In Woody Allen’s (fictional) The Gossage–Vardebedian Papers, first published in The New Yorker in January 1966 and later collected in his book Getting Even (1971) (in turn later collected into the book The Insanity Defense (2007)), the last of a sequence of letters ends with the absurd idea of playing Scrabble over correspondence:
[…] I accept your invitation to Scrabble in good spirits. Get out your set. […] I shall make the first play. The seven letters I have just turned up are O, A, E, J, N, R, and Z—an unpromising jumble that should guarantee, even to the most suspicious, the integrity of my draw. Fortunately, however, an extensive vocabulary coupled with a penchant for esoterica, has enabled me to bring etymological order out of what, to one less literate, might seem a mishmash. My first word is "ZANJERO." Look it up. Now lay it out, horizontally, the E resting on the center square. Count carefully, not overlooking the double word score for an opening move and the fifty-point bonus for my use of all seven letters. The score is now 116—0.
Your move.
Gossage
So Allen has come up with an initial word that scores highly. (I don’t know whether the 116 is correct—it seems high considering this question about typical Scrabble scores—but it does seem like it would be a high-scoring initial word.)
Of course he made up this game / picked this word for comedic effect, but it gets me to wonder: what would be the highest possible score in Scrabble after the first move? (And what word(s) would achieve it?) And of the best initial words, where is ZANJERO on that list?
(I imagine it should be possible to exhaustively enumerate this by trying all words of up to 7 letters from a dictionary and all allowed ways of placing them on an empty board, and maybe someone has already done it, but I couldn’t find it.)
Edit: The question What is the highest game score theoretically possible in Scrabble using 1 player and the International Scrabble Dictionary? asks a similar question, about the highest possible score at the end of a single-player game, while this question is about the highest possible score after just the first move (whether one player or two or more).