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> In 1967, Jim Mitchell, then 24, first tried his hand at making black-and-white porn films, using a borrowed 8-mm. camera and young men and women willing to copulate on screen for a few dollars a day. In due course he and his younger brother Artie made it big with Behind the Green Door (cost: $45,000; their gross: about $1 million), starring the ex-Ivory Soapbox Girl Marilyn Chambers. Now incorporated as the Mitchell Brothers Film Group, they are potentates of porn, operators of ten theaters in California and producers of the most expensive porn film ever, the $500,000 Sodom and Gomorrah.
> Former Ventriloquist Ted Marche, 53, a decade ago opened a small dildo factory in North Hollywood, convinced that another kind of profit might be extracted from the sexual enthusiasms of the young. Since then, he and his son Steven, 27, have sold 4,975,000 dildos. Today Marche Manufacturing turns out 350 different sexual products, and sales have risen an average 28% each year since 1970. Claims Dildodynast Steven Marche: "These toys have saved more marriages than all the preachers in the world."
> San Franciscan Nick O'Demus, 53, who declines to give his real name, drifted into the sexual leather-goods market nine years ago. A sandal maker, O'Demus was asked by a few customers if he could turn out sexual harnesses. "Pretty soon," he says, "word got around about what I could do, and I found myself with a new product line." Now O'Demus and his partner, Frank Morris, 25, employ 18 people at their Trading Post Enterprises, which grosses $500,000 a year from making bondage materials, whips, chains and other devices, mostly for the homosexual trade, and selling them on the premises in a cluster of "boutiques." Says Morris: "We're trying to be the world's first and only gay department store—a gay Macy's."
> In 1968 ex-Insurance Salesman Al Goldstein, then 33, started Screw magazine with a friend, Jim Buckley (whom he has since bought out for $500,000). Just as Hugh Hefner merchandised himself as the dapper self-assured playboy, Goldstein sold himself as the anti-hero of raw sex—a fat, articulate, self-deprecating perennial juvenile ("I am the furthest thing from a mature person") who overstuffed his plain newsprint magazine with tales of his sexual obsessions, failures with women and humiliating need to buy sex from prostitutes because of his overwhelming unattractiveness. Screw (circulation: 125,000) features raunchy humor, gross sex, porn-movie reviews and endless columns of ads for prostitutes and willing amateurs. The formula, imitated by several other sheets, tapped an astonishing market of the sexually hungry, lonely and perverse, who, Goldstein says, have a right to their pleasures, just like the rest of humanity. His latest effort is Midnight Blue, a thrice-weekly, hour-long soft-core cable-TV program that now takes ads for massage parlors ($350 per one-minute commercial).*
> One of the nation's richest porn merchandisers of the '60s now spends his time in federal prison. In the 1950s Michael G. Thevis was part owner of a busy Atlanta newsstand. When he noticed that "90% of the sales came from 10% of the displays"—sex books—Thevis threw himself into porn. By 1970 he claimed control of