Six Reasons Why It Had To Be Kevin Bacon

It’s been twenty years this spring since three Albright College students invented “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” and the game is still going strong. And why not? Its premise — that anyone in the movie business could be linked to Bacon in six or less steps — is brilliant in its snarky simplicity. And with the advent of such websites as IMDB.com, it’s only become simpler. But why Kevin Bacon? Sure, in 1994 he declared to the now-defunct Premiere magazine that he’d “worked with everybody in Hollywood or someone who’s worked with them.” But even if he hadn’t made that claim, it’s hard to imagine this game built around any other ubiquitous actor. “Six Degrees of Toni Collette?” Ho hum. “Six Degrees of James Franco?” Way too meta. “Six Degrees of Woody Harrelson?” Yikes. No, it had to be Bacon, a man as appealing and accessible as the foodstuff that shares his name.  For Word and Film, I outline six reasons why We Need To Talk About Kevin.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy