My mom and I just watched "Spellbound". In my opinion, it was an incredible movie. I loved the characters and the suspense was nail-biting. If you've only seen in it the theatre, they have a special "Where are they now?" feature about the spellers on the DVD.
I found the whole phenomena rather interesting, and strange because there are no spelling bees in my province. The closest thing we had was "concours oratoire" (oratory competition), where you had to write a monologue in French and deliver it. I always hated this competition, but one of my classmates was quite the champion.