Is there an easy way to get the number of followers an account has without having to loop through cursors? I'm looking for a simple function call which will return to me just the number of followers the use with a given Twitter ID has. 
Just looking for the physical number not access to anything else
What I ended up doing was .show_user(user_id=twitter_id) which returns (among other things) the followers count via ['followers_count']
Twython get followers count