Serious, enigmatic, sometimes pretentious, very rich and often confused with mainstream director, Paul Thomas Anderson, porn director Paul Thomas celebrates a birthday today.

Born in Winnetka, Illinois, Thomas is the black sheep of the Sara Lee dynasty and must be giving his Fortune 500 relatives bad dreams to this day with his decision about getting into porn.

And we don’t know how many times this story’s been told- though Thomas related it again on a Howard Stern appearance several years ago- about his playing Peter in the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Hint: Thomas is the guy for whom the cock crowed three times, apparently a harbinger of his later XXX career exploits.

The story is also told about how Thomas- still a legit actor with the William Morris agency- met the Mitchell Brothers in San Francisco and performed in several loops for them including the film The Autobiography of a Flea. Albeit adapted from a small book.

In 1982, Thomas was arrested for smuggling cocaine into the United States from South America. He served a year in jail and, for whatever reasons possessed him, told that story on Stern where he was also promoting his version of The Devil in Miss Jones. To which we got a feeling that there was something else in Miss Jones that involved a rubber balloon.

Thomas explained that he was caught with a couple of kilos but didn’t mind doing time for it. With his curly haired pretty boy looks still going for him during that stretch, we imagine that Thomas was a very popular inmate and rumor has it starred in the makeshift jailhouse musical romp, Jesus Christ That Hurt.

As a director and performer, Thomas has more aliases [e.g.: Bo Edwards, Cleo Edwards, Judy Blue, Grady Sutton, Russell Ellison, Phil Tobias, Paul Tanner] than Sara Lee has food brands.

His industry awards also legion, Thomas married porn actress and director Anita Rinaldi in 2001 after he dumped his longtime second wife.

Thomas created a ruckus earlier this year when, during Yale University’s Sex Week, aired a graphic film featuring violent sado-masochism. The events coordinators, perhaps not realizing that sex has more implications than a simple handjob in a hay loft, said they were appalled, and that the decision was a grave mistake because no one bothered to screen it beforehand. Duh, sex movie.

In an interview with LA Weekly Thomas once remarked that, to his way of thinking, extended lovemaking scenes in R-rated films are gratuitous. Which is like J. Edgar Hoover busting a perv for wearing a chiffon dress.

Our personal memories of Thomas go back years ago to a night in a Santa Monica bar. Thomas was rhapsodizing most poetically about filmmaking. We didn’t have a clue what the fuck he was talking about.