Mae; Peter Bogdanovich - Film Professor; Rodger Barton - Detective Solly Weiner; Geoffrey Blake - Michael Kennedy; Jeff Mallory - George McDonald
Credit
Beth Klein - Casting, Stephanie Gorin - Casting, Lisa Niedenthal - Co-producer, Noreen Landry - Costume Designer, Laurie Mirsky - First Assistant Director, Emilio Estevez - Director, Craig Bassett - Editor, Tyler Bates - Composer (Music Score), John Dondertman - Production Designer, Paul Sarossy - Cinematographer, Dick Berg - Producer, Brendan Smith - Set Designer, John J. Thomson - Sound/Sound Designer, Norman Snider - Screenwriter, Anne Meredith - Screenwriter, David Hollander - Screenwriter, David McCumber - Book Author
Rated X is a 2000 film starring brothers Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, with the latter also directing. It is based on the nonfiction book X-Rated by David McCumber which chronicles the story of the Mitchell brothers, Jim and Artie Mitchell, who were pioneers in the pornography and strip club businesses in San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s.
