Hacker Cinema
Word Wars
2004 · Film · documentary · 80 min
Directed by Julian Petrillo, Eric Chaikin
The classic board game, Scrabble, has been popular for decades. In addition, there are fanatics who devote heart and soul to this game to the expense of everything else. This film profiles a group of these enthusiasts as they converge for a Scrabble convention where the word game is almost a bloodsport.
5 positive1 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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There was a Scrabble documentary called Word Wars (2004) and a crossword documentary called Wordplay (2006) that came out relatively close in time. Both are excellent films but reveal just how different fans of these two popular word games are. The top level crossworders had a general fund of knowledge and were mostly “normal” people. The hardcore Scrabblers were monomaniacs and dispositinally eccentric in many cases.
I love documentaries, and these are my favourites. All very worth a watch.
- The Crash Reel
- McConkey
- Buck
- Apollo 11
- Carts of Darkness
- The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia
- Samsara
- Baraka
- Brooklyn Castle
- Spellbound
- Drew: The Man Behind the Poster
- Crumb
- The Jinx
- The Art of Flight
- King of Kong
- Indie Game: The Movie
- Capturing the Friedmans
- OJ: Made in America
- The Barkley Marathons
- The Seven Five
- Murderball
- Unbranded
- Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee
- Big River Man
- Hoop Dreams
- Word Wars
- Free Solo
- Long Shot
- Meru
- Being Elmo
- All This Mayhem
- Jiro Dreams of Sushi
- The Cove
- Project Nim
- Alone in the Wilderness
- Behind the Curve
- The Dawn Wall
- Grizzly Man
- 13th
- Winnebago Man
- Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler
- Get Me Roger Stone
- Icarus
- 13th
- Koyaanisqatsi
- The Thin Blue Line
- An Inconvenient Truth
- Oklahoma City
- Virunga
- The Staircase
- Evil Genius
- Undefeated
- Betting on zero
If you're interested in the history and the weird world of competitive scrabble I highly recommend Stefan Fatsis' book "Word Freak", as well as the documentary film "Word Wards" (2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Wars
Two documentaries about word games came out at similar times. “Word Wars” (2004) was about Scrabble and “Wordplay” (2006) was about crosswords. Both are excellent films about high-level play in these games.
After watching them, what struck me was that the best Scrabble players were all, shall I say, a bit weirder than the best crossword players.
Crossword requires a large general fund of knowledge. Scrabble only requires rote memorization. Crossword attracted well-rounded people. Top Scrabblers were monomaniacs.
Saw a fascinating documentary on the odd world of competitive Scrabble. "Word Wars" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Wars
Rather interesting that to this day players still pull tiles out of a bag (which is open to cheating as the article states). Seems to me there should have been any number of low tech solutions to this in play by now.
Are you referring the documentary Word Wars? If so, I can wholeheartedly recommend. great film.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390632/
While not as impressive as playing competitive Scrabble in a foreign language, I thought it was fascinating in the documentary about competitive Scrabble, Word Wars[1], that one of the finalists in an American tournament was a British champion who had to keep track of which words were allowed in the British Scrabble dictionary versus the American Scrabble dictionary used in the tournament.
[1]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390632/