By Bridget Byrne
The Associated Press

BURBANK, Calif. - Before the recent National Scrabble Championship, Eric Chaikin was trying to cram for it. But there just wasn't enough time.

He was too busy promoting the documentary he co-directed, Word Wars, which profiles the game and some of Scrabble's most skilled players.

The film, which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, airs 8 p.m. Thursday on the Discovery Times Channel's Screening Room series.

Co-director Julian Petrillo, who describes himself as slightly better than a "garden variety Scrabble player," has known Chaikin since both attended Brown University.

Their documentary focuses on four top-ranked, obsessed players of the crossword board game, which was invented during the Depression by an out-of-work architect, Alfred Mosher Butts.

The dedicated tile shufflers - Joe Edley, Matt Graham, Marlon Hill and Joel Sherman - are revealed in all their fascinating eccentricity as they moved from preliminary competitions into the nationals in 2002 in San Diego.

The movie reveals a bag-shaking, tile-picking, quick-thinking subculture, ranging from improv matches in New York's Washington Square Park to to the intense sessions of official competition.

Exposed are the fetishes and rituals of a game. Clever graphics using anagrams and word definitions help in probing the players' minds.

Chaikin and the Word Wars competitors hope that TV audiences will want to see more of the game. The 2001 best-selling book Word Freak by journalist Stefan Fatsis raised its profile. This documentary may give it another boost.

Last year, ESPN televised a $100,000 all-star Scrabble game, and on Oct. 3, the network will air an edited version of the now completed 2004 national championship in New Orleans.

So the game is taking its place on television next to high-stakes poker games and spelling bees.

"Poker has one small advantage over us in that it doesn't really require the amount of study, yet Scrabble is still very accessible," Sherman says. "Chess and poker are kind of artificial ... but Scrabble is put together out of things that we absolutely use everyday - language and math skills."