‘BRATS’ SHOWS HOW A SIMPLE NICKNAME CHANGED A GROUP OF ACTORS’ AND HOLLYWOOD’S PERCEPTION OF THEM

Back in the 1940s a group of singers and actors that spent a good amount of time together on and off screen garnered the nickname of “The Rat Pack”. They were the epitome of cool and were suave at the height of their fame through most of the 1960s. Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dean Martin were the most associated, but Joey Bishop, Humphrey Bogart, and Judy Garland were part of the inner circle. While they at times didn’t like the nickname given to them most knew that anyone in that group was a pretty big deal. They mostly embraced it over the decades. In 1985 a writer for New York Magazine, David Blum played off that iconic nickname and wrote a story about Hollywood’s newest group of young actors and called them “The Brat Pack”. Most of us fans of the actors in the group and their movies thought it was a term of endearment, and thought that it was a new way of saying all the hot new actors were in this exclusive group. We could not have been more wrong.

Brats on Hulu is a documentary by one of the members of the group, Andrew McCarthy. He decided that the story of the young group of actors and the impact that article had on them was not very positive. The original group consisted of McCarthy, Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, and Emilio Estevez. Some of the Pack adjacent were Robert Downey Jr. Lea Thompson, Tom Cruise, Jon Cryer, Mary Stuart Masterson, and James Spader. They were a group of actors that were taking over film roles as writers and directors like John Hughes were writing movies about and for a teenage audience. There was a big shift at the box office for those types of films as teens filled movie theaters. Blum’s article didn’t concentrate on them being stars and good actors, but was more like taking a shot at them and suggested that they were young, mid-talented, and didn’t feel like they had to try hard to improve on their craft. McCarthy went out and tracked down as many of them as he could to interview them and ask them how the term affected them and their careers. Brats looks into life after all the camera’s were off and the actors talk about what happened afterwards.

What is it like to be at the height of your career and feel like it’s simultaneously being torn down? That’s what most of these actors were feeling at a young age. Their movies were topping the box office, but this new phrase was turning directors against them because of the light it portrayed them in. McCarthy is able to interview a few of the group including Estevez, Sheedy, and Lowe. Brats is pretty naked and I think it adds to it. These people just in their homes and everything else kind of stripped away while they have an open conversation. McCarthy does a great job getting the others to open up about their experiences mainly because he is one of them. I think if a reporter or any other documentarian had try to do this documentary they would have been mostly shutout or not gotten the responses he got. While Estevez comes off as the most cautious during their talk he starts to warm up more to it and getting a few things off his chest. It was also surprising who he got to talk to as I thought Molly Ringwald would have been interviewed, but must have declined and that Demi Moore wouldn’t have participated. McCarthy speaks not just with the actors but also directors, producers, writers and other behind the scenes people. He even interviews David Blum about the article. You see them all maybe facing the term for first time and also realizing that it wasn’t as bad as they thought. Finding out the term “Brat Pack” wasn’t a positive term all these years later kind of made me feel sad that a bit of nostalgia was now tarnished. If you’re a Gen X kid and spent a lot of time at the mall with posters of some of these people on your walls then you need to get this film on your watch list. If you’re not exactly from that generation then watch it as a cautionary tale that shows that words can hurt you.