Introduction
The Hollywood film industry is dominated by an elite who exercises control of available resources, career chances, and access to opportunity. This is a fact Robert R. Faulkner proved in his study called Music on Demand. In his study, Faulkner examined the network and connections between producers and composers. He found that each connection a producer made with a composer was essentially a business transaction. The more well-known a composer was, it was more likely that he would work on films with the largest budgets and greatest chance at commercial success. And thus, this revealed that composers of successful blockbuster films such as Rocky, Star Wars, The Amityville Horror, were naturally more sought after by top filmmakers than unknown or freelance film composers. Consequently, it formed a system where freelance or new film composers found it difficult to break in to the film industry.
Inspiration
I found inspiration from a Medium network visualization post about the most important actors in the film industry. It was interesting to see how well-connected popular actors are and the ways actors/actresses serve as a bridge in connecting different types of film industries from the Hollywood film industry or the French cinema to the Chinese film industry. I also liked the use of color to show the different groups or cliques of actors in the film industry.
Materials Used
The network data used was collected by Faulkner. I found the data on University of California Irvine’s network data repository site. The data contains the collaboration of 40 composers of film scores and the 62 producers who produced a minimum of five movies in Hollywood in the period of 1964 to 1976. In addition, it is a 2-mode network where a line between a composer and producer indicates that the former created the soundtrack for the movie produced by the latter. The line thickness represents the number of films both the producer and the composer collaborated on.
I started the project by the network data and then imported it into Google Sheets. Then, I created two separate Google Sheets for the nodes table and the edge table. To make the visualization, I used Gephi, which is an open-source network analysis and visualization software.
Results
To create the visualizations, I imported each table separately into Gephi. Then, I ran a few of the network statistics such as the average degree, modularity and the network diameter. I used the Yuhan Hu proportional layout and then expanded it to eliminate some of the overlap between the nodes.
I wanted to make sure that producers and composers were grouped by color. So producers are all colored purple while composers are in turquoise. I wanted colors that were vibrant enough for the dark background. I chose to make the edge lines green because it was distinctive enough from the other two colors but also not too distracting. The size of the circle depicts the number of connections that person made during the period of 1964 to 1976. The bigger the circle, the more collaborations that person had and therefore, the more successful he was.
Reflection
I thought it was interesting to see how much well-known composers were sought-after by producers. I kept the names of the composers and the producers because I thought that it was important to know who these people are. For example, Goldsmith is one of the top five composers in the dataset. This makes sense because Jerry Goldsmith was extremely successful during his time as he composed films scores for blockbusters like the Star Trek franchise, The Sand Pebbles, Gremlins, Planet of the Apes and many more.
I think I can go even further with the network dataset by creating an interactive network visualization where users can click on the nodes to learn more about the producers and composers themselves as well as learn more about the movies each one either produced or composed. Including the soundtracks of the top five composers would also make the visualization a bit more fun for users who are huge film and music fans.
References
Robert R. Faulkner, Music on Demand. Composers and Careers in the Hollywood Film Industry (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1983).
W. de Nooy, A. Mrvar, & V. Batagelj, Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chapter 5.