HOT Movies

You probably heard of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. The
objective is to find a way to get from any actor to Kevin Bacon in six
steps or less. For example, Sean Connery has a Bacon number of 2
(Sean Connery was in Wrong Is Right with Myron Natwick, who was in
Cavedweller with Kevin Bacon). That’s possible because Kevin Bacon
stars in a whole lot of movies. But is he really the center of
Hollywood?
I tried to find out if Kevin Bacon’s network is indeed as dense as the
Six Degrees game suggests. And of course, I used Google for that.
Here’s what I did, and you can try the same; I picked a list of 50
random famous actors, including Kevin Bacon, and searched Google
trying to find out if any two of the actors on the list were in a movie
together. Of course, this isn’t statistical correct proof. But it’s fun.
Here’s an example of a search query:
“Sean Connery and Julia Roberts” OR “Julia Roberts and Sean Connery” -degrees
This will return all pages with either the first or second phrase in them.
(I exclude pages with the word “degrees” because I don’t want to hit
on pages where people played the Six Degrees game, as that would
give Kevin Bacon an unfair advantage.) Whenever over 500 results
have been found, I will count this as a “hit.”
The following map shows all hits combined into a social network1.
Some actors of the 50 I included in the game actually didn’t make the
list because they had no connection at all – like Humphrey Bogart.
What does the map show? For one thing, that Kevin Bacon is not the
center of the Hollywood universe – at least not using this (nonrepresentative)
sample. Instead, Julia Roberts, Johnny Depp and Tom
Cruise seem to be the most connected. On the other hand, you can
also see that it’s easy for almost everyone on the list to get to Kevin
Bacon in six steps or less.