'The Life of Newton' - in brief

My senior year of high school I had but a handful of classes. One was Calculus. There were only three of us in the class. I was taking a math class in order to stay on the Math Team (I have a high school letter... in Math) and Calculus quickly proved to be over my head. I mostly gave up on it.

The problem with this was that there were only the three of us in the class. My buddy Jesse was having no issues understanding it, balancing me out, and Chris (aka Garth) was sort of getting it. There hadn't been a Calculus class at the school in years and they wanted us to succeed or at least look good.

For the final grading period, we were given a project to do instead of more math problems. It could be anything so long as it had something to do with Calculus. The projects could be done as individuals or as a group. When our teacher said the word 'screenplay' as an option, our eyes lit up. We were making a movie. It would be 'The Life of Newton'!

We researched Sir Issac Newton, determined our main characters based on his life, threw some math in there, and wrote some Monty Python inspired material. It is ridiculous, not always in a good way. The final 'movie' runs about 23 minutes long, including some long credit sequences and a music video. One of the best scenes was not written but improvised in one long take. There are silly voices, poorly developed themes, physical comedy, and some cross-dressing. The blooper reel is longer than the movie!

It's long been my goal to 'remaster' the original 'film' from the master tape as the original edit was poorly done with a camcorder and VCR. I'd put it off since I couldn't do a 'special edition' with a commentary track. Recently, I went to convert the tape to a digital file and the tape may not have survived the process. Sad. I think I got most of it, perhaps enough of it.

Sections of this seem destined for YouTube...