Not too shabby:
"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."
Pryce - a four-time Pro Bowl player whom Rex Ryan called "the best
defensive player in football" in 2006 - wasn't satisfied with just
writing treatments. (A treatment is essentially a three-page outline of
a film.) He wanted to tackle the true craft of screenwriting and labor
over his words as any artist would. And so he lugged his laptop around,
pecking away at the keys while the kids were off at school or whenever
football wasn't calling.
"The more I did it, the more I started to enjoy it," Pryce said. "Once
you get one idea, that bug kind of bites you. You start seeing ideas
everywhere. They start coming out of you real fast. Inspiration comes
from a lot of different places, but it also comes from the question:
What do I want to see?"
Pryce sold a second screenplay - which he would love to talk about but
says that, contractually, he's not supposed to discuss - and finished a
third that is still being shopped around.