Center of The Hollywood Universe
While at the University of Virginia, Brett Tjaden created the Oracle of Bacon, a computer program that uses information on some 800,000 people from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). The algorithm calculates "how good a center" an individual IMDb personality is, i.e. a weighted average of the degree of separation of all the people that link to that particular person. The site returns an average personality number, e.g. for Clint Eastwood, 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, Donald Sutherland and Dennis Hopper (the current center). Karen Black is the current and all-time highest woman in the list.
Read more about this topic: Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon
Famous quotes containing the words center of the, center of, center, hollywood and/or universe:
“Placing the extraordinary at the center of the ordinary, as realism does, is a great comfort to us stay-at-homes.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Actually being married seemed so crowded with unspoken rules and odd secrets and unfathomable responsibilities that it had no more occurred to her to imagine being married herself than it had to imagine driving a motorcycle or having a job. She had, however, thought about being a bride, which had more to do with being the center of attention and looking inexplicably, temporarily beautiful than it did with sharing a double bed with someone with hairy legs and a drawer full of boxer shorts.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“I am the center of the world, but the control panel seems to be somewhere else.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If New York is the Big Apple, tonight Hollywood is the Big Nipple.”
—Bernardo Bertolucci (b. 1940)
“In his comprehensive delight in all experience Dickens resembles Walt Whitman, but he was innocent of that nebulous transcendentalism that blurred Whitman’s universe into vast misty panoramas and left him, for all his huge democratic vistas, unable to tell a story or paint a single concrete human being.”
—Edgar Johnson (1912–1990)