Nick Manning drops science, loads

The best male porn stars neither take their job too seriously nor phone it in, a line as difficult to walk as coming on cue. And in the first of Nick Manning’s fascinating spliced-together “Droppin’ Loads” documentaries, we watch the Chicago native’s day to day antics on porn sets as well as the sorrow, glee, and the elusive quest for career and spiritual satisfaction in a business where it’s hard to find either.

(There’s also a lot of fucking.)

Studio: Sin City
Director: Nick Manning
Starring: Dyanna Lauren, Nick Manning, Charley Chase, Sarah Jesse, Audrianna Angel, Tanya James

“I’ve gotta take my crazy pills.”

Nick Manning is an intriguing dude, worthy of a documentary. Unfortunately, the documentary crew that followed him for years has yet to release “Hung, Hard, And High” (“I have no idea when it’s coming out,” he says), so Manning uses some of that interview footage along with new footage of his own (as well as interview clips conducted by director Devan Cypher) to present a pastiche of days spent naked in mind and body.

The word “winning” has been so co-opted recently that it has lost its meaning. So after you watch “Droppin’ Loads,” you’ll want the iconic adult star to just persevere.

“My life is a debacle,” Manning says. “I’m a danger to society.”

Manning uses chunks of photo shoots and public appearances from as far back as 2001 for the first of this 4-part series, and he and Cypher interview female performers like Charley Chase, Audrianna Angel, Sarah Jesse, and Manning’s wife Dyanna Lauren to fit together the pieces of the puzzle.

It would be easy to dismiss Manning as an egomaniac, or even to say that the puffed up ego is a show in itself, but what comes across in interviews is that Manning knows who he is, but sometimes it’s difficult to live in his own body.

“I want to get the stigmata,” says Manning at one point. “I want to bleed the wounds of Christ.”

“Droppin’ Loads” is the root catch phrase of Manning’s career. I asked him how it first happened.

“Well, sometimes I say ‘Go Cubs,'” Manning says. “I was always saying ‘Droppin’ Loads,’ or something close to it, when I came. I didn’t know it was a catch phrase. I didn’t know what a catch phrase was! Then people started quoting it back to me.”

Not all of Manning’s movies feature a shrieking Manning announcing the load’s arrival.

“Sometimes when I’m working for other people they have an expectation that I’ll be a certain way,” Manning says. “But when I’m working for myself, or working as me, I can say whatever I want.”

To Dyanna Lauren, for example, Manning remarks: “Painting the town red! And painting this whore white! Oh! Droppin’ Loads!”

It’s theatre, of course, and it’s hilarious.

He’s different at home.

“He doesn’t say ‘Whore Hole!’ at home,” Lauren says. “I wear him the fuck out. He’s been in the business 12 years? I’ve been in almost 24. He can suck my left one.”

I call Lauren first. She and Manning are driving together and I’m put on speaker.

“I don’t know why anyone would say I speak for Nick,” she says when I explain how I got her number.

“Probably because I don’t like speaking to assholes,” Manning says.

There is not much of a story to “Droppin’ Loads,” only a series of snapshots. You get the feeling from the interviews that everyone really likes Nick Manning, but that he’s an acquired taste and not for the world at large.

“I’m a hero worldwide,” he says to an interviewer, dead-eyed. Later he says that interview took until 6 in the morning, he was being asked stupid questions, and he’s been up for 48 hours.

In another segment he is blending together a power drink “from a 2,000-year-old Chinese book” consisting of “lemon, ginger, kale, flax oil, glucosamine, liquid minerals, beets, tomatoes, protein powder, ancient chinese herbs…” that he was told made one’s dick thicker.

He considers for a moment and says, “And this was made by a Chinese guy?”

But there is a darkness behind Manning’s money shot exertions that makes his cartoonish sayings mean something more. For example, how do you reconcile “Droppin’ Loads!” with this quote:

“I did not come to save the righteous, for they have no need of me. I came to save the Lost. And there’s no more lost people than in my business” ?

In summary, don’t expect answers or a linear narrative in “Droppin Loads.” But when are loads ever linear?