Solution to Evan Birnholz’s Dec. 11 crossword, “Fringe Film Festival”

After the news broke that The Washington Post Magazine will be shutting down, I wrote last Sunday that I will "almost definitely" still be writing crosswords for The Washington Post. I can now thankfully say that for certain. After the final issue of The Magazine runs on Dec. 25 you will be able find my crossword in the Arts & Style section of the newspaper. I realize that not everyone enjoys solving crosswords on newsprint instead of the sleek magazine pages, but at least that is one way to access my puzzles. You also have the option of accessing my crosswords online, where you can solve on desktop, mobile or tablet or print out a PDF which recreates exactly how I want each puzzle to look in print. However you choose to solve, I look forward to making puzzles for you and I hope you enjoy them.

The title of today's puzzle suggests we should be thinking about films, but where are they? The grid appears to be a little smaller than usual at 19×19 squares, and several answers don't seem to fit their clues. 1D: [Hidden peril, perhaps] is … RAP? 2D: [Part in a play] is … OLE?

Something is amiss, but you’ll find a key hint at 78A: [What edgy films do, just like 13 films in this puzzle] which is PUSH THE BOUNDARIES. These films can all be found just outside the grid. In fact, they each have their own clues under the heading of Fringe Films. (In print, these Fringe Film clues appear after the Down clues; but if you solve online, the Fringe Film clues can be found by clicking on the Info button above the grid.)

The revealer had said there were 13 films, though, and there is a 13th Fringe Film clue: [1983 film whose title is spelled clockwise in the first letters of the other 12 films]. Starting with "TRON" in the upper left corner and reading them clockwise around the grid:

… you get the 1983 film "THE OUTSIDERS," a meta-like answer that describes all of these films literally being outside the edges of the puzzle.

My aesthetic on puzzles with hidden letters is that I want the puzzle to form legitimate answers with and without those trick letters, which is why the grid is fairly overloaded with black squares and there are very few long answers. It’d be one thing to just chop off the first or last letters of whichever random words and create gibberish entries, but I wanted to go the extra mile and make sure that the grid would accommodate real words throughout even if those hidden letters weren't there.

One non-thematic clue I should mention is at 86A: [Former U.S. senator John C. ___, whose name can be formed by combining 44 Down and 22 Across and reversing the whole thing]. If you look at 44D: [Scriptural transgression], that's SIN, and 22A: [NBA team that plays on a gray home court] is NETS. Add SIN to NETS to get SINNETS, then reverse the whole thing to get STENNIS, the former senator at 86A. In many situations where I have a name that I’m not terribly familiar with and I’m unsure if it's crossed fairly, I’ll often go out of my way to give it a wordplay angle just to make it a bit easier to figure out. Sometimes that can mean putting in additional grid entries that can serve as a guide. However, I didn't have to do that here. I’d already built the sections of the puzzle with SIN and NETS; the central section with STENNIS was one of the last areas I’d built, and I just found the combination by complete accident. It pays to be lucky sometimes.

In addition, I was surprised that I’d never heard of John C. Stennis before writing this puzzle, even though he served in the U.S. Senate from 1947 to 1989. This was no one-term politician who fell out of the public eye faster than he was in it; he was a senator for over four decades! For whatever reason, though, Stennis never made it to my memory banks. There was a point where I’d considered going with the "Game of Thrones" character STANNIS instead since I’m much more familiar with him, but either way I’d be stuck with a name that some folks would know and others wouldn't, and STENNIS meant one fewer proper noun would be required (STANNIS would have necessitated BAINES at 80D instead of BEINGS). The unexpected SIN + NETS discovery is what ultimately sealed the deal on that choice.

Finally, a personal note about the puzzle: You may have noticed a note above the clues that says, "Happy birthday, [answer to Fringe Film 9]!" Fringe Film 9 is DAD, and this was my way of wishing my old man another happy trip around the sun today. I’d originally hoped to put DAD somewhere in the main grid, but when I saw I could make him a theme answer, well, there was no turning back. My Dad is the guy who got me interested in crosswords in the first place, letting me and my brothers try to help him out on solving New York Times crosswords when we were younger. He's also responsible for introducing us to TRON, and that's not because it shows up in puzzles fairly often — it's because he rented it on VHS from the video store a lot when we were kids, and I’d sit and watch that light cycle scene over and over and over again. There's a nonzero chance he's celebrating his birthday by watching "Tron" right now, to be honest. But however his day goes, here's a hearty raise of my virtual glass to you, Old Dad.

(And no, my Dad's name is not Fringe Film 9, in case you were planning to make that joke.)

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