In the documentary “Brats,” Andrew McCarthy attempts to come to terms with being part of the Brat Pack, the group of young actors who were ascendant in ’80s movies. Turns out, many of them didn’t like the nickname, or the association. “I lost control of the narrative of my career overnight,” McCarthy said of the period after the writer David Blum coined the immediately catchy term, in a 1985 New York Magazine profile of Emilio Estevez.
He and other actors, like Estevez and Rob Lowe, who had been frequently cast together in ensemble coming-of-age dramedies (“St. Elmo’s Fire”), scattered, fearful that appearing together would be a career liability. In the documentary, streaming on Hulu, McCarthy, an actor, director and travel writer, checks in, after many years of absence, to see how they processed this pop culture twist.
Some — like Demi Moore, a “St. Elmo’s” co-star — handled it all a lot better than others.
In a phone interview from his Manhattan home, McCarthy, 61, said his impulse was not nostalgia — though he knows that’s what might draw an audience — but an excavation of how time and memory collide with youthful expectations.
It was a leap: He walked around New York and cold-called Brat Packers he hadn’t seen in decades, with a camera crew trailing. “I thought, if anyone calls me back, I have a movie,” he said.
Prompted by McCarthy’s low-key, conversational style, Moore, Lowe, Estevez and others turned up; Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald did not. In kitchen table and couch-side interviews that also serve as a kind of celebrity home tour — Ally Sheedy’s Upper West Side apartment ranks as the most relatable — the movie cracks the time capsule of the Brat Pack’s appeal. Here, some takeaways.
Did the Brat Pack Change Culture?
The Brat Pack — a riff on the Rat Pack, midcentury entertainers like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin — signaled a shift in Hollywood, away from the swaggering auteurs of the ’70s toward movies that expressly dealt with young people’s lives and feelings. What is “The Breakfast Club,” the author Bret Easton Ellis asks in the doc, but “a therapy jam?”
And Lowe argues that the entertainment industry’s swing toward a youth audience started then, pushed by the Brat Pack’s film success, and never ended. “Friends” is just “St. Elmo’s Fire” with more laughs, and fewer cigarettes.
McCarthy was circumspect. “We just happened to be the ones who fit the wardrobe at the time that was happening culturally,” he said.
The documentary explores how the idiosyncratic soundtracks of the Brat Pack movies — especially the English New Wave bands that John Hughes, director of “Pretty in Pink” and “The Breakfast Club,” loved — became synonymous with the era, and now have a sentimental weight. “Forever Young” plays as McCarthy searches for Moore in her house.
One non-synthy song McCarthy desperately wanted to include in his film: Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll,” for Tom Cruise’s underwear slide in “Risky Business.” “That changed pop culture, that instant,” McCarthy said.
With a low budget, he wrote “begging letters” to musicians — “‘Bob Seger, you and I went and got drunk one night in the ’80s, do you remember?’”— to get permission.
The other must-have track was “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” by Simple Minds, the closer from “The Breakfast Club.” “Judd pumping his fist like that, that’s a quintessential Brat Pack moment.”
Blane’s Terrible Mop-Top, and Other ’80s Mysteries
The 1986 classic “Pretty in Pink,” in which Ringwald’s striver Andie is stuck on McCarthy’s richie Blane, while her much more interesting friend Duckie (Jon Cryer) pines for her, originally ended with Andie and Duckie together at prom. Test audiences booed, so it was reshot on a tight schedule and budget, with Andie and Blane pairing off.
But McCarthy was playing a Vietnam War-era Marine in a Broadway play; he arrived with a shaved head. Production whipped up a drab wig. “It just sat on my head like some bird’s nest,” he says in the doc. “If they’d known that we’d still be talking about it 35 years later, they would’ve paid for a better wig.” (Even more shocking, Ringwald hated Andie’s blush-pink sack of a prom dress, bursting into tears when she first saw it.)
In “St. Elmo’s Fire,” McCarthy’s character suddenly plays the bongos in one scene. “I’d read that Marlon Brandon played bongo drums,” McCarthy explained, “so I bought a set.”
And then there was the time that Lowe and McCarthy, normally rivals, ended up on a post-Spago bender with Liza Minnelli at Sammy Davis Jr.’s house: Brat Pack meets Rat Pack.
Demi Moore Is a Philosopher Queen
Interviewed outdoors, in a lush poolside setting, Moore emerges as a fount of inspirational, Instagrammable wisdom, like, “I look at everything as happening for us, not to us.”
“She’s the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the film,” McCarthy said. “That’s what we called her, in the editing room.”
Does the Original Article Hold Up?
Just as many of the Brat Pack-era movies — with their retrograde depictions and casual misogyny — would not be made today, Blum’s article is similarly outmoded; it also expresses a strangely withering shock that a bunch of rich 20-something guys mostly like to hang out, party and pick up women. In the documentary, Blum admits that he was probably meaner than he should’ve been.
McCarthy, surprisingly, is not even mentioned as a member of the Brat Pack in the piece. As a New Yorker, he’s treated as an outsider, and gets dismissed in a few derogatory lines — “I don’t think he’ll make it,” one unnamed actor sniffs.
Today, he said, the dynamics of the celebrity profile have changed. “No publicist is going to let their client go out with a reporter now like that,” he said.
Media stings differently, too. “When I reread the article, after 30-odd years, when I was making this, I thought, ‘This isn’t that bad,’” McCarthy said. “Britney was treated a lot worse.”