I came across a Charlie Chaplin quote that felt like a good starting point for a film industry puzzle. I had to paraphrase the quote somewhat to make it work as two parallel entries but thought it worked nicely as the basis for another highly themed puzzle. To fit the long quotes, I needed 16 letters and just to play around with puzzle format a bit, I built a 16x9 grid with 52 words — a midi sized puzzle.

If you have been following this blog since my Tom Petty puzzle of last year, you will remember that I have been exploring custom word lists and trying to design puzzles where every answer is themed. Since puzzle construction always requires some “glue” entries that don’t come from the custom word list, the challenge with these puzzles is to figure out how to clue even the glue to the theme. I’ll let you judge whether I succeeded with this one but I tried to construct it such that you don’t have to be too much of a film buff to do this puzzle.

Even so, I do think this puzzle ended up on the more difficult side so please don’t feel bad if you can’t complete it — even if you’re a film expert. I’m still building my skills as a cluer and sometimes I do go too far in one direction. As always, feedback welcome!

download  download (.puz) print  print puzzle (.pdf) key  print solution (.pdf) redirect  play full-sized app
or play using the in-line applet below:

clapboard