Sibs play sibs in Showtime smut saga

PASADENA - Yesterday's Showtime presentation answered a question on few people's minds, but interesting to ask anyway: What's the biggest difference between brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen and fraternal porn kings Jim and the late Artie Mitchell?

Answer: The Mitchell brothers have the same last name.

Other non-similarities: As far as we know, Emilio hasn't yet tried to off Charlie, no matter how high Charlie's bail gets. Estevez and Sheen never met Marilyn Chambers, whom the Mitchells made famous in "Behind the Green Door." But both sets of kin had their time in court - the Mitchell brothers to battle for their First Amendment protected right to show money shots in the O'Farrell theater; and Sheen to plead his way out of the pokie. We'd also guess they all love their porn.

If that wasn't the case Estevez and Sheen wouldn't have made Showtime's "Rated X," the tale of the legendary San Francisco skin-flick kings. Indeed, these Hollywood boys have a lot of eerie similarities to their subjects. As they fielded questions from TCA critics, it became apparent that Estevez, like his character Jim Mitchell, is the brains. Supposedly clean Sheen, like Artie Mitchell, is the troublemaker.

Seedy sounding though it is, this dark answer to "Boogie Nights" contributed to family togetherness by giving the pair a long-overdue opportunity to work together again, and for the first time as on-screen kin.

"As brothers playing brothers, you bring a history to the screen," Sheen said. "You bring a shorthand, you bring an understanding that can't be duplicated, I think, even for best friends or actors who have worked together and hung out for 20 years."

Nicely put, but don't be fooled; Sheen's still a knucklehead. When asked how assuming the role Artie Mitchell affected him, he responded, "I knew I was going to be asked to go to places that I hadn't been before, and I didn't really know when I accepted this film how I was going to do it, what the approach was going to be." Hoo! That's a good one.

Really, how could the younger Sheen figure out how to play a substance-snorting, hooker-banging pornographer gripped in the throes of drug-induced dementia and undone by hubris? I don't know - maybe study a few of his newspaper clips?

Bone-headed comments notwithstanding, "Rated X," also directed by Estevez, capped off a Thursday united in celebration of that great American pastime, smut.

No one can truly define smut, other than as the goo on rotten corn, but cable's having fun exploring the freedoms the quest to exterminate it has won. "Rated X" debuts at the Sundance Film Festival before premiering on Showtime. In the meantime, there's another look at First Amendment battles with "Dirty Pictures," a dramatization of the first criminal trial for obscenity that came out of a Cincinnati art museum's exhibition of the notorious Robert Mapplethorpe photos, starring James Woods and Craig T. Nelson. Both movies are tentatively set to premiere this spring.

Let's jiggle on over to FX, where Howard Stern is producing "Son of the Beach," bowing in March. The half-hour sitcom may be a far cry from Marilyn Chambers' oeuvre, but it shows what kind of weird offspring results if "Baywatch" were to bed down with "There's Something About Mary."

On the near-non-smutty end of the scale is SoapNet, a new Disney and ABC-backed cable channel rolling out in select markets, probably not including ours, Monday. SoapNet has a 24-hour soap format, mixing classic sudsers with repeats of current ABC daytime episodes in prime time nightly and in marathon blocks on weekends. That spells a whole lotta comas, murder plots, hot kisses, bedsheet-obscured love scenes and afterglow-giddy conversations in four-poster beds.

No one will bare it all for the soaps, though. That kind of business is best left between brothers - or at least, that's what Sheen and Estevez are hoping you'll decide.