The Crossword Cult

He who can't be stumped: Former U.S. president Bill Clinton, one of the puzzlers featured in Patrick Creadon's documentary Wordplay. Courtesy Odeon Films/Alliance Atlantis.

If enthusiasm is an American virtue, then filmmaker Patrick Creadon is one damn fine Yankee. On a minimal budget, the gung-ho Chicago native and current resident of southern California directed Wordplay, a compelling documentary about the cult surrounding the New York Times crossword puzzle. The film splashed big enough on the festival circuit to warrant a theatrical release — a matter of immense satisfaction to Creadon, a man whose store of surprisingly shop-worn adjectives runs from “fun,” to “amazing” to “great.”

“Can you believe it?” the 39-year-old Creadon enthused during an interview after the film’s screening in May at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival. “The greatest actor in the world, Dustin Hoffman, was there to see the film.” (Hoffman had been in town filming Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.)

In the United States, the crossword has traditionally been considered as elitist an East Coast institution as, say, Yale. It’s a brainteaser that mercilessly separates those who have a certain kind of cleverness and high cultural literacy from those who don’t. In the wrong hands, a film on this topic might have alienated the have-nots, pleased the haves and made the couldn’t-care-lesses shrug their shoulders. But Creadon manages that typically Midwestern feat of making the competitive, occasionally pretentious phenomenon seem — what’s the word? — folksy.

It doesn’t hurt that the man who edits the Times crossword, Will Shortz, is an Indiana boy; he's transplanted from the country to the big city, but doesn’t come across as too citified. “Will’s so big in this community, and everyone knows his name, but very few people know what he’s like,” Creadon says. Shortz is a pleasant smarty-pants, as tidy and square as his daily output. But Wordplay goes way beyond outing the personality behind the puzzle.

Labour of love: Wordplay producer Christine O'Malley and her husband, director Patrick Creadon. Courtesy Odeon Films/Alliance Atlantis.

Creadon’s documentary captures three different groups of puzzlers. The first are high-profile fans like Bill Clinton (“He’s not happy unless he does his puzzle every day,” says Creadon), the Indigo Girls (“We make our band members use pencil, because we don’t trust them”), Yankees’ pitcher Mike Mussina and The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. In one scene, the comedian is seen in his office, histrionically screaming, “Bring it, Shortz!” as he begins work on that day’s offering.

The doc then shifts to Shortz’s efforts to “bring it” during his daily to-and-fro with his freelance puzzle constructors. Folksy alert: One of Shortz’s constructors is “Merl,” a guy in Tampa, Fla., who devises the puzzles on a piece of graph paper while eating hominy grits at his favourite diner. The southerner faxes each puzzle to New York, where Shortz decides if it passes muster. If so, the editor assigns it a day of the week — Monday puzzles being the easiest ones, Saturdays the hardest — and works with his constructor to fine-tune the clues.

Finally, the film follows a motley crew of top-notch solvers on a ridiculously suspenseful journey to the annual national crossword tournament in Stamford, Conn. The tourney becomes the film’s centre and allows Wordplay to compete with absurdist contest dramas like Christopher Guest’s Best in Show and Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom.

Only it’s a doc. It’s hard to believe, really, that the contestants in Wordplay weren’t conjured up by a Guest or Luhrmann; the players range from an adenoidal gay former crossword prodigy (“I was the youngest to win it ever,” he boasts, brushing non-existent lint from his buttoned-up shirt) to the pizza-scarfing frat boy who seeks to take the youngest-ever record himself, from a middle-American computer exec to a neurotically single editrix from New York.

Creadon directed and shot the movie; his wife, Christine O’Malley, produced it. “It’s embarrassing, but my wife and I discovered our shared enjoyment of the puzzle on our honeymoon [on Maui], and now we do it after we’ve put our two young ones to bed, to reward ourselves for a day done.”

The husband-and-wife team have paid their dues in film and television over the years, he as a cameraman working for the usual alphabet soup of networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, MTV, ESPN, PBS) and she filling production posts for various documentaries, including as an associate producer on Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. “Between us, we have 25 years in the trenches,” Creadon says, “and a lot of equipment. But we only used a hand-held camera [in Wordplay]. We wanted people to feel comfortable, to allow us to take a little peek into this private thing that they do.”

Creadon was jazzed by the positive audience reaction the film garnered at the Toronto screening. “You see, it’s not just an American film, it’s a people film.” Nonsense. The film is as American as its maker — and provides a nice little glimpse into what’s going on in your neighbour’s always-lit-up living room.

Lovers of the Times puzzle speak of it with adulation; by praising it, they're also patting themselves on the back for their own sophisticated taste and highbrow aspirations. I had my own period of addiction to the puzzle during my undergraduate studies in the States, but have since found more pleasure in the cryptic crosswords in Canadian and British papers. Both types of puzzles have their appeal, but where crosswords reward trivia knowledge, cryptics emphasize verbal acuity. To compare: Mandlikova of tennis, 4 letters = HANA (New York Times); need a difficult craft, eight letters = HARDSHIP (Globe and Mail).

A group portrait of the devout: A collection of the personalities in Wordplay. Standing, from left, crossword tournament contender Tyler Hinman, contender Jon Delfin, New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz and freelance crossword constructor Merl Reagle. Sitting, from left, tournament contenders Trip Payne, Ellen Ripstein and Al Sanders. Photo Robin Holland. Courtesy Odeon Films/Alliance Atlantis.

The Times puzzle favours generalists, not specialists. To quote Clinton, “It’s like life: you start with the problems you can solve, the answers you know, and you move out from there.” The Times iteration fosters a can-do attitude; it’s a more democratic puzzle than its aristocratic equivalents in Canada and Europe.

The tournament portion of Wordplay bears witness to the American tendency to pursue every pleasure at once socially and competitively: in short, to make everything a contest. Other than Stewart, everyone in the film takes the puzzle very seriously. This tendency was revealed in the so-called “scumbag controversy”: in April, Shortz allowed a constructor to give “scumbag” as a seven-letter equivalent for “scoundrel” — unwittingly contravening a longstanding Times ban on using the word in the paper.

Creadon cheerfully defends Shortz. “When Will took over the puzzle 15 years ago, he injected this lively sense of wordplay into it. ‘Let’s make the answers common, and colourful and modern,’ he said.” Creadon pauses, leaning his crew-cut head pensively to the side. “Will said, ‘Let’s bend the language a little bit, let’s have more fun with it.’”

Wordplay opens June 16 in Toronto and June 23 in Montreal and Vancouver.

Alec Scott writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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