6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon and the Conshohocken Connection

6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon and the Conshohocken Connection

2/27/2024

By Brian Coll

I’m chatting with my old friend Brian Turtle. 

All right, 30 years ago some of the movies in theaters were True Lies, Legends of the Fall, Mask, Airheads and Interview with the Vampire… meanwhile cable tv was still the big way most of us got our entertainment at home. What were you watching 30 years ago?

Well, 30 years ago would have been 1994. I was a junior in college with hardly any money to go to the movies – although I think I did see all of the films you just mentioned. My friends and I probably pooled our money together for booze and pizza and hoped for a good series of videos on MTV or something compelling on TBS.

I guess it was your love of movies that brought us to why we are chatting about this pop culture phenomenon. So, without keeping people waiting any longer, what is special about 30 years ago to you?

Sure, we all loved movies, but on a fateful night in January 1994, with a blizzard outside to further emphasize fate trapping us indoors; My friends Mike Ginelli, Craig Fass, and I turned on the TV. With a few clicks of the remote, we found Footloose. And then the movie Quicksilver. And somewhere in between a commercial for a movie no one has seen called The Air Up There came on. And that was the magical combination of 3 snowed-in friends and 3 Kevin Bacon movies that led to what became known as “The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”.

Take us into that room.

We were at Mike and Craig’s apartment. Actually it was an off-campus townhouse where another Archbishop Kennedy alum – Joe Hendrzak – also lived. This was the pre-internet era, so we made our entertainment the old-fashioned way, we watched TV (commercials and all).

So that’s really it, the room was your basic townhouse living room; a few empty beer cans here and there… couple of couches, and your 90’s style box television set that was normally set to MTV, but on this night was airing Footloose on some basic cable channel like TBS. The movie was actually more background noise as Mike, Craig, and I probably discussed sports, music, school, or whatever else between drinks. But then Quicksilver came on and we were like, “what is this, a Kevin Bacon marathon or something?” and then that’s when the ad for The Air Up There came on and we were like, “You’ve gotta be kidding me. The man is everywhere!”

And as the story goes, no one remembers exactly who said what, but the conversation generally went like this:

Craig: “Man, Kevin Bacon is everywhere tonight. Do you think he’s worked with just about everyone else in Hollywood by now?”

Me: “Has he ever worked with John Lithgow?”

Mike: “Idiot. He was just in Footloose with John Lithgow.”

Me: “No, not John Lithgow. I meant Robert DeNiro. Has he ever worked with DeNiro?” (Note: this was several years before they’d share the screen in Sleepers).

Craig: “No, but Robert DeNiro was in The Untouchables with Kevin Costner, who was in JFK with Kevin Bacon.”

And that was the first connection of probably a million more back to Bacon. Or as I said in the SXSW event celebrating the game with Kevin Bacon, “That was the match that burnt the forest down”.

We wound up staying up all night trying to connect anyone and everyone who had ever been in a movie back to KB. I think we finally collapsed from exhaustion after a failed attempt to connect Gary Coleman.(which we wound up doing the next day).

Alright, so you play this game and then what?

Well that’s the thing… we picked up right where we left off the next day with successfully connecting Gary Coleman, and we just kept playing.

We’d get back on campus and ask our fraternity brothers to throw names at us and we’d bounce off each other from various connecting movies and always landing back on Kevin Bacon. It was like the “stupid human trick” that never went away.

While Brian and I are chatting about this, he texts Craig and asks if he had anything to add…. as we are recapping he had this to add:

It got to the point where we couldn’t focus on story lines in movies anymore. We would start linking everyone in every scene back to Bacon. We weren’t necessarily trying to get back the quickest. We were usually trying to take the weirdest path back to make each other laugh. It got us talking about other movies, reciting lines. It switched on a completely different part of my brain. Which I am not sure I could ever access again. Thank you Craig! Love it!

How does it spread from Albright to the world?

Albright was a small campus so it ripped through there in about a week. We’d have random people we hardly knew walk up to us in the cafeteria and say something like “Do Michael Keaton.” And Bam-bam-bam, we’d connect the dots and have another satisfied customer.

A few weeks later, we road-tripped to Penn State to see some friends and got to playing. Before long, half of Main Campus was throwing celebrity names our way and would be astonished by our ability to tie it all back to Bacon. (Again, pre-internet entertainment…)

So then the larger tipping point came after we appeared on MTV’s The Jon Stewart Show and showcased our “talent” to a national audience. A year later, they had us back on the show WITH KEVIN BACON who was out promoting his movie Murder in the First at that time.

How we ever managed to get on the Jon Stewart show was another story all together. Basically, we were watching the show one night and they had a roller-skating chicken on. We figured if this is what’s passing for high quality entertainment these days, our Kevin Bacon “trick” should at least get us a call back. So we wrote this off-the-wall letter about how we were uncovering a global conspiracy of Kevin Bacon being the center of the universe. It was completely absurd, but it worked. We got a call back. And eventually we got booked for the show.

Once that happened, we were on morning radio shows across the country on a regular basis, eventually culminating in our first (of 3) appearances on The Howard Stern Show. It was Howard Stern who inspired us to see how we could turn this game into a profit of some sort. (He literally said, “I can’t believe you guys aren’t making any money off this.” To which we thought, “yeah right, how?”)

That first Stern show led to us meeting with an agent from the William Morris Agency in NYC, which in turn led to us signing a publishing deal with Penguin Books. A few months later, The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon paperback was on sale. To the complete and utter disbelief of all involved, the book hit the LA TIMES Best Seller list! We were now best-selling authors. Are you kidding me?!

The book led to more press and TV/radio appearances. They ran a piece on Dateline NBC on us. Then the board game was released which essentially launched Endless Games as a company. Hell, we even had a pilot for a TV show on VH1 that sadly got shelved due to a format change in their programming. Then we had a deal for a TV game show as recently as 5 years ago – which also sadly never saw the light of day.

But hey, here we are, literally THIRTY YEARS since that fateful night at Albright College, and the game is still a part of the fabric of pop culture.

Important question here…. at what point does Kevin Bacon want to put a hit out on you?

Admittedly, and Kevin Bacon has gone on record to support this, he didn’t like the game when he first heard about it. He thought we were making fun of him. But then he met us backstage on that second Jon Stewart Show appearance and saw we were just a couple of knuckleheads having a good time. We liked his movies. He reluctantly got on board with the game and even wrote the forward to the book.

Has he fully embraced it?

Well, yes and no. He has said that he was kind of indifferent about it but then heard people were playing the game using Arnold Shwarzenegger as the end-point, and he was like “whoah, wait a minute. That’s MY game.” So yes, I’d say he embraced it. Now, did any of us imagine he’d be answering questions about this game in every interview he’d do for the next thirty years? No we did not. I’m sure he’s a little sick of having to tell his version of the story, but we still appreciate the opportunity to tell ours.

What’s next for this?

The fact that this game made it out of 1994 with any sense of notoriety was more than any of us expected. We had a moment… which turned into an hour, and then a year, and now three decades. At this point, I don’t think anything would surprise us when it comes to what could happen next.

Brian, thank you. Thanks for getting Craig involved in this conversation/article. Mike Ginelli, Craig Fass thanks for being in that room 30 years ago to bring us the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon to the world. I imagine this story, like 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon went further than Albright this might go further than our normal readers here at Conshystuff.com. To the readers and folks here in Conshohocken, here is the tie in. Brian Turtle and I (Brian Butch Coll) went to Archbishop Kennedy together. We played sports together and to this day, every time we see each other I leave the room laughing and smiling.

If you want to see Brian Turtle and Kevin Bacon discuss this, check this out on YouTube from the SXSW: 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon | SXSW Live 2014 | SXSW ON – YouTube