New York Times, Wednesday, September 14, 2016

This is my second attempt at a puzzle with perimeter answers. My first one required a lot of dodgy fill, and was difficult enough to construct that I vowed never to try THAT again. But then I had the idea for today's puzzle.

Happily, when I sat down to construct this one, the fill came together pretty well. While it's hinted at in the revealer, it's not explicitly stated that each of the films referenced in the puzzle was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. Given that, as well as the need for symmetry and to have four corners where the first and/or last letters of the answers were the same, I didn't have a lot of wiggle room to try different configurations/answers. The three themers in the main body of the puzzle layered on additional constraints. Despite all that, the fill in the final product isn't bad, IMO, with only a few entries I wish I could have eliminated (KTS, ITA and IMET, you know who you are . . . )

One other tricky aspect of this puzzle was cluing. I wanted the clues to be independent of the films and their subjects: but since many of the theme movies were biopics, I couldn't pull it off. For example, how do you clue "Patton" in a way that doesn't relate to General Patton? How do you clue Amadeus without referencing Mozart? It doesn't work, unfortunately.

In any case, I hope solvers enjoy the puzzle enough to give it two thumbs up!

PICTURE / FRAME telling us that all perimeter answers are motion PICTUREs. At first I felt like the revealer was inelegant, placed into odd locations with no symmetry, but I liked Dan's effort to save that by using the ACADEMY to balance everything out.

Great gridwork. It's so hard to build around perimeter themers, since they immediately make the four corners so inflexible. At first I thought Dan had a ton of freedom in choosing from hundreds of single-word movies out there, but reading his notes (about how each of the perimeter movies are Best Picture nominees) made me realize how little flexibility he really had. Most any pair of crossing perimeter answers in a corner means trouble, and having such a limited set can mean trouble.

But that NW came out so strong, kicked off by AVATAR and AMADEUS, including the nice VARIETAL / ANGELINA / REDDIT. There aren't any fantastic multi-word entries like IT'S A GIRL, but given the ultra-tough constraint of having AVATAR / AMADEUS fixed into place in a big space, I can only imagine how much time Dan spent working through that corner, restarting when he hit even the most minor of crossword glue. Now this is the way to start a puzzle!

The SE wasn't quite as nice, given the I MET partial and HITHERTO (although the lawyers in the solving audience might disagree with me), but it's still very smooth. I'm so resigned to seeing two or three ugly bits like I MET in a corner of perimeter puzzles — to get such effortless-seeming results was a great and pleasant surprise.

Perimeter puzzles also often show signs of strain as the constructor tries to merge everything in the middle, but Dan also does well here. Keeping his NW and SE corners big and wide-open means he can spend a bunch of black squares in the middle of the puzzle, helping him knit the four corners together more easily. RENA was the only head-scratcher for me, but she is a soap star, and all the crosses are fair.

Been a while since we had a perimeter theme, and usually it's pretty apparent what's going on because of all the crossword glue needed to hold the thing together. Really nice craftsmanship from Dan today.