Paul Thomas: The 10 Provocations of PT, Part 1 – Podcast 88

The Rialto Report

Ashley West

Arts, Tv & Film, Performing Arts

4.8 • 531 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2019

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Paul Thomas, or PT as he’s typically known, is one of the iconic names of the adult film industry.

He was born Philip Toubus, and started out as a porn performer for the Mitchell Brothers in mid-1970s San Francisco. Until the last few years, was still in the business as a director.

During the past four decades, PT won every kind of adult award – from Best Actor to Best Director, and was inducted into every Hall of Fame the sex film industry has ever invented.

But there are two aspects to PT’s background that make his presence and success in adult film even more interesting.

First he came from a wealthy family – one that owned household-name businesses like Sara Lee and Jim Beam – and he was brought up in relative luxury.

And secondly, by the time PT started his career in sex films in his mid 20s, he’d already achieved considerable success and fame on stage in musical theater. He’d starred on Broadway in Hair and played the role of Peter in the 1973 film version of Jesus Christ Superstar. In fact, he was being groomed by the William Morris Agency in Hollywood for a big career in mainstream television and movies.

So with all the money and success, what motivated PT to move into the newly formed adult industry – a business frowned upon by much of mainstream society, not to mention full of legal and reputational risks for its participants?

It all comes down to a series of questions: Why? Why did he do it, when he had so many alternatives? Why did he stay in the business for so long? And what effect has it had on him? These questions have stayed with PT to this day.

I’ve known PT for years, and we’ve talked about doing an interview for almost as long as I’ve known him. We actually started once, but after over five hours of conversation, we realized that we hadn’t even reached the time he’d started school, so we scrapped the idea.

Recently though we decided totry again, and this time I got PT to agree to a strict format. I would pick ten areas of his life that have shaped him. Ten provocations – in keeping with the biblical theme of his most famous role in Jesus Christ Superstar. I would ask him whatever I liked about these subjects – and nothing would be off the table. We’d cover adult films, both as an actor and as a director, his troubled relationships, his experiences with drugs, his multiple times in jail, and much, much more.

And we’d finally see if we could get closer to answering the question that has plagued PT for so long: why the hell did he go into, and stay in, the adult film industry?

This is the first time PT has told his story. These are the ten provocations of PT.

The above picture is Paul Thomas photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe.

This first episode of two is 86 minutes long.

The musical playlist for this episode can be found on Spotify.

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Paul Thomas

Paul Thomas in Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)

The post Paul Thomas: The 10 Provocations of PT, Part 1 – Podcast 88 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Adam Agoyan is a film director who has twice been nominated for Academy Awards.
0:06.0	His critically acclaimed films include The Suite Hereafter, Exotica and Chloe.
0:11.0	In 2002, he wrote a short essay about his favorite actor, someone he'd never actually worked with, but had admired from afar.
0:19.0	The actor's name was Paul Thomas, and this is what Adam
0:22.5	McGowan wrote. Few careers fascinate me more than that of Paul Thomas. According to the IMDB,
0:31.5	Mr. Thomas has acted in almost 300 films and must hold a record for directorial credits, 208.
0:39.4	His extraordinarily prolific career seems to have tapered off in the last year,
0:43.4	with his last credit as director being WMB, weapons of masturbation in 2003.
0:50.5	As an actor, Mr. Thomas will surely have a hard time matching the 30 credits he scored in 1981,
0:56.0	including Swedish Erotica Parts 1 to 4, 8, 11, 13 to 14, 17 to 18, 22, 25, 28 to 29, and 40 to 41.
1:06.0	The IMD states that Mr. Thomas is sometimes credited as Judy Blue, Toby Phillips, Philip Tobias and Phil Tobus, among several other incarnations.
1:17.6	Given the invariable spelling errors that must occur on certain pornographic titles, when one produces over 40 volumes of Swedish erotica in a single year, mistakes are bound to be made. Most of these monikas seem to be some sort of variation of Paul Thomas's birth name, Philip Tobus.
1:34.3	It's under this name, Philip Tobus, that I first came into contact with this talented individual.
1:40.3	He was one of the principal actors in Norman Jewison's Jesus Christ Superstar.
1:45.8	Mr. Tobus, who has a distinctive singing voice, played the part of Peter.
1:50.8	Watching this film when it was released in 1973 changed my life.
1:55.5	I'd sung hymns every morning at school and endured compulsory Bible readings,
1:59.5	but the religious imagery meant
2:01.3	little to me until I saw this magnificently entertaining movie.
2:05.7	I can still remember every word of Tim Rice's witty libretto, and I particularly remember
2:10.1	Mr. Tubus as he denied Christ three times.
2:14.8	His look of increasing bewilderment as he fulfilled Christ's prophecy struck me as something close to sublime.
	...

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