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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 16, 2004

OGIC: Words on film, part one

January 16, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Scrabble has always struck me as one of the more incendiary of your basic roster of living room games. In my experience, conditions can get toasty. One’s normally liberal sense of humor can be tested, bent, and sometimes broken. The ice cubes and olives (in a properly lubricated game) can fly.


If Scrabble can bring out the beast in the most domesticated, pleasure-seeking players, what about those who play for fame and cold cash? They do exist, you know. If you don’t, my friends Eric Chaikin and Julian Petrillo want (with a little help from a smart film distributor or cable channel) to show you. I suspect the title of their documentary about the world of knock-out, drag-down Scrabble–Word Wars–will seem intuitively right to anyone who has played much so-called friendly Scrabble at all. The film reaches its first public audience this weekend. Out of 540 films submitted, Word Wars was one of 16 selected to compete in the documentary category at the Sundance Film Festival, which kicked off yesterday.


I saw an early trailer for Word Wars in 2002, and it looked to me like a happy marriage of the respective virtues of Spellbound and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control–two movies I adored. If you’ve read Stefan Fatsis’s excellent book Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, you’ll understand why I bring up Errol Morris’s film. As characters, the perennial championship contenders in Scrabble fall in the general ballpark of those charming yet ever-so-slightly unnerving fellows in Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, who display such feverish involvement in their curious lines of work, and somewhat less interest in other matters.


Word Freak falls into that Subculture-Exposed genre that produces so many middling, midlist, paint-by-numbers books (many of which, I hasten to add, are very good reads). But it rises to the top of its category by virtue of Fatsis’s good writing, and two pieces of luck. First, Fatsis turned out to have enough talent for the game to partly break out of his journalist role and compete very seriously. Second, the major players were, to a man, great characters: fascinating meetings of utter brilliance (in the game) and willful social marginality (outside of it). The more you read, the less this seems accidental. Dominating this game takes, aside from labor, a pretty beautiful mind.


Getting back to Word Wars, the documentary originated with Eric, a compulsive and talented anagrammer (throw him “sharecrop” and you get a fast “horsecrap” back) whose path reversed the one Fatsis had followed. Eric first entered this demimonde years ago as a competitor, wandered away from it for a time, and came back later with a camera. (Eric is a minor character in Fatsis’s book, where he reveals his favorite anagram, “eleven + two” = “twelve + one.” Believe it.)


“I was a wordplay lover in college,” Eric says, “but I realized that if you want to be a champion, you have to devote your life to memorizing words. That made me give up, but as I got to know the players I realized I wanted to capture the whole milieu on film. I was around when Stefan was researching Word Freak and I thought, someone should have a camera here.”


When Eric decided that the world’s best Scrabble players could and should be a cinematic subject, he called Julian, his college pal and a twelve-year veteran of the film industry. Julian’s r

TT: Good idea of the week

January 16, 2004 by Terry Teachout

From Eve Tushnet:

LISTENING TO GEORGE JONES, “SHE THINKS I STILL CARE.” Somebody make Chan Marshall cover this.

I’d buy it. I must have played that song three times a night for two years back when I was in a country band, and I still love it. (For the original recording, go here.)

TT: O.K., maybe we are like Heathers

January 16, 2004 by Terry Teachout

For further proof that We Happy Few are no better than a bunch of 10-year-old girls giggling on the playground–and that includes me–go here. (I’m writing in Our Girl, by the way.)


Maybe that stuffy lady
from the Washington Post was on to something….

OGIC: On-topic

January 16, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Find out your own personal Scrabble score. Via the well-nigh unbeatable Pejman Yousefzadeh, he of thirty points, not to mention impeccably good timing.

TT: If you build it, they will laugh

January 16, 2004 by Terry Teachout

I caught up with recent off- and off-off-Broadway shows in my theater column for this morning’s Wall Street Journal. I raved about Private Jokes, Public Places:

The funniest new play to hit New York in months… has taken up residence in the least likely of venues: Oren Safdie’s “Private Jokes, Public Places,” a comedy about architecture now being performed downtown at (wait for it) the Theater at the Center for Architecture. Implausible as it may sound, Mr. Safdie has done the impossible: He’s written an unpretentiously witty play of ideas about some of the most pretentious ideas known to man.


Since 9/11, Americans have been exposed to more up-to-the-second designs for high-profile buildings–most of them bad, some downright hideous–than at any other time in recent memory. What kind of thinking, if any, goes into these white megaelephants? Mr. Safdie, a student of architecture at Columbia University turned struggling playwright (and, not coincidentally, the son of celebrity architect Moshe Safdie), has drawn on personal experience to answer that question….

As for Aunt Dan and Lemon, well, here’s the lead:

The word “transgressive” was not yet chic when Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon” was first produced in 1985, but it could have been coined to describe this vomitous piece of blather, which has been revived by the New Group in a production directed by Scott Elliott and running through Jan. 31 at the Harold Clurman Theater.


Like most works of art (I use the term loosely) that are praised as transgressive by easily impressed critics, “Aunt Dan and Lemon” is actually anything but. To be sure, Mr. Shawn dabbles in theatrical shock tactics, but stripped of its gratuitous nudity and violence, his play is a one-sided piece of sucker bait that will offend only those thin-skinned right-wingers who take unkindly to being portrayed as capital-F fascists by a smug left-winger….

No link, so to read the whole thing (including brief mentions of The Beard of Avon and Anna Bella Eema), pick up a copy of this morning’s Journal, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section and keep flipping pages until you find me. I’m there, together with other good things.

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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