Hung, Hard & High Extended Trailer from Charles Barker on Vimeo.
The big lie of reality television is that everyone on it is interesting. And since porn performers occupy the same level of celebrity as reality TV characters, the temptation to give them the reality TV treatment (Mary Carey in Sober House, Ron Jeremy in everything, the women of My Bare Lady) is overwhelming.
But Nick Manning, the subject of the documentary Hung Hard And High, is not like these people, because his life is fascinating.
“My life is a debacle,” Manning tells filmmakers Justin Kane and Charles Barker in the 6-minute trailer of a project that collected 150 hours of footage. Kane and Barker shadowed Manning for a year between the AVN shows of 2008 and 2009.
“He’s equal parts cocky and self-deprecating,” said Kane of Manning, who was an eager participant in the filming.
“I’m about as famous as Pauly Shore,” Manning says. “I’m as big a clown as that guy (and) we have equally nothing going on.”
And while Manning’s non-porn lifestyle isn’t, at this stage of his career, as squalid as that of younger men, he does at one point draw the viewer’s attention to the fact that “the greatest porn star in the world is eating Ramen.”
Bibles litter Manning’s home, which he shares with a revolving cast of girlfriends and business associates, and he believes that he was sent by God to guide the Lost.
But “I believe that everything that happens to me is because God is punishing me,” Manning says.
At no point in the trailer does the viewer want Manning to fail; unlike any one of his peers, his cockiness is balanced with a very frank self-doubt.
Kane and Barker are in the process of editing the footage for either a feature-length documentary or a multi-part cable series. With more than 30 porn personalities interviewed and at least that many occasions of Manning uttering his “Droppin’ Loads!” catchphrase, Hung, Hard And High looks to be a compelling portrait of Bibles, boners, and bong loads.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: This Ain’t the Partridge Family XXX; Nick Manning dreams of Dean Moriarty; Spunk’d
See also: Hung, Hard & High on MySpace
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