William Shakespeare (left), Robert De Niro (middle), and Miles Long (right). Headshots from IMDB.com

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Who is the most important person in the film industry?

Network analysis using IMDB data

Steve Hedden
8 min readAug 29, 2019

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Kevin Bacon once said that he “had worked with everybody in Hollywood or someone who’s worked with them,” which led to the parlor game “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” along with various parodies, ads, boardgames, talk show appearances, and even the charity ‘SixDegrees.org’. The game consists of trying to connect an actor to Kevin Bacon through shared films with other actors, within six connections. For example, Nicolas Cage was in Adaptation with Meryl Streep who was in The River Wild with Kevin Bacon (2 degrees separated meaning Nicolas Cage has a “Bacon Number” of two). There are also various online resources, like The Oracle of Bacon, to calculate an actor’s “Bacon Number”.

Nicolas Cage is two degrees separated from Kevin Bacon, meaning Nicolas Cage has a “Bacon Number” of 2. Nodes (or vertices) in blue and links (or edges) in orange — explained in more detail below.

But is Kevin Bacon the ‘most connected’ or “most important” person in the film industry? To answer this question, I downloaded the entire IMDB database. This is a rich dataset (like over 3.6 million people in over 5.1 million titles dating back to 1894 rich) and once you start “extracting the network” from this data it gets huge. By “extracting the network” data I just mean that we are interested in not just the people and the movies…

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

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Steve Hedden
Steve Hedden

Written by Steve Hedden

Product management, international development, data science and network analysis.

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