The Science of Rant Monday, March 21, 2005

For those of you not familiar with "Rant," it's a party-game version of the old "Back to Bacon" thing, where you link actors who appeared in movies together until you get to Kevin Bacon. In "Rant" (or at least the version my friends and I have played), you start with Steve Buscemi and link movies to actors to movies and then see who gets stumped first.

Well I'm happy to report that a band of geeks has gotten this thing down to a science. The The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia links any actor to Kevin Bacon, and this variant links any actor to any other. Even more interesting (if you think things like this are interesting) is their analysis in Who is the Center of the Hollywood Universe? Here they show by statistical analysis that Mr. Bacon isn't even in the top 1000 best candidates, but Harvey Keitel is #5.