Sinner Takes All: A Memoir of Love and Porn

CHAPTER 20 The Birth Of Teravision

Tony Lee was right. I made a ton of money from feature dancing and it more than covered our legal bills. After battling it out in court for most of 2003, we settled with Digital. Steve Hirsch, the owner of Vivid Video, was instrumental in convincing us to settle with Digital.

Steve’s interest in me helped me make the decision to settle with Digital. The deal on the table was this: I would be a Vivid Girl, and he would help us with our new company, Teravision, by guiding us and serving as the distribution company for our company’s films.

But I still had this thing about settling with Digital. I didn’t want it to mean I was backing down. Evan and my lawyer came to me and said, “Listen, you’re operating off of emotion right now. If I learned anything from the music industry, it is that I got ripped off on my first album. I signed a really bad deal. You just have to let it go, let the anger go, and take what they give you. You’re going to work. You’re going to be Tera Patrick.”

I agreed to settle on Thanksgiving 2003, and boy did I have a lot to be thankful for. I cooked my first Thanksgiving dinner for Evan and Sammy, and it was the beginning of a fresh new start in the industry.

I never dreamed of owning my own business until I met Evan. I just didn’t think it was something that I could even do if I wanted to. But Evan made me realize how much I was capable of doing if I really wanted to. Just when I was ready to give up, he encouraged me to fight on and made me believe in myself and that I was capable of more. My goal for Teravision was to form a company that produced beautiful movies where the women always looked gorgeous and classy and the performers in it where treated like stars. We were trying to portray women in a positive way. We were also trying to make high-quality films to elevate the business. We had our movies at high price points, and we wanted everyone else to have their movies at high price points to bring us all up.

While I was excited to own my own company and thrilled I could work again and under my name, I still had one hesitation. The big dilemma now was that I didn’t really want to do more movies and fuck other men. I was in love, and I just didn’t want to have sex with anyone other than Evan. I couldn’t do it. Call me old-fashioned, but I only wanted to share my body, my most intimate moments, and myself with my husband.

Evan said to me, “It’s great that you won. But what have you won? It doesn’t count if you don’t now do something with it. Look, for your career, you need to make movies again. Your fans want you to.”

“But I don’t want to have sex with another man,” I told him.

“Well, I don’t want you to either,” he said.

And then he made the decision that would change everything. “How about if you have sex with me on camera?”

“What? Really?” I was surprised. My ex-boyfriend wanted nothing to do with porn, and here was a guy who was willing to fully jump in and be my partner in crime. For the first time in my life, I had a man who wanted to see me be the best I could be and achieve the most I possibly could.

He said that while he wanted to do this for me, he was worried about how it would affect his son. At the time, Evan was also still trying to have a mainstream acting career. After Oz was over, he went on many auditions for movies and television roles. His friends who were mainstream actors would tell him that if he did porn, he wouldn’t be able to work in mainstream. So Evan had to make a hard decision about what path he wanted his career to go down. As we know, once you take the porn path, there is no turning back.

I was excited at the thought of doing movies with Evan, but in the back of my head I was a little worried at first. Is his head going to get big from this? There’s a long history of guys getting into the business through their porn-star girlfriends, and the end isn’t usually pretty. This is what everybody warned me about. But we decided we were stronger than that and we’d do this. Evan would become my sole male porn costar and, after a two-year hiatus, I would return to porn. The first film, my comeback movie, would be Tera Tera Tera, which was a Teravision/Vivid production. It was also my first hardcore girl-on-girl film and my first film with Evan.

But first Evan needed a porn name. We did the usual formula of using the name of your first pet with the name of the street you grew up on. But Splasher Ocean didn’t exactly work. He came up with Spyder Jonez because his nickname was “Spider” because of his huge spider tattoo on his back. I thought it was such a weird coincidence that my nickname as a child was also “Spider” because of my arachnid-looking limbs. For the last name, Jonez, Evan picked that spelling because he said he thought it sounded like a badass guy in a Blacksploitation film.

The only problem now was: How was I going to have sex with my husband on camera? At home, I can be nasty with him and let myself go. There was no one in the room looking at me, judging me. At home with Evan, we’re more extreme. I like to be choked and peed on. We like to get out the rope or duct tape and tie each other up. I didn’t know how to do it with him on camera and make it believable, because you have to be so mechanical and safe on camera and that is so different from how we are in real life.

For the mainstream porn companies I’ve worked for, you have to be careful not to cross the obscenity line. For instance, on camera, most mainstream companies don’t let you have sex in bondage. You can do bondage, but penetration can’t be involved. Well, at home with Evan, sex and bondage go hand-in-hand. On camera, you can’t be tied up and penetrated. That’s something else we love to do. Choking, of course, is off-limits on camera. Spanking is OK, but it needs to be consensual and you need to give permission on camera that you want to be spanked. I’ll never forgot when Evan and I shot Sex in Dangerous Places for Teravision, which featured a scene where he tied me up and fucked me. As we were doing the scene, we had our lawyer on the phone giving the director, Paul Thomas, instructions on what I had to say to avoid legal action. I had to acknowledge that I was being tied up and fucked and that I liked it and it was not against my will.

Digital Playground had always wanted me to be a good girl and not the nasty girl I truly was. I was pure vanilla, a pillow queen who lay back and moaned. But that’s not who I really was. I found myself sexually through my husband; I discovered what really gives me pleasure and what works for me. I’ve done things with Evan in the bedroom that I’ve never done with another man. I let him wrap his hands around my throat, which gives me a head rush and makes an orgasm even better. I never trusted any man to do that before, but I trust Evan. I never let a man pee on me, but I let Evan. It’s about submission, trust, and giving yourself freely to someone, and that’s a turn-on.

So Evan and I decided that when we made our Teravision movies, I’d do some things I’d never done on camera before, such as having hardcore sex with a woman, engaging in an on-screen orgy, and doing my first real anal scene. It was time to shed my old image and reemerge as a newly sexually empowered femme fatale. But first we had more important engagements to attend to: our wedding.