The method employed in “Results of ranking” section for directors is not applicable to other members of the crew, because none of them has (usually) an influence and a decisional power comparable to director during the production of a movie. A different way of considering the career of a person, compared to the one used for directors in “Results of ranking” section, is to evaluate the importance of movies he took part. However, in our case, influence is calculated as centrality in the network of references, then older movies tends to achieve a better ranking than new ones, and their crew would benefit from this circumstance. For avoiding the effect of time, and then comparing influence of movies with same ages, we adopt a ranking similar to the Medal Ranking System employed for the Olympic Games. We assign our score to each movie, according to the method described in “Results of ranking” section, then, in each year, we select the films in the top 5% ranking, assigning to each member of its crew a “gold” point; we repeat the algorithm for movies from the top 5% to 10% ranking, assigning a “silver” point, and for movies from the top 10% to 15%, whose crew members gain a “bronze” point. The ranking of persons is ordered by looking to the number of “gold” points gained, then “silver” and finally “bronze” ones. Hence, we take into account the participation of a person in the most influential movies released in a year, and her ranking is due to the number of top movies she took part during her career. In the event of all points being equal, the individuals are ranked according to the overall number of movies they contribute to, in ascending order, since we prefer to reward who was capable to reach the same level collaborating in less movies. In addition, this method allow us to filter members of the crew according to their involvement in a movie labeled with a specific tag, obtaining the most important personalities according to each tag. We limit our research to movies released before 2010: we estimate, in fact, that it is difficult for a film to gain a realistic (and measurable) influence in less than 10 years.

Directors

Table 4 shows the ranking of the top 20 directors of all times according to our method. Contrary to the ranking of most influential directors on Table 3, here we notice a greater mixture of ages (careers range from early years of the 20th century to early years of the 21th century), nationalities (directors hailing from the United States and the United Kingdom are still the majority, but there is significative presence of Swedish, Japanese and Austrian directors), and number of movies directed (from around a dozen to almost 80). Such heterogeneity is exactly the objective of this method, while the one based only on influence is biased towards older movies rather than modern ones. The homogeneity of the previous ranking highlights the influence of ancient masterpieces at the price of dimming most recent works.

Table 4 Top 20 directors: each item contains the number of golden (G), silver (S) and Bronze (B) points collected, the year of the first and last movies, and the number of films directed in total Full size table

The list in Table 4 shows directors with the most impressive careers in the entire history of cinema, but there are personalities that have been very important only for few years, or in certain genres, then we decided to extend the research also on specific tags: we apply the same “medal” method, but filtering only the participation in movies labeled with the tag under study. We start by analyzing the production of directors in each decade, summarizing our findings in Table 5.

Table 5 Top 5 directors by decade, from 40’s to 90’s Full size table

By analyzing the production of each director during ten years only, we observe that results are more homogeneous: the director that reaches the top ranking in each list has from 5 to 8 movies in top 5%, while the ones in 5th position has directed around 3 movies that are most influential according to our method. It is also interesting that no one filmmaker in the list of 60’s comes from United States, contrary to other ages, where American directors are the majority: such results shows how much European and Asian cinema of that period has been influential for the following productions.

We perform a similar analysis on genres, and display in Table 6 the top 5 directors in four peculiar genres: “comedy”, “horror”, “crime” and “western”; these genres have been selected because each of them has its distinctive aesthetic and rules, significantly dissimilar to other genres’ ones. As expected from distribution of genres in Fig. 1a, the “western” genre contains lower points than the other ones, because there are fewer movies labeled with this tag. We can also notice temporal patterns for each genre: “western” has had a great impact in the last years of the 30’s and in the middle of 60’s, “crime” has emerged after the 70’s (with another peak at the end of 80’s), while “horror” seems to emerge in the 60’s and to reach its peak of influence during 70’s; on the other hand, “comedy” is widespread during the ages. For “western”, we can also notice that two directors in the list belong to the sub-genre called ‘Spaghetti Western’, that emerged in Italy during the mid-60s, showing the importance of this style for the genre.

Table 6 Top 5 directors by genre, for comedy, horror, crime and western movies Full size table

Finally, we also filter the results by country, limiting our study to the four countries having more movies in the dataset, as depicted in Fig. 1b, i.e., the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Italy: results are summarized in Table 7. India has been excluded because, as showed in Figs. 2i and 4a, its influence on other countries is too weak, then the identities of Indian filmmakers are relatively unknown outside their native country. It is not surprising that the points reached by directors from the United States almost double the ones of other countries, since the number of movies produced there is several times greater than outside, as showed in Fig. 1b. Additionally, the influence of their directors ranges over all the ages of cinema, from the very beginning to recent times; something similar happens for directors that worked in the United Kingdom. The case of Alfred Hitchcock is particularly interesting: after reaching celebrity in the United Kingdom, he moves to the United States, continuing to reap success. As regards the other two countries under study, we notice that French directors have been influential during the 60’s, in the period called ‘French New Wave’ (La Nouvelle Vague), while Italian ones during the 70’s. In addition, the presence of the same filmmaker, Federico Fellini, in the lists of both countries suggests the existence of a strong collaboration between them, as already noticed in Fig. 2g.

Table 7 Top 5 directors by country, for movies produced in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Italy Full size table

Actors and actresses

Table 8 provides the ranking of actors and actresses according to our method: as done with directors, the analysis is limited to movies released before 2010, even if, for columns “career” and “number of movies”, we have also taken into account films released after such year. Looking at the list, there are several interesting results. First, all personalities come from the United States or the United Kingdom, showing both the great impact that movies in English have in the industry of cinema, and the bias of the dataset. As second point, the great majority of individuals are still in activity or, at least, appeared in a movie released after 2010, suggesting that the most influential movies of modern times are the ones starring most famous actors and actresses. Probably such result is due to little bias that affect modern movies released after 90’s: since they are too recent for having already deeply influenced other ones, their score is heavily influenced by the presence of sequel or other movies belonging to the same franchise. This kind of films usually have a big budget, that can be spent for hiring famous actors and actresses, and attract more audience. The same happened also in the past, but movies that have been popular during their release usually may have a great impact on the contemporary ones, although their importance may weaken for films released many years later. This result is also probably affected by the increase in production of movies over the years observed in Fig. 1c: since our method select a percentage of movies released each year, if the number of released films grows, the same happens to the number of movies it selects. We could select a fixed number of movies instead of a certain percentage, but in this case we would foster films released in less productive years, to the detriment of more prolific ages. Finally, and most crucially, the number of top movies starring a male actor is several way greater than the number of top movies starring an actress: among them, only Lois Maxwell, who appeared in most movies of James Bond film series with the role of M’s secretary, can compete with her male colleagues, entering in the bottom part of the top ten ranking. This result can be partially justified by the differences in number of actors and actresses in our dataset, reported in Table 1, with the former almost doubling the second. The same happens to the number of connections with movies: however the list shows only top personalities, that in case of gender equality should be comparable.

Table 8 Top 20 actors and actresses: each item contains the number of golden (G), silver (S) and Bronze (B) points collected, the year of the first and last movies, and the number of films starred in total Full size table

As done for directors, we also study the top ranking filtering by decade: results for both actors and actresses in decades from the 40’s to the 90’s are reported in Table 9: we notice that the amount of points for actors and actresses through ages is more homogeneous, with the exception of the 90’s, which registers a higher value of movies in the top influence: this observation strengthen the hypothesis of the small bias that affects modern movies. It is curious to notice that the ranking is again almost entirely composed by American personalities, except for male actors in the 50’s, dominated by Japan: some of them had a role in the works by Akira Kurosawa, a very influential Japanese director, while some others acted in several Kaiju (Japanese monsters) movies, like the ones of Godzilla franchise, that have had a great influence on American monster movies. However, a difference between male actors and actresses is still visible: among the latter, only Lois Maxwell in the 60’s (and maybe Jamie Lee Curtis in 80’s) can be included in the top 5 of best actors of any gender.

Table 9 Top 5 actors and actresses by decade, from the 40’s to the 90’s Full size table

We can find the same behavior if we filter careers by genre: the results for “comedy”, “horror”, “sci-fi” and “musical” movies are summarized in Table 10, where actresses are highlighted in bold. We report data on “musical” films because it is the only case that shows some gender equality: this kind of movies is characterized by many singing and dancing scenes, that are probably performed by male and female actors in equal rate because of producers’ decisions. It is also interesting to notice that no one of the actors in the “comedy” list belongs to the general ranking in Table 8, probably because dramatic movies are more influential. Furthermore, top 4 ranking in the “sci-fi” list is composed by Japanese actors, starting their career in the mid-50’s: as in the list by decades, all of them were involved in Japanese monster movies, that had a great influence on American cinema. As a final remark, all the actors in the “musical” list acted from the 30’s to the 40’s, showing that such genre of movies was very popular in that period, while it lost appeal in more recent times.

Table 10 Top 5 actors (of any gender, actresses in bold) by genre, for comedy, horror, sci-fi and musical movies Full size table

Finally, we analyze if such difference in gender only happens in movies produced in the United States and the United Kingdom, by filtering actors and actresses’ careers by country of production of the movies they are involved in. We notice that such behavior is a bit weaker in other European countries, as showed in Table 11 (actresses are reported in bold), but it is still present, with only one exception. In France and Italy the majority of top positions are occupied by male actors, but there is at least one actress in the last position, and their values can be compared with the other members in their list. The same happens in almost all other countries, with the exception of Sweden, where actresses are the majority, even if we extend the analysis to top 10 positions; if we analyze their career, we notice that all Swedish actors in list owe their influence to Ingmar Bergman, one of the most influential European directors, as also stated in Table 4. As additional country in Table 11 we report Japan, because it is the only one where actors have scores comparable with English movies, thanks to their participation in Monster movies, as we have already mentioned beforehand.