Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a trivia

Trivia

The trivia are the three lower Artes Liberales, i.e. grammar, rhetoric and logic. These were the topics of basic education, foundational to the quadrivia of higher education, and hence the material of basic education, of interest only to undergraduates...

game

Game

A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...

based on the concept of the small world phenomenon

Small world experiment

The small world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggested that human society is a small world type network...

and rests on the assumption that any individual involved in the Hollywood, California film industry can be linked through his or her film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

roles to actor Kevin Bacon

Kevin Bacon

Kevin Norwood Bacon is an American film and theater actor whose notable roles include Animal House, Diner, Footloose, Flatliners, Wild Things, A Few Good Men, JFK, Apollo 13, Mystic River, The Woodsman, Trapped, Friday the 13th, Hollow Man, Tremors, Death Sentence, Frost/Nixon, Crazy, Stupid, Love....

within six steps. The name of the game is a play on the "six degrees of separation

Six degrees of separation

Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, "a friend of a friend" statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer...

" concept. The game requires a group of players to try to connect any individual to Kevin Bacon as quickly as possible and in as few links as possible. In 2007, Bacon started a charitable organization

Charitable organization

A charitable organization is a type of non-profit organization . It differs from other types of NPOs in that it centers on philanthropic goals A charitable organization is a type of non-profit organization (NPO). It differs from other types of NPOs in that it centers on philanthropic goals A...

named SixDegrees.org

SixDegrees.org

SixDegrees.org is a website launched on January 18, 2007 by Kevin Bacon. SixDegrees builds on the popularity of the "small world phenomenon" to create a charitable social network.- History :...

History

In a January 1994 Premiere magazine

Premiere (magazine)

Premiere was an American and New York City-based film magazine published by Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., published between the years 1987 and 2007. The original version of the magazine, Première , was started in France in 1976 and is still being published there.-History:The magazine originally...

interview about the film The River Wild
The River Wild
The River Wild is a 1994 thriller film directed by Curtis Hanson and starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Bacon, David Strathairn, John C. Reilly, and Joseph Mazzello...

, Kevin Bacon commented that he had worked with everybody in Hollywood or someone who's worked with them.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon first surfaced at about the same time. On April 7, 1994, a lengthy newsgroup

Newsgroup

A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...

thread headed "Kevin Bacon is the Center of the Universe" appeared.

The game was created in early 1994 by four Albright College

Albright College

Albright College is a private, co-ed, liberal arts college affiliated with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1856 and is located in Reading, Pennsylvania, United States.-Overview:...

students, Craig Fass, Christian Gardner, Brian Turtle, and Mike Ginelli. According to an interview with the quartet in the spring 1999 issue of the college's magazine, The Albright Reporter, they were watching Footloose during a heavy snowstorm. When the film was followed by The Air Up There
The Air Up There
The Air Up There is a 1994 comedy film directed by Paul Michael Glaser and starring Kevin Bacon and Charles Gitonga Maina with Yolanda Vazquez as Sister Susan.-Plot:...

, they began to speculate on how many movies Bacon had been in and the number of people he had worked with.

In the interview, Brian Turtle said, "It became one of our stupid party tricks, I guess. People would throw names at us, and we'd connect them to Kevin Bacon."

The quartet wrote talk show

Talk show

A talk show or chat show is a television program or radio program where one person discuss various topics put forth by a talk show host....

host Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart is an American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian...

a letter telling him that "Kevin Bacon was the center of the entertainment universe" and explaining the game. They appeared on The Jon Stewart Show
The Jon Stewart Show
The Jon Stewart Show was a short-lived talk show hosted by comedian Jon Stewart on MTV. It premiered in 1993 and became the second highest-rated program on the network behind Beavis and Butt-Head....

and The Howard Stern Show with Bacon to explain the game. Bacon admitted that he initially disliked the game because he believed it was ridiculing him, but he eventually came to enjoy it. The three inventors released a book, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (ISBN 9780452278448), with an introduction written by Bacon. A board game based on the concept was released by Endless Games

Endless Games

Endless Games is a games manufacturer based in South Amboy, New Jersey and founded in 1996 by industry veterans Mike Gasser, Kevin McNulty and game inventor Brian Turtle....

.

Bacon also appeared in a commercial for the Visa check card

Check card

The term check card can refer to:* An identification card issued by a retailer allowing the holder to tender payment by check. Such cards were commonly issued in the United States by supermarkets and other retailers before the widespread use of debit cards....

that parodied the game. In the commercial, Bacon wants to write a check to buy a book, but the clerk asks for his ID, which he does not have. He leaves and returns with a group of people, then says to the clerk, "Okay, I was in a movie with an extra, Eunice, whose hairdresser, Wayne, attended Sunday school with Father O'Neill, who plays racquetball with Dr. Sanjay, who recently removed the appendix of Kim, who dumped you sophomore year. So you see, we're practically brothers."

The concept was also presented in an episode of the TV show Mad About You
Mad About You
Mad About You is an American sitcom that aired on NBC from September 23, 1992 to May 24, 1999. The show starred Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt as a newly married couple in New York City. Reiser played Paul Buchman, a documentary film maker. Hunt played Jamie Stemple Buchman, a public relations specialist...

dated November 19, 1996 in which a character expressed the opinion that every actor is only three degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. Bacon spoofed the concept himself in a cameo he performed for the independent film, We Married Margo
We Married Margo
We Married Margo is a 2000 American independent comedy film directed by J. David Shapiro and co-written by Shapiro and William Dozier. The film tells a story of two friends who were married to the same woman and is loosely based on real events in that Shapiro and Dozier actually met after dating...

.

The October 30, 2002 headline of The Onion

The Onion

The Onion is an American news satire organization. It is an entertainment newspaper and a website featuring satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news, in addition to a non-satirical entertainment section known as The A.V. Club...

, a satirical newspaper, is "Kevin Bacon Linked To Al-Qaeda".

Bacon provides the voice-over commentary for the NY Skyride attraction in the Empire State Building

Empire State Building

The Empire State Building is a 102-story landmark skyscraper and American cultural icon in New York City at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street. It has a roof height of 1,250 feet , and with its antenna spire included, it stands a total of 1,454 ft high. Its name is derived...

in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. At several points throughout the commentary, Bacon alludes to his connections to Hollywood stars via other actors with whom he has worked.

In 2009, Bacon narrated a National Geographic Channel

National Geographic Channel

National Geographic Channel, also commercially abbreviated and trademarked as Nat Geo, is a subscription television channel that airs non-fiction television programs produced by the National Geographic Society. Like History and the Discovery Channel, the channel features documentaries with factual...

show 'The Human Family Tree' – a program charting the work of the Genographic Project and their work on the genetic interconnectedness of all humans.

In 2011, James Franco made reference to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon while hosting the 83rd Annual Academy Awards.

Bacon numbers

The Bacon number of an actor

Actor

An actor is a person who acts in a dramatic production and who works in film, television, theatre, or radio in that capacity...

or actress is the number of degrees of separation he or she has from Bacon, as defined by the game. This is an application of the Erdős number

Erdos number

The Erdős number describes the "collaborative distance" between a person and mathematician Paul Erdős, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers.The same principle has been proposed for other eminent persons in other fields.- Overview :...

concept to the Hollywood movie industry. The higher the Bacon number, the farther away from Kevin Bacon the actor is.

The computation of a Bacon number for actor X is a "shortest path

Shortest path problem

In graph theory, the shortest path problem is the problem of finding a path between two vertices in a graph such that the sum of the weights of its constituent edges is minimized...

" algorithm

Algorithm

In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is an effective method expressed as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning...

Kevin Bacon himself has a Bacon number of 0.
Those actors who have worked directly with Kevin Bacon have a Bacon number of 1.
If the lowest Bacon number of any actor with whom X has appeared in a movie is N, X's Bacon number is N + 1.

Here is an example, using Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley

Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....

Elvis Presley was in Change of Habit
Change of Habit
Change of Habit is a 1969 musical drama film starring Elvis Presley and Mary Tyler Moore. It was Presley's 31st and final film acting role; his remaining two film appearances were concert documentaries. It was also Moore's fourth and final film under her brief Universal Pictures contract; she...

(1969) with Edward Asner
Edward Asner was in JFK
JFK (film)
JFK is a 1991 American film directed by Oliver Stone. It examines the events leading to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and alleged subsequent cover-up, through the eyes of former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison .Garrison filed charges against New Orleans businessman Clay...

(1991) with Kevin Bacon

Therefore Asner has a Bacon number of 1, and Presley (who never appeared in a film with Bacon himself) has a Bacon number of 2.

, the highest finite Bacon number reported by the Oracle of Bacon is 8.

Because some people have both Bacon and Erdős numbers due to acting and publications, there are a rare few who have an Erdős–Bacon number, which is defined as the sum of a person's independent Erdős and Bacon numbers.

Undefined Bacon numbers

A small proportion of actors have an undefined Bacon number, meaning that they cannot be linked to Bacon in any number of connections at all. According to the Oracle of Bacon website approximately 12% of all actors cannot be linked to Bacon using its criteria, but this number is difficult to verify.

Center of the Hollywood Universe

While at the University of Virginia

University of Virginia

The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...

, Brett Tjaden created the Oracle of Bacon, a computer program that uses information on some 800,000 people from the Internet Movie Database

Internet Movie Database

Internet Movie Database is an online database of information related to movies, television shows, actors, production crew personnel, video games and fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. It is one of the most popular online entertainment destinations, with over 100 million...

(IMDb). The algorithm calculates "how good a center" an individual IMDb personality is, i.e. a weighted average

Weighted mean

The weighted mean is similar to an arithmetic mean , where instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others...

of the degree of separation of all the people that link to that particular person. The site returns an average personality number, i.e. for Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood

Clinton "Clint" Eastwood, Jr. is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and politician. Eastwood first came to prominence as a supporting cast member in the TV series Rawhide...

, it returns an average "Clint Eastwood Number." From there the Oracle site posits "The Center of the Hollywood Universe" as being the person with the lowest average personality number. Kevin Bacon, as it turns out, is not the "Center of the Hollywood Universe" (i.e. the most linkable actor). In fact, Bacon does not even make the top 100 list of average personality numbers. While he is not the most linkable actor, this still signifies being a better center than more than 99% of the people who have ever appeared in a film. Since each actor's average personality number can change with each new film made, the center can and does shift. "Centers" have included Rod Steiger

Rod Steiger

Rodney Stephen "Rod" Steiger was an Academy Award-winning American actor known for his performances in such films as On the Waterfront, The Big Knife, Oklahoma!, The Harder They Fall, Across the Bridge, The Pawnbroker, Doctor Zhivago, In the Heat of the Night, and Waterloo as well as the...

, Donald Sutherland

Donald Sutherland

Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...

and Dennis Hopper

Dennis Hopper

Dennis Lee Hopper was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. As a young man, Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors' Studio. He made his first television appearance in 1954 and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant...

(the current center). Karen Black

Karen Black

Karen Black is an American actress, screenwriter, singer, and songwriter. She is noted for appearing in such films as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Great Gatsby, Rhinoceros, The Day of the Locust, Nashville, Airport 1975, and Alfred Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot...

is the current and all time highest woman in the list.

Photography book

Inspired by the game, the British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

photographer Andy Gotts

Andy Gotts

Andy Gotts is a celebrity photographer from London, England. He is most noted for his black and white portraits of Hollywood actors.Gotts' work has been published internationally and has appeared in many magazines; GQ, Empire, FHM, Total Film, Stern, French Vogue, Glamour, El Mundo, OK Salute!, io...

tried to reach Bacon through photographic links instead of film links. He wrote to 300 actors asking to take their pictures, and received permission from one, Joss Ackland

Joss Ackland

Sidney Edmond Jocelyn Ackland CBE , known as Joss Ackland, is an English actor who has appeared in more than 130 films and numerous television roles.-Early life:...

. Ackland then suggested that Gotts photograph Greta Scacchi

Greta Scacchi

Greta Scacchi is an Italian-Australian actor.-Early life:Scacchi was born Greta Gracco in Milan, Italy, on 18 February 1960, the daughter of Luca Scacchi Gracco, an Italian art dealer and painter, and Pamela Carsaniga, an English dancer and antiques dealer...

, with whom he had appeared in the film White Mischief
White Mischief
White Mischief is a 1987 film dramatising the events of the Happy Valley murder case in Kenya in 1941, when Sir Henry "Jock" Delves Broughton was tried for the murder of Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll....

. Gotts proceeded from there, asking each actor to refer him to one or more friends or colleagues. Eventually, Christian Slater

Christian Slater

Christian Michael Leonard Slater is an American actor. He made his film debut with a small role in The Postman Always Rings Twice before playing a leading role in the 1985 film The Legend of Billie Jean...

referred him to Bacon. Gotts' photograph of Bacon completed the project, eight years after it began. Gotts published the photos in a book, Degrees (ISBN 0-9546843-6-2), with text by Alan Bates

Alan Bates

Sir Alan Arthur Bates CBE was an English actor, who came to prominence in the 1960s, a time of high creativity in British cinema, when he demonstrated his versatility in films ranging from the popular children’s story Whistle Down the Wind to the "kitchen sink" drama A Kind of Loving...

, Pierce Brosnan

Pierce Brosnan

Pierce Brendan Brosnan, OBE is an Irish actor, film producer and environmentalist. After leaving school at 16, Brosnan began training in commercial illustration, but trained at the Drama Centre in London for three years...

, and Bacon.

External links

Find The Bacon - is a site built for finding the connections between actors and the movies they have played in.
Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg - Suggests that Bacon connects to many actors because he acts in many different kinds of roles and films.
The Oracle of Bacon computes the Bacon number of any actor or actress from IMDb data
Cinema FreeNet Movie Connector finds links between stars, but can also use directors and producers.
Another oracle of Bacon type game by a computer science student