Ravens defensive end Trevor Pryce was walking through a suburban mall one day, holding the tiny hand of his daughter, Khary, when she asked him a question that shaped the second act of his already unique American life.
Stopping at a mall fountain, Khary gazed down at the hundreds of pennies and wondered aloud what would happen if the pennies got mixed up and you got the wrong wish? Pryce laughed, not really sure what to say.
His daughter moved on to other things, but for Pryce, the idea lingered. Wouldn't a tale of mixed-up wishes make a funny children's movie?
He wasn't the only one who thought so. After tweaking the mixed-up wishes concept a bit, and after several rewrites, Pryce eventually sold it to Sony Pictures, which has plans to turn it into a film in late 2009, he said.
At 33, Pryce is still playing at a high level on the field, and he will be an integral part of the Ravens defense when it takes on the Miami Dolphins in a wild-card playoff game Sunday. But Pryce is also thinking of life after football.
How his daughter's question led to a movie script is, well, the stuff that movies are made of. Pryce mentioned the idea one day, almost in passing, to his agent, Peter Schaffer, and Schaffer passed it along to his friend and producer Mike Fleiss, a big football fan and creator of The Bachelor. Fleiss loved it and uttered the four words every Hollywood neophyte yearns to hear from a big-time producer.
Write me a treatment.
"I didn't even know what a treatment was," the soft-spoken, 6-foot-5, 290-pound Pryce said recently, crouching low on a wooden stool in front of his locker. "I Googled 'How to write a treatment' and it didn't seem too hard. It didn't seem like rocket science. I thought, 'I can do this.' "
Plenty of athletes would have stopped there, promising themselves they would tiptoe into the murky waters of the Writing Life upon retirement. It would be difficult, one could easily assume, to be passionate about both writing and football without robbing something from one to give to the other. But Pryce finds that kind of sweeping generalization about the life of NFL players to be somewhat false.
"Everyone has a passion outside of football," Pryce said, pointing around the locker room in the direction of several teammates. "Just not all of them are interesting. For Jarret Johnson, he loves to hunt. Bart Scott loves fashion and clothing and things like that. [Justin] Bannan likes to eat. Haloti [Ngata] likes to sleep. For me, it just happens to be movies."
