What Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Can Tell You About Connections
Working in any creative industry is always a balancing act. If you want to keep working, you need to be making connections and building a solid reputation among the people you work with. You need to always be aware of who knows whom and how everyone is interconnected. Inevitably, whenever this conversation arises the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game gets brought up which makes sense since it’s the perfect metaphor for how connections work in the real world of “The Biz.”
The game is simple. It’s predicated on the fact that everyone is interconnected due to who they know. Kevin Bacon is the example in the game. He’s been in so many films and television programs that it’s very easy to link him to another celebrity. ANY celebrity. They key being you need to be able to do it in six moves or less. Let’s start with Kevin Bacon and Morgan Freeman.
Kevin Bacon was in A Few Good Men with Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise was in Oblivion with Morgan Freeman. Two steps.
That’s a pretty simple one. Let’s try it again, this time with Kevin Spacey.
Kevin Bacon with with Brad Pitt in Sleepers. Brad Pitt was in The Usual Suspects with Kevin Spacey. Again, that’s in two steps.
The point to take away here is that everyone is only six degrees of separation away from you at all times. The connected nature of Hollywood can be both a reassuring fact and an admonition against souring your relationships. Stay in the ecosystem long enough and you’ll connect with just the person you need to connect with to get that screenplay sold, take a risk on an unconventional concept for a pilot, or land a job working for your favorite director.
Thanks to the internet and especially social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, now everyone can connect with virtually everyone else. Our connections are connected to other people who are connected to yet other people. Just count the number of connections between you and someone else in your city. You can probably get there within six steps. At least part of the beauty of our hyper-connected world is the fact that the people en masse have tremendous power to champion and spread the word about the films and television shows they enjoy. Stranger Things, the breakout Netflix hit that’s got the Tweet-o-sphere aflutter with memes and YouTube full of spoofs, was passed on by 20 different networks, yes that’s right 20 different networks before it found a home with Netflix.
Making films, music, podcasts, plays, or anything creative is hard. It just is. Especially in mediums where you need other people. In today’s interconnected landscape it’s getting easier and easier to connect with the people you need to connect with. So, if you’ve got a project that’s near and dear to your heart, know how you’re doing to talk to about it to others. You really never know who knows whom, so aim to always make a good impression and develope your pitch so that it sounds natural, engaging, and communicates all the best aspects of your project.
When you’re first starting out, connections are vital. As you continue in the business, you’ll come to depend on your connections and those of your friends and colleagues as a means to get things done quickly and efficiently. So, value and nuture the relationships you make and take care not to burn bridges. Creative differences on one project might mean you and a collaborator part ways on one film but flashforward a year and you may find that those differences a tremendous boon rather than a liability on some crazy, cultish webseries.
Really value and nurture the connections that you build because those people have connections and so on and so forth. The long and short of it is that you never know who is going to lead you where. It’s so important when you’re first getting into any creative field not to overlook any potential pathway. Keep all those potential career inroads open and engage, work, and make positive impressions and connections just as much as you can. Get on the road and blaze a trail to where you want to go.
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