Saturday, July 07, 2007

Kevin Bacon's Got Nothing on Tina

A long, long time ago, when Kevin Bacon was still one of the guys in Animal House or someone you may have seen in Diner, I met Tina. Tina was my college roommate. Complete strangers when we first met on a hot August day, we soon discovered we both had a fondness for laughing until it hurt and that we found the same things amusing. We ended up rooming and laughing together for four years.

Tina is someone who could have written all the questions and answers for the "Silver Screen Edition" of Trivial Pursuit. This is a game I would never choose to play with her unless she were on my team. In all honesty, though, it’s a game I would never choose to play. I am a complete movie illiterate, the kind of person who’d never seen such film greats as West Side Story or The Graduate until I’d met Tina, and she started a somewhat hopeless period of educating Emily, taking me to see many, many classic films that were shown on the university grounds during our tenure there. Poor Tina. She was the Queen of Classic Movies stuck with a roommate who would announce something like “An Officer and a Gentleman is the most romantic movie I’ve ever seen.” I still remember her astonished response to that, “Oh, Emily! You haven’t even seen Casablanca?!” (A lapse that was fixed as soon as we were able, not an easy task in the days when VCRs were only just coming onto the market, and DVDs were just somebody's pipe dream.)

Tina is the one who invented what is now called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." It wasn’t his idea. Don’t believe Wikipedia, which will tell you this game was first being played on college campuses in the early 1990s. I had long since graduated from college by then. This was Tina’s game, and I’m still upset that Kevin Bacon is getting all the credit, even more so because she played it in a more interesting way (not being egotistically focused on herself). As a matter of fact, I never actually played the game. What I did was watch her play it. We all did.

Tina’s goal was not to have six degrees of separation, but to make it fun, to make it long and complicated. She poohed-poohed stars who could be linked in less than six movies. She wanted stumpers, those that obviously required a PhD in film knowledge, and we all wanted to come up with one she couldn’t solve, to discover the only two actors or actresses who could not be linked through their movies and their co-stars. I’d try to stump her (the first-grader pitted against the PhD) by coming up with such winners as Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Most of my choices would elicit rolled eyes, and an “Oh, that’s so easy, Emily,” as within a minute, she’d have linked the stars with three movies.

Others (those who were at least at the twelfth-grade level) would give her really good, chewy near-stumpers. She’d think about them for a long time. She’d puzzle over them. She’d assure us she’d eventually get it. We’d all forget about it. We’d think she’d forgotten about it. Then suddenly, just as we were turning off the light to go to bed, she’d say, “I’ve got it,” and would proceed to reel off a list of ten movies, most of which I’d never heard of, that connected the stars. Of course, I was so ignorant, she could easily have just made up movies, but Tina’s not that kind of person.

Tina and I were talking the other day (I’m all excited because with this move to PA, I’m going to be within a very easy drive of where she lives instead of a six-hour-long drive), and we were reminiscing about her game. Well, we weren’t actually reminiscing so much as I was informing her how pissed I am that Mr. Bacon is getting all the credit for her game. She remembers that my boyfriend at the time almost did stump her once by throwing out Leonard Nimoy with someone, just the sort of obnoxious thing he would have done. Thank God she bested him, or we never would have heard the end of it.

I didn’t remember that near-stumper of his, but I was laughing (we still laugh!) about how I was always thinking I’d come up with some clever choices like Madonna and John Wayne, and she’d tell me they were way too easy. Well, wouldn’t you know, she’s still got it? We went on to discuss many, many other things, and just before we hung up the phone, she said to me,

“Oh, and I did this one quickly. Madonna was in Dick Tracy with Warren Beatty. Warren Beatty was in Splendor in the Grass with Natalie Wood. And Natalie Wood was in this old John Ford movie called The Searchers with John Wayne.” Eat your heart out, Kevin Bacon. I’m wondering, though, if by the time we’re 80, I’ll finally manage to come up with one that’s more than three “degrees.”



Aeschylus in a nutshell: made me wish so badly we had managed to salvage everything he wrote. If you haven’t read him since you were in school, I promise he’s worth re-reading, although very depressing to realize we human beings haven’t changed much in all these years. Also, I prefer the ones that aren’t so focused on war, like Prometheus Bound.

21 comments:

Rebecca said...

The Oresteia completely rocks. I don't think anything else in Greek tragedy (the main tragedy being how few plays are extant) even comes close.

Anonymous said...

Kendall and I hereby challenge Tina to the Silver Screen Edition of Trivial Pursuit. My earliest motivation to learn to read, after all, was so I could understand the closing credits on my favorite cartoons!

Here's a challenge for you and Tina, with a gay-tinged theme in honor of L.A.'s recent Pride Weekend: how many degrees between Cher and Judy Garland? (Okay, it's not that hard, and there are several ways to get there.)

Anonymous said...

How about ZaSu Pitts and Brad Pitt?

Anonymous said...

ZASU PITTS was in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" with Mickey Rooney. Rooney was in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" with Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn was in "The Children's Hour" with Shirley MacLaine. MacLaine was in "Terms of Endearment" with Tom Skerritt. Skerrit was in "A River Runs Through It" playing the father of BRAD PITT.

Emily Barton said...

Becky, I was going to go on to read other tragedies, but now that you've mentioned it, I think I'll skip those and move onto comedy. Aristophanes was one of my all-time favorite reads when I was in college. Can't wait to see if I still feel that way.

Danny, funny. As I was writing this post, I ahd the thought, "Tina and Danny would get along famously." We'll have to all come to L.A., (or you and Kendall will have to come to PA) where I'll watch everyone play the Silver Screen Edition. (I'll leave Cher and Judy Garland up to her.)

Hobs, see Danny's answer below. Never could have done it myself.

Rebecca H. said...

I'm a film illiterate too, Emily, and would never, ever play this game ... very cool that you are enjoying the Greek drama!

Anonymous said...

Danny--awesome!

litlove said...

I simply could not play this game with film - I've seen about 10 films and most of them were intended for children. It might be fun to alter the rules a bit and play it with books, however.

Tina said...

Hi Danny,
Although I've been doing chains since high school, Emily is being a bit generous when speaking about my movie knowledge. I know there's a lot I don't know. I do have your Cher and Judy Garland link though, and I promise I made my connections before I saw yours. Judy was in the Andy Hardy films with Mickey Rooney who was in Breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn, who was in The Children's Hour with Shirley MacLaine, who was in Steel Magnolias with Olympia Dukakis, who was in Moonstruck with Cher.

Tina

Emily Barton said...

Dorr, we'll have to see some movies together sometime, and, Litlove, you can join Dorr and me when we do. Meanwhile, I bet we'd all three be good at some sort of book version of the game.

Tina, you're being too modest. Anyone who can invent such a game knows much more than your Average Joe, but Danny just might be the only person in the world who could give you a run for your money.

mandarine said...

I am sure the actor chain algorithm can be automated. First, make a filmography crawling engine (a little google that only looks for filmographies on the web). Then fill a database with all the filmographies. Then build relationship graphs and a fast quizz-solving algorithm (I am sure a keen math or computer science student could do that in the blink of an eye).
This would make a very popular quizz website where people get to enter the names of the actor pair, and can ask the shortest reply from the server when they think they have it.
I am too lazy to do it, but it could be fun (and finding funding should be 'easy').

IM said...

Wow, there are some serious movie buffs in your circle Emily. I wouldn't be very good at this game either, but I might be able to try a variation using popular music. Good to here about Tina again.

Emily Barton said...

Mandarine, only YOU amongst my blogging buddies would come up with the computer answer to the game.

Ian, so maybe we ought to take Mandarine's idea and all make a fortune, broadening it to author connections and band-member connections. It could be a game that people play against the computer, in which the player tries to come up with the computer's number of "degrees." There could probably be a sports component, too, connecting players through teams on which they played.

mandarine said...

My Grandpa always says: when you have a brilliant idea, always ask yourself why nobody thought of it before. If you cannot answer that question, there is a high probability that it has already been done.

Alas! In this case, he is right. Check http://oracleofbacon.org for the original game. There is also http://www.cinfn.com/ for linking any two actors. And there is http://www.bandtoband.com/ for music. I could not find a site for literature and writers, though; so there is still hope we can be pioneers on something, although I doubt the funding aspects (and the associated fortune) could be as obvious.

Emily Barton said...

Your grandfather must have been a very wise man, Mandarine. And in the case of connecting books and authors, there's the other answer to that question, which we ask ourselves all the time in the publishing world: if it's never been done, there's a good chance nobody wants it, so you need to either a. find out if anyone does or b. create a "need" for it.

IM said...

I meant to write hear, not here in my comment. It's a little mistake, but I seem to be making them more often: there/their etc.

mandarine said...

He still is.

Emily Barton said...

Ian, I didn't even notice. Meanwhile, I'm making such huge mistakes as putting poor Mandarine's grandfather in his grave before his time!

Froshty said...

I could ask my friend Julio if he could write a literature/authors algorithm. He's good at those. Anyway, my lack of film knowledge is a secret shame of mine, since my major was Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures. If you name a film, it's likely that I have not seen it. By the way, what about Lou Diamond Phillips and Julie Andrews?

Tina said...

The fun of the game is that you can approach it anyway you like, and as I was telling Emily, my memory isn't what it used to be, so I may have to backtrack and go a different way. I can't resist making a link so here are two variations for Lou Diamond Phillips and Julie Andrews.

1. Lou Diamond was in "La Bamba" with Esai Morales, who was in "Bad Boys" with Sean Penn, who was in "Dead Man Walking" with Susan Sarandon, who was in "The Banger Sisters" with Goldie Hawn, who was in "Foul Play" with Dudley Moore, who was in "10" with Julie Andrews.
2. Lou Diamond Phillips was in "Courage Under Fire" with Meg Ryan, who was in "Sleepless in Seattle" with Bill Pullman, who was in "While You Were Sleeping" with Sandra Bullock, who was in the "Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood" with James Garner, who was in "The Americanization of Emily" with Julie Andrews.

Emily Barton said...

I'm telling you, you can't beat Tina! And, Tina, believe it or not, I've actually seen The Americanization of Emily, which 'd bet most people haven't, because I was introduced a few years back by a friend to the hilarious Joyce Grenfell through audiotapes of hers, and this was the only movie she was in that I could find at our library.