Word: pandolfini
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...always, and mainly, a kid. He loved baseball, basketball, reading, horsing around -- normal boy stuff. He also sat up nights pondering the 64 squares. He watched gaunt gladiators play speed chess for drug money in Washington Square Park in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. He studied with Pandolfini and played tournaments under the loving, sometimes jealous, eye of his journalist father Fred. By his eighth birthday, Josh was the top-ranked player of his age. Today, at 16, he still is. And the 1984 book Fred wrote about Josh is now a motion picture. Both have the title Searching for Bobby...
Then again, it could be just a game -- a wonderfully complex game that absorbs a child without consuming him. "You can be competitive in chess," says teacher Bruce Pandolfini, "and still be a healthy, normal person. You can just be yourself...
...flashy moves of a chess patzer. Phone books are smashed and chessmen trashed. Josh plays catch in a sepulchral chess club, inhabited by a veritable cuckoo's nest of chess nuts. The movie also distorts the chess education of this bantam Rocky. It has Josh learning almost equally from Pandolfini (Ben Kingsley) and a kindly street hustler (Laurence Fishburne). In fact, Pandolfini was the boy's main teacher. Kingsley does have a charismatic gravity and the carriage of -- Fred Waitzkin's phrase -- "a ruined aristocrat." In portraying a teacher whom Josh refers to as "a great friend, a wonderful...
...love and money -- unlike their European counterparts, American chess players rarely make a living from the game -- Pandolfini agreed to be an adviser on the film. He showed actors how to grab the chess pieces ("There is a certain elegance to it," he says) and devised some 200 chess positions. For him, "The film isn't so much about trying to find the next Bobby Fischer; it is about trying to find those good times that came upon Fischer's success in 1972, when chess was suddenly important to the American public...
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