"I knew I wasn't going to sell my first screenplay," Reagle says, fiddling with the black-rimmed glasses framing his brown eyes. This time, in 1979, he moved to Santa Monica, Calif., not far from Hollywood, where screenwriters go to strike it rich. They did persuade him to relocate, however. He pumped out two screenplays in three years in San Francisco, but neither brought him fame, fortune nor anything close. "You never, and I mean never, hear that on the radio," he says of Herrmann's works.Īs it turns out, the journey wasn't such a great thing for Reagle. That is, music by the composer, responsible for the soundtrack to "The Day the Earth Stood Still," a 1951 sci-fi classic that tops Reagle's list of all-time best movies, chiefly for its themes of tolerance and logic.įor Reagle, the music was a sign he was on the right track. Nope, on that long trip, he flipped on the radio to help keep him awake, rolled up and down the dial, and came across something he never expected.īernard Herrmann. This being Reagle's life and all, it couldn't be as simple or straightforward as that. A thousand miles, straight through, overnight." "I turned 26, and I just wanted to get out of town," he says. Then he hit on a plan, one that would keep him close to the words he loved: He would write screenplays. Journalism didn't inspire him, and the rock music gig he also was trying at the time, well, "anybody can do music," he says. He landed a job as a copy editor at the college newspaper, held the post for three years, and stayed with it after school to "pay the bills."īut, like many young adults, he was looking for something more. He enrolled at the University of Arizona, tackling the journalism program there. Rather, it seemed as though he would build his life around a journalism career, when a high school English teacher in Tucson - he had moved there in 1961 with his mother, Evelyn, after his parents divorced - suggested it would be a great field for someone with his love of words. "I remember when I was 8, 9 years old," he says, "I used to get the puzzle in the Philadelphia Inquirer and work on solving it."īut crosswords were just a hobby, and nothing over the next two decades or so of his life suggested they would ever be anything more, certainly nothing he would build a life around. No flash in that one, no real hook to grab the puzzle people.Īh, but keep in mind, that first attempt came when he was 6 years old, and the names were those of his first-grade classmates. You wouldn't get that sense of hipness from Reagle's first attempt, a crazy quilt of a puzzle he cobbled together in his parents' home outside Camden, N.J., a puzzle that linked notable names of the day. "It seems crazy not to be a puzzle that's happening, that's with it," he says, snapping his fingers in jazz be-bop fashion to emphasize the point. This is a man taking the starchy crossword puzzle of old to wild new places in the future. He lives to play with words, after all, to spin them into clever puns, to mold them into maddening riddles, to simply stack them as building blocks in some house of, well, not so much horrors as gasps and groans and Spoonerisms and grins. (Check the name at the top of the story against Reagle's twist on it.)īut it's nothing new for Reagle. "I told you I'd find a good anagram for you," the 56-year-old says excitedly, a wide grin arcing amid the red-and-gray facial hair he sports from ear to ear and nose to neck. It eventually will turn into a 150-minute discussion with Merl Reagle, a somewhat disjointed dialog that will cover his days as a playwright and TV game-show writer, the genetics of humor, his travels from coast to coast, life as crossword constructor extraordinaire, and more.Īnd it certainly will delve into his hefty role in "Wordplay," a Sarasota Film Festival offering that looks at the emergence of the modern-day word puzzle and the people addicted to it.Īnd it doesn't hurt that the film ends with a suspenseful American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Conn.īut it starts with the verbal volley from Reagle, a Tampa resident. "'Hooker in van.' You're 'hooker in van.'" Renowned crossword constructor Merl Reagle figures prominently in documentary film and as exponent of subculture Renowned crossword constructor is Master of the Grid Source: Sarasota Herald-Tribune (Florida)
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