New York Times, Thursday, January 13, 2022

I'm very excited to make my New York Times debut — many thanks to everyone involved! I'm a comedy and game show writer, and in March 2020 I wrote for a show (remotely, as you might have guessed by the date) that uses a crossword format (although technically #notacrossword). That experience made me want to try writing a "real" crossword, so a pandemic project was born.

For this particular puzzle, I was playing around with changing the tenses of verbs in movie titles, as in "Raised Arizona," "Brought It On," etc. Then I added pronouns to make them sentences that also acted as summaries, as in "They Traded Places," "He Forgot Sarah Marshall," etc. The funny thing is, if you were about to watch "Finding Nemo" and someone walked in and said, "Spoiler alert: they found Nemo", you might be annoyed at first, but then you'd probably laugh because you'd realize that the title "Finding Nemo" is pretty much a spoiler anyway.

SPOILER ALERT, the revealer comes first! The theme purposefully spoiled by an early revealer? Something so cheeky about that; I love the rule-breaking aspect.

I've seen FINDING NEMO a few times, so I knew that THEY (Marlin and Dory) FOUND NEMO. Something clever about this "spoiler." Although I can't point to exactly what makes it clever, it pleased me.

KILL BILL was shelved further in my mental archives, so I couldn't remember if she (O-Ren Ishii) killed Bill or not. Or who Bill was, for that matter. SHE KILLED BILL, that answers that — but it doesn't answer my question regarding why this is a spoiler.

(Astute reader Julian Blatt points out that the "she" is actually Beatrix Kiddo. No kidding, so much for my mental archives!)

Free Willy was even deeper in the dusty corners of my brain. Was there any question if Willy got freed, given the movie poster? So why is HE FREED WILLY a spoiler?

Someone spoil my questions already!

Theme hesitations aside, I loved the debut of POWER POSING. If you've never heard the term before, it's Wonder Woman's trademark move, adopted by powerful women everywhere. Neat to get GWEN STEFANI in a symmetrical spot — I'd love for someone to send in a pic of her POWER POSING!

Although the SPOILER ALERT theme ironically left me with unanswered questions, there's a delightful seed there. I typically hate it when a puzzle gives away the game much too early, so my constructor radar pinged, wanting to brainstorm more on how this could be developed further. I like when a debut intrigues me to think further.