CURSE OF THE BRAT PACK
We wanted to be like them, but was fame all it was cracked up to be?
‘They explored what it was to be beautiful and misunderstood’
For British teenagers in the 1980s, there were always tantalising glimpses on screen that to be a young American was to be inherently cooler – Diff’rent Strokes, The Red Hand Gang, Fame... While dance student Leroy was flirting with his teacher Lydia, we saw mirror versions of ourselves arguing with teachers in Grange Hill, parents in EastEnders or, more likely, curled up with the latter.
Small wonder that when the Brat Pack came along, they dazzled us. Hollywood suddenly realised that young people went to the cinema, and in a series of films running loosely from 1983’s The Outsiders through to About Last Night… (1986), one group of actors reflected a different kind of existence – with good looks, money, sex and swearing.
Long before Friends, Glee or Entourage leant into the appeal of the tight but tortured group dynamic, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore and co explored what it was to be young, beautiful and misunderstood. It helped that one of the era’s directing titans John Hughes loved British synth-pop, so soundtracks by Simple Minds and OMD provided a musical bridge for us Brits to The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink. In June 1985, two things happened. St Elmo’s Fire came out, starring what felt like the entire roll call, and New Yorker journalist David Blum wrote a piece in which he detailed the stars’ reallife excesses and christened them “the Brat Pack”. Now in a documentary, McCarthy reveals how jarred he was by the description, and goes in search of the other Brats to see how they felt about it all. He begins with a visit after 30 years to nominated pack leader Estevez, and after their initial awkwardness they get into the nitty gritty of whether the tag was a good thing or not. Estevez remembers they stopped working together (“We were like kryptonite to each other”), while McCarthy blames it for the subsequent dip in his career. “Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg is not going to call somebody who’s in the Brat Pack.” That’s when you think, oh come on! Because actually Spielberg did phone Tom Cruise and so did Scorsese, while
Sean Penn bagged two Oscars, and both actors are clearly at least “Pack-adjacent”, so perhaps other factors played a part.
Different interpretations are revealing. Demi Moore asks, “Why did we take it as something bad? Because we were afraid we were brats.” And Rob Lowe – unsurprisingly, considering he enjoys surf-kissed lifelong good looks, great hair, a happy marriage and starred in The West Wing – has the most fun take on an era he calls “right place, right time”, especially the evening the Brat Pack encountered the Rat Pack with a visit to Sammy Davis Jr’s house, alongside Liza Minnelli. “Did that really happen?” he smiles.
He also muses, “There’s always going to be some perception that bumps up against how you see yourself and what you think you can do.”
Eventually, McCarthy admits a) it wasn’t so bad and b) growing up, he’d always carried a feeling of being stabbed in the back, and the moniker was just one more thing he took badly. He shares, “Emilio always seemed like the insider of a club and I felt like the outsider.” Forty years after this group embodied everything that we youngsters wished to be, we learn that, fame, money and glamour aside, they were, and are, just like the rest of us.
Brats is available now on Disney+