The Fairfield Film Festival

Six Degrees of Connection: What's Your Bacon Number?

BY JOHN SORFLATEN

The folks in Fairfield, Iowa (population 9,404), wanted their third annual film festival (February 2-4, 2007) to show The Fairfield Connection to “the entertaining universe.” What hope did this rural Iowa community possibly have? Plenty, it turns out. Let’s see how they did it.

Aiming High

First, they hoped to get their own town native, Ben Foster, to come. Yes, the Ben Foster of X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) fame. Ben played the boy with angel wings.

In fact, Ben found his acting self when going to grade school in Fairfield, which at the time was home to four community theaters. By age 12, Ben had starred in a play he wrote and directed and that won second place in an international competition. But the Fairfield folks couldn’t get Ben to come home for the festival. He was too busy.

Soap Star Turned Director

In making the connection to Ben, an organizer spoke to Vicki Alexander, who said her brother, Wally Kurth, was an actor on the soap opera General Hospital (he’s played ruthless businessman Ned Ashton since 1991).

They found out that Wally had just finished a feature-length documentary, Class C, about a Montana girls’ basketball team that started in the cellar and, after a precipitous emotional climb, ended up vying for a playoff berth among the final 8 out of 91 teams. Now, Wally Kurth was a Fairfield connection worth crowing about.

I Know Neil

Needing more films for the festival, the organizers explored their friendship with actor cum futon and furniture store owner Neil Brooks Cunningham, who had moved to Fairfield in 1990.

Neil had a successful New York acting career, studying under Lee Strasberg for 16 years. Neil’s fellow students included Shelley Winters, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Dustin Hoffman, Eli Wallach, Robert DeNiro, and Jane Fonda.

What could the festival show of Neil’s work? Well, he worked mostly on stage and taught acting, but he had bit parts in Alice’s Restaurant (1969), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), and Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232 (1992), among other films. All grist for the film festival. 

Even more, Neil had starred in several local Fairfield productions over the years, like The Retreat (2006), a 30-minute short for which he won best actor in the 2006 Wild Rose Film Festival in Des Moines. That movie captures the humor of seeking the Zen-like freedom of “letting go” amidst the frustrations of practical living. Interestingly, this world-weary saga was written and produced by four young post-college guys from Fairfield, out of which Zac Sluser won best director at the same film festival.

Gen Y Not?

And then, in what the organizers called A Gen Y (Not) Film Adventure, Zac also could show his latest 20-minute epic, Who You Know, about the ethical challenges of making it in the business cum financial world. Zac even used some Hollywood actors he had bumped into while working in Los Angeles. Now, this is where it gets interesting and shows Zac’s hutzpah in making connections.

The Six Degrees Phenomenon

You see, mathematical wags and sociology research teamed up to explore the small-world phenomenon of random relationships that gave rise to the famous play Six Degrees of Separation. You can see that 1993 movie on DVD, if you want. It explores the impact of a chance relationship on a married couple. Their superficial lives as art dealers take a turn for the positive upon interacting with a young con artist, played by Will Smith.

Well, this notion of a small world is all based on Stanley Milgrom’s 1967 sociological research into the number of “hand-offs” needed to connect any two people. Milgrom counted the transfers used to move an important document from a randomly chosen citizen of the U.S. Midwest to a target person via a friend or friend of a friend. In the earlier research, that target was a particular stockbroker halfway across the U.S.

Milgrom’s subsequent research indicated six as the average number of intermediaries—“six degrees of separation”—between any two ends of the chain.

Enter Kevin Bacon

Funnily enough, in 1994 four college students in Reading, PA, saw a TV commercial with Kevin Bacon. They wondered how many actors Bacon had worked with, creating a game of sorts in which people—including Kevin Bacon—would trace the sequence of relations between any two actors.

During one Will & Grace TV episode, Bacon (playing himself) was asked, “You did a movie with Val Kilmer?” Kevin replied: “No, but Val was in Top Gun with Tom Cruise, and Tom was in A Few Good Men with me.”

You can find a website that gives you the same information called the “Bacon number.” Check out http://oracleofbacon.org at the University of Virginia Computer Science website. Now, given this website, the Fairfield organizers checked out how the small-world phenomenon applied to Fairfield connections.

Let’s see: Neil Brooks Cunningham turns out to have a Bacon number of 3. Neil was in Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986) with Leland Sun. Leland was in Joshua Tree (1993) with Beau Starr. And Beau was in Where the Truth Lies (2005) with Kevin!

Let’s try some more. Zac’s last movie Who You Know has the following players, with these Bacon numbers: Alice Evans (2), Mews Small (2), Ann-Marie Egre (3), and Tom Irwin (2).

Is Fairfield connected to Big Entertainment? Looks like it.

Let’s try some more.

The Random Element

But, wait—in reading about the small-world phenomena, I found Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz at Cornell University, who figured that networks, like power grids or neural networks, benefit from adding a small number of random links. These additions reduce the path length between any two points in the network, making it more resistant to disruptions.

Additional linkages—even random ones—help explain the increased coordination within a network of activity. They got this idea from Watt’s mathematical exploration of how cricket chirps in a large group get synchronized. This happens even over long distances that otherwise prevent the crickets from hearing their comrades at the other end of the moon-lit field.

So it’s “the strength of weak ties” that holds together social networks, according to Mark Granovetter, author of Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers.  It’s not what you know, but “who you know.”

Oops, that’s also the title of Zach’s last short movie that we mentioned above.

In any event (and this is a festival event of growing proportions), the Fairfield people still needed more movies for their weekend splash.

Leigh Badgley’s Greenpeace Film

So they brought in Leigh Badgley, a local girl who left in 1995 to make documentaries in Vancouver. Since then, she’s done 30 of them, with many award winners. Leigh’s big in Canadian documentaries now. Her latest, Greenpeace: Making a Stand, earned a seven-minute standing ovation from the World Peace Forum.

Guess what? Leigh photographed legendary filmmaker David Lynch at his Hollywood Hills home in a short promotional film, Building a Legacy of Permanent Peace, that she produced for the Transcendental Meditation organization in 2003.

David Lynch in a Coffeehouse

It turns out that David Lynch has a Bacon number of 2. This, plus the fact that Leigh appears at least in a production photograph with Lynch, gives her a Bacon number of 3. Not bad for a latecomer to show business.

By the way, Lynch visited Revelations, a local Fairfield coffee shop, about four weeks before the Fairfield Connection Film Festival date. Julie Stephens, the proprietor (along with her two sisters and mom), asked him to show a movie at the festival. Lynch said, “Anything Julie wants, Julie gets.”

So the festival promoters now claim “a first public showing” of one of his short films, “The Cowboy and the Frenchman,” a parody of the French view of Americans—or is it an American view of the French? Lynch, the auteur, mystifies us, which is his intent in all his movies.

So, the organizers guess that Julie now has a Bacon number of 3, too, since she brought Lynch into the Fairfield picture so readily.

Let’s get back to Wally Kurth of General Hospital and his girl-basketball documentary, Class C. Remember to type in “Wallace” into the Oracle of Bacon website, not “Wally.” Because that’s the only way you’ll find that Kurth’s Bacon number is 2. And that’s because he appeared in Why Love Doesn’t Work (2001) with Andrea Bendwald and she was in Picture Perfect (1997) with Kevin Bacon. Looks like Vicki’s connection through her brother paid off. 

You know, this left our Fairfield organizers only one or two more challenges in connecting the dots between their cause-celebres and the Big Entertainment world.

The BBC’s Stuart Tanner

Turns out that Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield has a Media Communications program taught by a well-practiced investigative documentary producer from the United Kingdom: Stuart Tanner.

Tanner’s work with the BBC and the U.K. Channel Four News spans 15 years of award-winning documentaries. Among many other topics, his productions cover ethnic conflict in China and persecution of the Falun Gong by the Chinese government.

Now, Stuart Tanner simply does not show up on the “Oracle of Bacon” website we used above, because he has no exposure in the feature film industry. But our Fairfield organizers used the “strength of the weak ties” theory and hoped to exploit the benefit of random additional linkages to make their small world stronger and more resistant to disruption.

So they looked on www.imdb.com (the Internet Movie Data Base) and were amazed to find six listings for actors or producers born in Fairfield, Iowa. Among them, Willem Zuur (born 1985) has a Bacon number of 2.

Of great interest to the festival organizers, Willem’s biography on www.imdb. com says that in the summer of 2001 he began to practice a meditation called Falun Gong. And at age 18 (2003) he went to China on vacation where the taxi driver told police that Willem practiced Falun Gong. Willem was consequently arrested and imprisoned for a while.

Now, recall that Stuart Tanner has done a documentary on the persecution of the Falun Gong by the Chinese government for the BBC. It’s called The Enemy Within, with release in 2001. Do you get the picture of a small, connected world?

The Fairfield organizers gave Stuart an honorary Bacon number of 3, given the strength of his philosophical relationship with Willem’s Bacon number of 2.

Young Luke Sky.. err Stenger

That leaves only one filmmaker in their festival left to talk about. Luke Stenger at age 18 has not had much of a chance to get a good Bacon number.

But Luke has auteured 40 movies since age 11. And his latest ouevre, Off the Clock, stars an actor named Andy Mackenzie who has appeared in several Iowa movies.

Well, Andy appears to have a Bacon number of 2. But can we be sure that the Internet Movie Data Base Andy MacKenzie is the same Andy MacKenzie who knows Luke Stenger? Hmmm, maybe not.

By the way, Luke will soon know Leigh Badgley, who knows David Lynch, who is a 2. And Luke already knows Neil Cunningham (a 3) from the futon store and Zach’s Fairfield movie The Retreat that Neil starred in.

Well, at the time of this writing, nobody knows whether Luke’s buddy Andy MacKenzie is the same Andy MacKenzie connected to the Kevin Bacon with a Bacon number of 2. But, by this time, who cares?

You Too Could Have a Bacon Number

All we know is that there were plenty of Fairfield Connections in this film festival. Enough for a whole weekend, Friday night through Sunday night.
Visitors even got a button that says, “I Know Neil.” Neil’s retrospective, by the way, had an overflow crowd, including fellow actors and others he worked with in various Fairfield-based film productions over the years.
So visit Neil’s store, Central Park Custom Home Furnishings and Futons on the square. Shake hands with Neil, and count yourself lucky. You’re lucky because Neil has a Bacon number of 3. That gives you a Bacon number of 4. Not bad for a beginner.

Who would’a guessed?

You really, really are connected to the entertaining universe.

Movie Maven Workshops

Yes, plans are in the works for a series of movie workshops! Topics will be offered in 1- to 7-day formats (per your needs) at reasonable tuition with top-name industry experts in Fairfield. Some possible workshops include:

• Writing good movie reviews
• Developing an authentic voice for acting
• Becoming a Shaolin writer in today’s culture (“wisdom writing”)
• Directing fiction from the heart
• Creating documentaries that make a difference
• Imagining, getting, and doing sound for the sound-person
• Working your camera using natural lighting
• Learn to animate your animation with anima and animus

Let us know your interest in these and any other topics. Email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it to stay posted on upcoming workshops!

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