Two Incredible Stories About John Newton

John Newton was born in 1725. He was 11 years old when he first went to sea on his father's ship. Not unusually, he later became a member of the Navy and joined the HMS Harwich.

Pretty quickly, Newton considered conditions on the ship unbearable and deserted. Sadly, not long after, he was captured and demoted from midshipman to common seaman. To accompany this demotion, he was publicly flogged, of course.

Eventually, though, he was granted his request to transfer service onto a slave ship. On this ship, he travelled to Sierra Leone where, quite unexpectedly, he became the servant of a slave trader. It was only when a sea captain who had know his father happened along that Newton was released. Having apparently learnt nothing from his own time in enslavement he then went on to captain his own slave ship.

On May 10, 1748, his ship was caught in a storm. Something about the tempest seemed to mean rather a lot to Newton - he took it as a sign from God, and would call it his 'great deliverance'. From that time on, he was a proudly religious man.

Of course, he still plied the slave trade.

Years, later, John Newton became a Minister. Reportedly, he would always try to create new music for his services, and one year between 1760 and 1770, he composed, and first performed, Amazing Grace. This song is much better remembered than Newton himself, and more closely associated with, say, Elvis Presley even, than the man who actually composed it's music.

Hundreds of years later, John Newton became the subject of The Heart of Man, a screenplay retelling those remarkable events. When the script landed on the right desk at Prelude Pictures, they saw a perfect project for their latest dedicated initiative. In a co-production deal with Mandalay pictures, Prelude were gearing up to knock out some "inspirational" films.

There was one problem, however. The script had no front page. They had no idea who had written it, where in the world they were or how to reach them.

The Writer's Guild of America do keep a log of such things - if the author takes the trouble, and incurs the financial expense - to register their work. Whoever had written The Heart of Man had not. To me, it seems a mystery that the script ended up at Prelude at all. Surely an agent must have submitted it? And they hadn't logged it with the WGA? Foolish.

Walden Media, producers of the one-baked, another-in-the-oven Narnia films stepped in and helped Prelude track the script's authors down. Why they did this isn't yet clear, but if it doesn't involve big piles of dollars, my money's on a religious agenda.

Lisa and Eric Rice (Eric Rice? Eric Rice? Did his parents think they were funny?) were the unknown authors who just got lucky and had a 'great deliverance' of their own. They can look forward to The Heart of Man going into production soon - no cast or crew yet announced.

I'm reminded of the story about Mark Twain receiving a letter addressed only "Mark Twain, God Knows Where". Twain's reply?

"He did."