MADness—the Blog

Google’s Ngram Viewer made news this week.  You may have heard about it, or perhaps even played around at the site.  As noted elsewhere, it’s not only fun, it can be addictive.

I did a few queries to see how some big names in movies have fared over the years*.  Some of the results are in the charts below.  The first two compare actors and actresses who all began their careers before 1940.  The third compares some Best Picture winners from different decades, starting in the ’30s.

I can’t say there were big surprises—I expected John Wayne and Bette Davis to top the charts, so to speak—but the fascinating thing is to see how the names compare in ways that weren’t available before.

A couple of items caught my eye.  One is the surge for many of the names beginning in the 1960s.  I’d attribute that to a rise in interest in film across the culture more than to the individual stars.  You also see a more gradual, across-the-board dropoff during the past decade.  I’m not sure if there’s a single reason that accounts for that.  In part, the generation that knew the old names best is not here to buy books as they did before.  The internet, no doubt, has had an effect, with more writing online leading to perhaps less in print.  Another thing, it seems we had a spate of movie retrospectives around the centennial of film in 1995, and at the end of the century a few years later, and we may be witnessing a natural ebb of that kind of interest.

THE ACTORS
10 stars, all of whom started before 1940
Charlie Chaplin is the earliest and most enduring name.  Wayne remains the biggest name, though he appears to have peaked about a dozen years ago.  Jimmy Stewart seems to have the latest gain in fame (though it may be that we know him more as Jimmy now and he was more often James back then).

THE ACTRESSES
10 stars, all of whom started before 1940
You can see the huge interest in the early days for Greta Garbo and Shirley Temple, and it’s a tribute to them that they remain big names many decades after their short careers.  But Bette Davis, with a much longer career, is the big name among this group.  She ranks higher than all the men except for Wayne and Chaplin.  But if you add Marilyn Monroe to the query, you see who’s the biggest actress of them all.

THE BEST PICTURE WINNERS
8 Oscar-winning films, one from each decade since the 1930s
The films here are Oscar favorites but not necessarily the most popular ones.  The database doesn’t give good results for some Best Picture winners.  Casablanca and Chicago happen to be names of cities, too.  Who knew?  Hamlet is more than what’s dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.  Lawrence of Arabia is not just a movie about a man, but a man, and the name begins its spike 40 years before the film was made.  That said, for several of the films the chart shows a consistent pattern:  a sudden rise, a dip, a leveling-off.  Not the case, though, for the latest two films.  Schindler’s List hardly gets out of the starting gate, for reasons I can’t explain.  Million Dollar Baby (also a film title from 1941, and a song title, or partial title, for hits from Bing Crosby to Lil Wayne) is still on the rise.  In any case, the top film among this group is On the Waterfront.  It coulda been just a contender—but it’s the champ!

* Caveat querier:  The Google database is big, with more than 500 billion words from 5.2 million books, and it offers one measure of popularity over time.  But like any metric (e.g., box office results), it’s hardly definitive.  For one thing, it’s a work in progress (the database contains 4 percent of the corpus of published books).  And there’s this:  what people talk about is often not the same as what people write about, and what people write about in newspapers, in magazines, and now on the internet, is often not what people write about in books.

UPDATE:
This just in.  Well, from the summer of ’09, actually.  A discussion at the Language Log blog took issue with the accuracy of the Google Books endeavor, and Jon Orwant of Google provided this insight into the project.  Some interesting technical background and another reason to not take results as gospel truth.

UPDATE 2:
The Schindler’s List anomaly is due to punctuation.