Jim Mitchell (James Douglas Mitchell) was born at the Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio. His father Douglas was originally a research engineer with Formica Corporation in Cincinnati-his mother Linda was a high-school English teacher. However, when Jim was six months old, his father decided he didn't want Jim growing up on the Cincinnati streets. Douglas then quit his Formica engineer's job. He built a homemade trailer, attached it to the back of their family car (an old 1953 Plymouth Cranbrook club coupe) loaded up their belongings and moved his family to Bartlesville, Oklahoma to go into the oil & gas producing/ranching/farming business with Jim's grandfather-Orville Anderson Mitchell...(Bartlesville is located on the eastern edge of the Osage Nation Reservation.) As a result, from an early age Jim was either drilling new oil and gas wells (usually with antiquated "cable-tool" oilfield drilling rigs) "pulling" wells (doing well maintenance work on existing older wells) salvaging out oilfield equipment or buying/selling oil & gas properties. Operated 100+ year-old oilfield rod-line "powerhouses", horse-drawn "pulling units' and vacuum plants, dressed (sharpened) cable-tool drill bits with a sledgehammer after heating them in a crude oil-fired forge, worked cattle, baled hay, did blacksmithing/welding, mechanic work and so on. When Jim wasn't doing that, he was working for his grandmother (Nora Vickers Mitchell-a well-known Bartlesville antique dealer) repairing/refinishing Victorian/Edwardian furniture. However, Jim always had Hollywood in his sights, as he had one great-uncle (Floyd Blackman) that had acted in two Hollywood silent films after his military service in "War One", but later worked mainly as a cameraman throughout the 1920's and '30's. In addition, while growing up he knew two actors from the Bartlesville area: Gretchen Wyler and Ben Johnson. (Gretchen was in his father's high-school class, while Ben was a close friend of his paternal grandmother.)

The first film job Jim acquired was when he bluffed his way onto Tim Burton's "Çılgın Marslılar (1996)" film set as a Production Assistant-the location was a small Mennonite town called Burns, Kansas-completely surrounded by Kansas wheat fields. He stripped the Oklahoma license plate off a black, 1975 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, replaced them with a set of expired California plates, loaded up extra clothes, food and supplies, put the top down and then headed for Burns. When he got there, he found a mob of reporters, news crews, fans and a lot of Kansas State Troopers-who's job it was to seal off the town's entrances during filming. However, when he pulled up, introduced himself and said he "was running late, but still needed to get into work"....To his surprise, the troopers waved the crowds aside and let him pass...He immediately parked the car and started working for Tim Burton as if he belonged there-didn't get caught by Security until noon the next day. Luckily, an attractive and kind-hearted Assistant Director he had been working with saved him from being thrown out of town and he got to continue working on the film. He spent his last day there assigned to Joe Don Baker, and was then invited to continue working with Burton's crew at Kingman, Arizona.

The area where Jim had grown up had cranked out a lot of other film stars, such as Tom Mix, Sid Jordan, Emmett Dalton (from "Dalton Gang" outlaw fame) Will Rogers, Clark Gable, Flora Campbell, Nancy Barrett, Terrence Malick and Larry Sellers.