Now Google helps you play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Type into the Google search box “Bacon number” and the name of someone from the movies and you get that person’s Bacon number. I typed in “Bacon number Humphrey Bogart”, and this is what I got:
Humphrey Bogart’s Bacon number is 3
Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre appeared in Casablanca.
Peter Lorre and Jack Nicholson appeared in The Raven.
Jack Nicholson and Kevin Bacon appeared in A Few Good Men.
Just about everyone who is working in films today has a Bacon number of 1 or 2, so I tried to confound the system with Fatty Arbuckle, whose movie career was killed by a scandal in 1921, and I got:
Roscoe Arbuckle’s Bacon number is 3
Roscoe Arbuckle and Buster Keaton appeared in Coney Island.
Buster Keaton and Patty McCormack appeared in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Patty McCormack and Kevin Bacon appeared in Frost/Nixon.
Next, I tried Warrren William, the King of Pre-Code from the early 1930s.
Warren William’s Bacon number is 3
Warren William and Henry Wilcoxon appeared in Cleopatra.
Henry Wilcoxon and Bill Murray appeared in Caddyshack.
Bill Murray and Kevin Bacon appeared in Wild Things.
Amazingly, these people each have a Bacon number of only 2: Klaus Kinski, Margaret Hamilton (The Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz), John Wayne, Marcello Mastroianni, Mary Badham (Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird), Melina Mercouri, Francois Cluzet, Gloria Grahame, Raymond Burr, Woody Strode, Vivien Leigh and Bob Dylan. The highest known Bacon number is 7, held by William Rufus Shafter. This is an AWESOME time-waster! Love it! Thanks, Google!
Yes, this is what every wife wants to read — “This is an AWESOME time-waster! Love it! Thanks, Google!”
When you perform the Kevin Bacon search with Vivian Leigh you get incorrect results. Vivian Leigh nor was Donald Sutherland in
War wagon. Something is clearly wrong with algrorithm to associate Vivian Leigh with Kevin Bacon. In fact Vivian Leigh’s last film was Ship of Fools in 1964.