It was his birthday yesterday which reminded me of this game.
My question is whether a link has to be through an acting job. Because it occurred to me that if you played this game with somebody like Johnny Carson, you’d find that pretty much everyone is within two degrees. Carson appeared on his talk show with thousands of celebrities during his thirty year career. And anyone who didn’t appear of the show almost certainly has a direct link with somebody who did.
My other question is about what it takes to establish a link. Kevin Bacon’s first movie credit was in Animal House. John Belushi was the star of that movie. But I don’t think Bacon and Belushi ever appeared in a scene together. So does this link count? Does Belushi have a Bacon number of one?
If so, does that mean everyone who has ever appeared on Saturday Night Live have a Bacon number of two? Can you say that Bacon and Belushi both appeared in Animal House and Belushi and Colin Jost both appeared on Saturday Night Live so Jost has a Bacon number of two?
I have heard, though, that the actual most central vertex of the co-star network is Christopher Lee, not Kevin Bacon. That is to say, everyone who has a Bacon Number has a Lee Number, too, and vice-versa, but the average Lee Number is less than the average Bacon Number.
The usual definition is that the actors have to appear in the same movie but not necessarily the same scene for each degree of separation. There’s a thing called the Erdős number where you have to have published a paper where the two people are among the collaborators in writing the paper for each degree of separation. The Erdős number was defined first. There a thing called the Erdős-Bacon number which is the sum of a person’s Erdős number and their Bacon number. The actor with the smallest length of connections
The usual definition is that the actors have to appear in the same movie but not necessarily the same scene for each degree of separation. There’s a thing called the Erdős number where you have to have published a paper where the two people are among the collaborators in writing the paper for each degree of separation. The Erdős number was defined first. There’s a thing called the Erdős-Bacon number which is the sum of a person’s Erdős number and their Bacon number.
I had heard that the real central vortex is actually Roddy McDowell, owing to his astonishing longevity - including films that were released three years after he died. Lee appeared in a handful more films in a handful fewer years than McDowell, but McDowell moved across the Atlantic to Hollywood before Lee, and benefits from the large pool of Golden Age stars he links with.
1 Eric Roberts (2.90841)
2 Michael Madsen (2.92200)
3 Willem Dafoe (2.92898)
4 Samuel L. Jackson (2.92926)
5 Harvey Keitel (2.92940)
6 Danny Trejo (2.94407)
7 Udo Kier (2.94448)
8 Liam Neeson (2.95841)
9 Malcolm McDowell (2.95900)
10 Donald Sutherland (2.96374)
(the number after each name is the average “X-number” for the whole actor network. Kevin Bacon’s average is 3.120 (Christopher Lee comes in at #24, and Roddy at 823). Bacon himself is #523
It’s not surprising that Kevin Bacon is not even in the top t00 of the Bacon number measurements. The Bacon number was created in 1994 by three students at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. They hadn’t done any research on the subject. They just guessed that he had a lot of short connections to other actors. As I said, the concept was stolen from the idea of the Erdős number.
Tangentally, I’ve been loving this movie connection game: Cine2Nerdle. I don’t think I’ve ever connected movies based on Eric Roberts or Michael Madsen, no wonder I’m so bad.
Rules: name a movie that connects via actor, director, writer, composer, cinematographer, etc. Connections can be used 3 times. Last one standing wins.
It wasn’t a random pick. Bacon had inspired the idea in an interview when he said he had worked with everybody in Hollywood or someone who’s worked with them.
I just have to mention that I am on the Hall of Fame on the Oracle of Bacon for finding someone with a Bacon number of 7. Slow times during grad school many years ago. The Oracle of Bacon
If group credits count (that is, being a member of a group who appeared in a film where the name of the group but not individuals appears in the credits), I have a Bacon number of 3. But so do vast numbers of other people.
Interesting… On the list of centralmost actors, it’s not until you get to #36 that you see the first woman, and only six in the top 100. At a guess, it probably reflects most women in Hollywood having shorter careers than the men, as they age out of being considered “sexy”.
Oracle of Bacon uses TMDB which has less movies than IMDB (though there are probably movies in TMDB not in IMDB). The point is numbers vary depending on which movies “count”
Well, my father has a Bacon number of three – he appeared as an extra in Sweet Liberty (he’s the guy photobombing Alan Alda during the freeze frame in the closing credits). Michael Caine has a number of three.
If you only count appearing the same scene, his number is four, since he’s right there behind Alda.
BTW, Hank Aaron has an Erdos number of 2, since he and Erdos signed a baseball together.
It would be interesting to know what Bacon’s ranking was back when 6 Degrees was first invented - several of the people now ahead of him surely wouldn’t have been, back then.
It’s rather like the mitochondrial Eve/Y-chromsome Adam calculations - those aren’t fixed personages, but rather the current holders of a position that will shift over time