Like many Brunonians, Eric Chaikin '89 likes intellectually challenging games - his favorite is Scrabble.
Unlike most Scrabble enthusiasts, Chaikin plays at an internationally competitive level - yet his own Scrabble abilities are not what make him notable in the Scrabble community. He's also attracting attention for his critically acclaimed documentary, "Word Wars."
Chaikin and Julian Petrillo '91 wrote, directed and produced the film about competitive Scrabble.
Released at more than 25 film festivals this past year, "Word Wars" has been well-received by audiences. It was an official selection of this year's Sundance Film Festival and won the Audience Award at the Full-Frame Doc Festival.
Though "Word Wars" entered Sundance with a large amount of advance publicity, the movie did not receive the distribution deal its creators had expected. It airs regularly on cable, thanks to a distribution deal with the Discovery Times Channel. It has also seen a limited theatrical release, and the filmmakers have signed a deal to distribute the film on DVD.
The film follows four champion Scrabble players as they come together over one specialized skill.
"They are competitors but also comrades," Chaikin said.
That the four players are so colorful means that the film ended up being as much a character study as a documentary, Chaikin said, where the characters - and not the directors - construct the story.
"We made some decisions early on. There would be no narrator, no voiceover - the story would tell itself," he said.
The directors called in Cassidy Curtis '92 - all three alums were members of Zeta Delta Xi - to produce graphics for the film.
Curtis was then working as an animator on "Shrek 2."
"We told him, 'You are the only guy who can manifest this vision. We need to come up with graphical motifs to get what was going on in (the players') heads,'" Chaikin said.
The documentary itself was Chaikin's idea - he had competed in national Scrabble tournaments. After graduating from Brown, Chaikin worked on Wall Street, managing software development. A cognitive science concentrator, he "split my time between acting and computers" at Brown, although his theater experience was "nothing like this," he told The Herald.
Scrabble was a part of Chaikin's Brown experience - but it wasn't a major one. "I played at Brown and sort of gave it up at Brown," he said.
In 1997, Chaikin left software on one coast to pursue acting on the other coast - in Los Angeles.
"I was looking to put the creative and business sides together," he said.
To reignite his creative side, Chaikin called upon Petrillo, a modern culture and media concentrator who had spent his time since Brown working in television production.
"When I left school, I didn't really feel that what I did at Brown had prepared me for what I started doing," Petrillo said. "I didn't go to film school."
In the film industry, he said, "There was never one time where I took out my Brown diploma. The film business is not about your education."
Still, he said, his Brown education has made him confident.
"Grounding in general knowledge, the practical and theoretical side of the film coin was an invaluable background and prep," Petrillo said.
After graduating, Petrillo had his first break through commercial production and then moved on to episodic television. But he was willing to switch mediums when he heard about the project that would become "Word Wars."
"Eric was like, 'This is a really worthwhile project.'" Petrillo said, adding that he always harbored an interest in documentaries and found this one particularly interesting.
As a high-level Scrabble player, Chaikin had met Stefan Fatsis, a Wall Street Journal writer and author of the book "Word Freak," which follows several competitive Scrabble players - some of whom appear also in "Word Wars."
The movie was not without its pitfalls. Chaikin said he has found there is no market for non-political documentaries.
"The economics for the marketplace of documentaries is very competitive," he said. "It may be getting better for Michael Moore," but for the majority of documentary filmmakers, there are few opportunities in the genre.
As for whether they will make another movie like this one, Petrillo said, "I would like to make more documentaries, but I'd also like to eat and pay my mortgage."
Chaikin said Brown gave him confidence that pursuing his interests would eventually work out. "I have to embrace my eccentricities. I could spend all my time memorizing words (for Scrabble). Brown gives you that sense - you know, trust your vision, it usually works out well," he said.
