Grid: untimed; Meta: 2 minutes
Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Cinematic Firsts” — Conrad’s writeup.
Abbreviated writeup this week because the meta is straightforward, and I’m working in Las Vegas where midnight eastern time is 9PM here. This week we’re looking for an activity that actors might be good at. There were four theme entries:
- (CHAPLIN)(MILK): Biopics of 1992 and 2008
- (LINCOLN)(NIXON): Biopics of 2012 and 1995
- (KINSEY)(TRUMBO): Biopics of 2004 and 2015
- (SNOWDEN)(JOBS): Biopics of 2016 and 2013
WSJ Contest – 09.08.24
I quickly checked the first names of the biopic subjects:
- (C)harlie Chaplin
- (H)arvey Milk
- (A)braham Lincoln
- (R)ichard Nixon
- (A)lfred Kinsey
- (D)alton Trumbo
- (E)dward Snowden
- (S)teve Jobs
The first letters of the first names spell our contest solution CHARADES. Solvers: please share your thoughts. I’ll end with a non-meta related song.
should have used the Henry Mancini theme from movie “Charade”
I loved this one.
I love movies, thought biopics are not my favorites. The dated clues meant nothing to me, but with a few crosses, each of the titles was obvious.
Once you have the grid filled, you don’t need movie knowledge to get the meta answer. The puzzle title points you to the biopics’ subject’s first names, and even if you don’t know all the names, you probably know most of them.
Easy and fun. Thanks, Mr. Gaffney!
Agree wholeheartedly.
This was a fun meta. The word biopic always makes me laugh because I have a friend who pronounces it like biopsy. I was impressed by the difficulty Mr. Gaffney must’ve felt trying to put this one together. Finding the right flicks with the right first names. I’ve only seen MILK and KINSEY, but the other titles were easy to suss out. Although I have to admit, I wrote EARL Snowden down rather than Edward and Darrell Trumbo rather than Dalton. But I still got the letters needed that spell out CHARADES.
As a lover of movies I too was impressed with the legwork that must have gone into finding titles that allowed the meta solution to work with the prerequisite number of letters. Easy puzzle, but wholly satisfying!
Left me imagining how Oppenheimer would mime “that puzzle was the bomb!”