Athletes help to produce 'Chain Letter'

LOS ANGELES -- It's not that Deon Taylor, the director of "Chain Letter," intended to end up in Hollywood.

Quite the contrary, really. If you flash back to 20 years ago, Taylor was a 6-foot-2 teenager who had potential to become a great shooting guard. Originally from the west side of Gary, Ind., his family ultimately moved to Sacramento, Calif., and eventually he landed a spot on San Diego State University's squad.

"I thought it. I dreamt it. I prayed it. I could do it all. But what a lot of kids don't know is, it's not about your talent all the time," he says, then pauses before finishing up. "It's about the stars lining up for you to get to that level. It's about the stars lining up ..."

The groundwork for his life was laid. The stars were lined up for young Taylor and his was a story that was going to be filled with basketball -- and lots of it.

So it seemed. Alas, there was a plot twist. After college, Taylor wasn't able to find a position on a team in the NBA; he had to settle for playing two pro seasons in Chemnitz, Germany.

"There's only 300 people in the NBA. It doesn't work for everybody. It took me a long time to learn that. I was mad at basketball; I was mad at the game. You get it, you do all that stuff. I was over in Germany playing, it was great -- you're getting the fame, you're getting a check, but it ain't the NBA," Taylor says.

A second act was conceived. It was when Taylor was off the court that he figured out what his true passion was. The irony? That passion would have never been developed had he not missed out on a career playing basketball professionally stateside.

"While over there, I just didn't speak the language," Taylor, 35, says. "I was an inner-city kid. I remember the first time I took, like, probably 50 movies over with me, and I remember the first two weeks, I had watched all 50 movies."

He eventually watched about 300 movies while playing overseas, he said. His mind wandered, so he wanted to know the process behind making the films, and he started researching how movies were made, reading shooting scripts and learning the business.

And thus, a new passion was born -- filmmaking -- and on Friday, the world will finally get to check out what Taylor and his new team have been up to for the past six years.

Taylor sized up Hollywood the way he may have sized up an opponent on the court, and was strategic. He learned that you could make a horror picture for very little money but get huge returns.To make his dream happen, Taylor opened up a film production company with former athletes, including ex-NBA stars Mitch Richmond, Bryon Russell and Sam Cassell, ex-NFL star Willie McGinest and current Texans offensive lineman Ephraim Salaam. Their first collaboration, "Chain Letter," hits theaters Friday. The film is about six friends who are sent a chain letter via e-mail and text message, and if they don't pass it on, a killer will come after them. It stars Nikki Reed, from the "Twilight" series, and was written and directed by Taylor with the other athletes serving as producers. This is the first of several films and television shows the company has planned.

Salaam, along with the former athletes, has really gotten into their new business venture. They're not just the financiers of the business; they have content input and love to try their hand at something foreign to them.

Salaam is in his 13th NFL season. "It's a dream job, it's a dream come true," he says, "and Deon ... about six years ago ... came up to me and was like, 'Hey, I've got an idea for a scary movie.' I pretty much said, 'OK,' helped him with the script, wrote him a check, and here we are six years later on the cusp of doing something phenomenal."

"If I'm not in season, I'll do producer duties, make sure everything's flowing well and whatnot," Salaam says. "But he is definitely the creative mind behind this. I don't know where he comes up with some of this stuff. It's amazing. He played professional basketball overseas for some years, and I used to always joke with him ... that, 'Hey, you wasted all that time trying to be a basketball player and you had a gift for making films.'"

Richmond says that navigating Hollywood has been tough, but a welcome challenge.

"I think the one thing that you really want to do when you retire is get into something that you really like, something that you can enjoy," he said. "There's something that I really enjoy about looking at movies and making movies and seeing the behind-the-scenes and getting involved in a project like that. We're looking forward to seeing it on the big screen."

Still, it wasn't all that easy. It was difficult for Taylor to be taken seriously initially. He said studio executives thought he wanted to make quick-witted urban comedies like the Ice Cube and Chris Tucker cult hit "Friday" and didn't quite know what to make of his interest in horror films.

"I'm an African-American director, and normally we don't jump into that lane," he said. "I would sit down with the executive and they'd say, 'OK, so tell us about your "Friday" movie that you got,' and I said, 'Man, I don't have "Friday," man.' They're like, 'OK, so what do you got, a "Car Wash"?' And I said, 'no, no, no,' and I then would pull out a film like 'Chain Letter' or a horror movie, which stars Nikki Reed and these huge -- at the time -- white actors, and they would go, 'Wait a minute, this is a little bit different,'" Taylor says.

The film will get a wide theatrical release.

The same pitch landed him a business deal with Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx, with whom Taylor recently inked a TV production deal, called "No-Brainer." The two met on the basketball court -- they both play in the NBA Entertainment League -- and they chatted a bit after one game.

Taylor said he told Foxx his theory about horror movies getting the most bang for the buck.

"I said, 'Everyone in the world might not understand a Jamie Foxx joke, they might not understand 'Miami Vice.' But I'll tell you this ... Russia, China, Japan, Egypt, Africa, you could name them all, they all understand, 'Door gets kicked open, man swings axe.'"

Today, Taylor says he'll take a deep breath, sigh and rejoice that his longtime dream finally will get an audience.

And then he'll get to work on the team's next project.

"I love the fact that we can compete at that level, and we've been very, very blessed and it's taken a while for us to get here, but we're winning now," Taylor says. "I mean, the film is coming out, so it feels good now to drive down the street and there are 1,000 billboards for the film, and you watch TV and the commercial runs. That's a blessing in itself, but I think we won."

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Carrie