Karen Lurie author page
2 puzzles by Karen Lurie
with Constructor comments
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"Well, actually…" is the pedant's favorite opening phrase, and maybe some puzzle writers/trivia buffs have used it too (ironically, of course)? Occupational hazard, right? It's even become a verb, as in, "I well-actually'd Andre 3000, explaining that a Polaroid picture requires no shaking."
So I zeroed in on the phrase and thought about what questions it could answer on its own while still maintaining its status as a phrase used to correct someone. Then, I just had to get the themers to make sense as questions that might really be asked.
By the way, I fully expect that anyone commenting on this puzzle will find a way to "well-actually" me, so I'm bracing myself...
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| S | C | I | N | I | N | E | S | L | E | A | P |
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.