The “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game, where one tries to connect any given actor to Kevin Bacon by means of naming a chain of actors who have worked together, is obviously in increasing trouble given the lagging film career of Kevin Bacon. The game emerged in the mid-1990s as a riff on both his ubiquity and tendency to appear in movies with ensemble casts. However, these days we have slightly more elaborate movie databases and software with which to ingest them, and can now figure out a statistic for an actor that measures the network importance of both the actor as well as recursively their own network. So who’s the real center of Hollywood? Samuel L. Jackson, with an eigenvector centrality of 0.091, followed by Robert De Niro (0.09), Morgan Freeman (0.089) and Bruce Willis (0.082). Bacon is ranked No. 64.
Comments