Tile Gurus

“If you want to go to a picnic and play softball — great, do it, have fun,” says Eric Chaikin. “But if you want to play Major League Baseball, you’re going to have to pump some iron.” It’s not the first analogy he tosses out in our conversation — just the most unexpected one. After all, he’s talking about Scrabble.

“These guys are at the top of their game,” continues Chaikin, codirector and producer of Word Wars, a documentary about four players’ quest for the National Scrabble Championship title, which carries with it $25,000. “They know the dictionary cold. Not just the definitions but how to instantly rearrange the letters and form anagrams,” he says. And the process has to be fast — games at this level are limited to 25 minutes. Players must choose the word that gives the highest possible score almost immediately to increase their chances of using all the tiles by the end of the match.

And $25,000 is hardly chump change for these largely unemployed logophiles. There’s Matt Graham, a scatterbrained, pill-popping sometime-comedian whose New York City apartment is littered with dictionaries, encyclopedias and word lists. He makes an unlikely travel companion for Marlon Hill, a potty-mouthed, pot-smoking black-power advocate from Baltimore. In one scene, Hill emphatically points out that they’re not friends, the result of a long-standing feud over Graham’s propensity for playing “phony words.” The camera then cuts to Hill delicately applying eyedrops to Graham’s bloodshot peepers and carefully shaving the back of his neck.

Also included is Joel Sherman, who justifies his joblessness with claims that Scrabble is the only thing his body allows him to sit still and do. His epic gastrointestinal issues, which have him guzzling gallons of Maalox, earn him the revolting nickname G.I. Joel. The final player is Joe Edley, three-time national champion, who is mostly loathed by the others. A husband and father (with a job!), he intimidates opponents through tai chi-fed mind control and blames his poor showing at the tournament on the fact that he didn’t get acupuncture.

The documentary, which was a hit at Sundance this year, follows the men from December 2001 to August 2002, ultimately landing in San Diego, site of the 2002 tournament. The New York-based Chaikin, who used to manage a software-development office in Overland Park, says the intent was to make it feel like “a regular movie with characters that happened to be real people.” A wordsmith himself, he knew the guys from his own time on the Scrabble circuit. He is also a friend of Stefan Fatsis, author of Word Freak, which included many of the same language enthusiasts.

And what did they think of their portrayals? “Well, they’re pretty self-aware,” Chaikin says, acknowledging that his subjects aren’t completely oblivious to their unconventionality. But Chaikin and codirector Julian Petrillo never intended to make them seem like outcasts. “I wanted to humanize them,” Chaikin says. “I mean, these guys are my friends.”

But we wouldn’t be surprised if Marlon Hill denied that, too.