I have a Bacon Number of 2.
What is a Bacon Number? Let’s back up.
There is a theory that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. It’s called the Six Handshakes Rule or Six Degrees of Separation. There’s no real science behind it, but it’s an accepted factoid and may as well be true.
Kevin Bacon is in a ton of movies. More than 65. He’s no Eric Roberts, who has been in over 400 movies, but he’s been in a lot. The idea is that all Hollywood actors have 6 or fewer degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.
In the 90s, Kevin Bacon mentioned in an interview that he worked with everybody in Hollywood. Soon the group “Kevin Bacon is the Center of the Universe1” appeared online. Later, some college students in the group invented a game called “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” after watching two Bacon movies back to back. The students appeared on The Jon Stewart Show and The Howard Stern Show with Bacon to explain the concept and got a little fame. They wrote a book and later a board game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, both which you can still buy today.
Originally Bacon was really annoyed with this, but came around and even wrote the intro to the book. He also set up the Six Degrees charity.
If you look at my IMDB page, I only have one credit. It credits me as a producer because I fed the crew one day. I actually also had a bit role in the film but it’s not listed. My role had no lines and I got shot in the head.
But that’s not how I got my Bacon Number, that’s just a humble brag. I actually got my Bacon Number from a teacher’s conference. The presenter was a 3D animator and explained the Bacon Number concept to us. He told us that he worked on a film with Kevin Bacon, so he had a Bacon number of 1. Then he made the cameraman turn the camera on us and told everyone there that they now have a Bacon Number of 2.
That’s how I got my Bacon number.