A new documentary about New Zealand's National Scrabble Championships is a surprising and compelling watch. Photo / Dean Purcell
If you think you understand Scrabble, a new film might make you think again.
It was during a break in play midway through the first day of this year’s New Zealand Scrabble Championship, when the country’s 14th-ranked player, grand master Lawson Sue, approached the country’s third-ranked player, grand master Dylan Early.
Sue, whose outlook on both life and Scrabble is perhaps best described as chipper, was clearly hoping for a bit of light banter. He was about to be disappointed.
“How are you going?” Early asked.
“50 per cent,” Sue said. “You?”
“Two,” Early said flatly. “Two wins.”
Sue, obviously surprised and unsure what else to do with this unexpected bit of bad news from one of the pre-tournament favourites, laughed, presumably nervously, for quite a long time.
Early did not laugh at all. “It’s not good,” he said.
“But you’re still chipper?” Sue asked, smiling broadly and gesturing encouragingly.
“No,” Early said, flatly.
“Oh, okay,” Sue said.
“I’m a bit deflated now.”
There was an awkward silence as Sue tried to figure out his next play. Eventually, blessedly, he spotted fellow competitor Laura Griffiths, who turned out to be having a great tournament, and left Early to his disappointment.
This uncomfortable scene takes place about halfway through an intriguing new documentary, Every Word Counts, a 30-minute film by Alexander Gandar, which is probably the first, and will surely be the last, movie ever made about the New Zealand Scrabble championships – almost certainly the least telegenic event on the country’s sporting calendar. It would be easy to make a movie making fun of Scrabble and the people whose obsession with it takes them all the way to the top. The usual formula is to find a handful of obsessive oddballs and depict their eccentricities in ways that will leave viewers laughing, gasping and sharing on social media. But this movie is not like that at all.
Gandar takes care to show his three central characters Sue, Early and Griffiths as ordinary humans, albeit with an extraordinary devotion to – and facility for – a game most of us only play when the weather at the campground has packed up and no one’s in the right headspace for Monopoly.
Part of the reason for the warmth of this portrait is that Gandar himself is a Scrabblehead, albeit an unlikely one. An experienced film-maker with a striking resemblance to Andy Warhol and a dress sense to match, Gandar does not look much like any of the people in his movie: While the Scrabble demographic is reasonably broad, it skews much older and less avant garde, and has fewer awards for directing music videos. Nevertheless, Gandar says the welcome he’s received since joining Auckland’s only Scrabble club, in Mt Albert, a year and a half ago, couldn’t have been warmer.
On his first night at the club, he beat New Zealand Scrabble president and former Auckland councillor Cathy Casey, and followed that up by beating the country’s 16th-ranked player Val Mills before losing narrowly to grand master Liz Fagerlund in his third match.
“I’m slightly suspicious that maybe they might have thrown the games in order to keep me. I mean, they would say no, they would never admit to that, but I just always wonder: did Val let me win that game?”
Whether or not Val let him win that game, Gandar is clearly a talented player. His ranking has risen steadily over the past year, to the point he’s now number 85 in the country.
He grew up playing regular games of Scrabble with friends and family, but the game most of us play in homes and baches around the country is a radically different proposition from the one played by competitors in the country’s clubs and at its leading tournaments. Gandar can still remember the moment when his standard of play reached the point where even his own mother no longer had any interest in playing him.
“There was one fateful Christmas where I had learned all the two-letter words. This was long before I was even playing competitively. But I just committed all of those to memory and went and played her and was doing s*** like this. And she almost hurled the board over the road. She was like, ‘These aren’t words! You’re cheating!’ And I had to sort of very delicately and patiently explain to her that I wasn’t cheating, I was just learning the words. And actually, in fact, that is more the game than just playing words that don’t overlap, that don’t have this kind of thing going on.”
The “kind of thing” he was talking about is known as “parallel play”, which involves playing a word alongside another word already on the board, enabling you to collect points not only for the word you’re playing but also for any new words (typically two or three letters long) you create as a result.
This technique, possibly more than any other, is what separates a decent home player from a club player. There are 124 two-letter words and 1340 three-letter words in the Collins Scrabble Dictionary. The top players know all of them.
Once you reach this level, though, no one apart from other club players wants anything to do with you. You have crossed a Scrabble rubicon. Indeed, during our interview, Gandar’s colleague, one of New Zealand’s leading wordsmiths and enthusiastic Scrabbler, Toby Manhire, walked in and commented on how much he disliked playing with Gandar, primarily because of the gulf created by his knowledge of the two-letter words and concomitant ability to engage in parallel play.
“I just think it’s a different game,” Manhire says, “and the problem is if you go to a lovely holiday somewhere and you get otherwise lovely people like Alexander who you love to spend time with and have a cup of tea with and then it’s like, ‘Oh, let’s have a lovely game of Scrabble’, and then he goes, ‘Zhhn zhhn flicky flick ding ding ding’ and he’s got a thousand points.”
Gandar wants Scrabble to be bigger, to have a profile something like chess, its big-time rival in the battle for mind share in the world of what he calls brain sports.
The game isn’t currently doing a great job of attracting new talent, as Gandar’s own journey demonstrates. Although he had long been playing Scrabble at a level good enough to destroy his family and alienate his friends, it had never occurred to him to join a club until he stumbled on Cathy Casey playing a game with his boss at work late one night and she invited him along.
“If the Scrabble world had reached me earlier,” he says, “I could have been playing for six, seven, eight years, as opposed to just one and a half.”
He hopes his documentary encourages more people into the game and that it helps show the game in a light it might not have always enjoyed. In this country, he says, there’s always been a “whiff of the quirky” about Scrabble, but that’s not necessarily the case in other countries, particularly in Southeast Asia and Africa where what he calls “brain athletes” are taken seriously and are highly regarded.
“I was definitely trying to achieve a sense of that credibility, of having it being like a serious pursuit for these people and sort of trying to work beneath or under that stereotype of it being quirky or weird.”
In Every Word Counts, a good number of games in progress at the national championships are shown and the moments that make it to screen frequently involve the same event: the playing of a particularly notable word for a high score, typically a “bingo” (where a player uses all her letters, earning a 50-point bonus). What’s most notable about this event is that, no matter how high the stakes or how game-changing the play, the other player almost always congratulates their opponent for it. Maybe some competitive Scrabblers have a whiff of the quirky, but in this movie at least, they just seem nice.
The desire of all competitors to win is obvious, but what’s much more striking is the sense of camaraderie. These are people who want to connect with others who share their passion. That’s what Gandar has found on his own Scrabble journey, and that’s what his movie is ultimately about.
“There’s no judgment at all,” he says. “The game is the game. If you love the game, that’s all that matters.”
Every Word Counts is streaming now on thespinoff.co.nz.
The new free open-air saltwater pool is already proving popular.