Nearly 40 years ago, New York Magazine published a magazine cover centered on a group of young Hollywood stars that would change the social conversation in the industry for years to come, but not as much as it would go on to change the lives of the selected members of “Hollywood’s Brat Pack.” In the first trailer for Hulu‘s Brats, one of the group’s core members, Andrew McCarthy, brings the pack back.
“If you were coming of age in the 1980s, the Brat Pack was near the center of your cultural awareness. But for those of us experiencing it from the inside, the Brat Pack was something very different,” McCarthy says in a new clip for the documentary, which premieres on June 14. “On June 10, 1985, New York Magazine published Hollywood’s Brat Pack — I just remember seeing that cover and thinking, ‘Oh, fuck.’”
According to the subheading for the David Blum article, the Brat Pack comprised “Rob [Lowe], Emilio [Estevez], Sean [Penn], Tom [Cruise], Judd [Nelson], and the rest — the young movie stars you can’t quite keep straight. But they’re already rich and famous. They’re what kids want to see and what kids want to be.”
But as the term was introduced and spreading like cultural wildfire, its parameters shifted and settled more definitively around a select group that included McCarthy as well as Demi More, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall, plus Estevez, Lowe, and Nelson. The defining films of the era include The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire, but also extended to movies including Mannequin, Pretty in Pink, and other releases starring this cast of actors.
Not all of the recognized members appear in Brats, but with McCarthy as both the writer and director of the film, the ones who participated were more inclined to pick up when he called. “It was time that we cleared the air on a couple things,” Estevez says in the clip. Moore appears in the trailer, as do Lowe and Sheedy. There is also an appearance from Pretty in Pink star Jon Cryer, who makes a point of declaring: “I am not in the Brat Pack.”
