Andrew McCarthy’s ‘Brats’ Doc Relied On The Brat Pack Calling Him Back

Actor-director Andrew McCarthy used to hate talking about being part of the Brat Pack, the group of young actors in the 1980s who, for many years, were Hollywood’s biggest stars. His new documentary, Brats, took him on a journey that changed that.

“The Brat Pack didn’t exist in a brick and mortar way, but it totally did exist because here we are over 35 years later, and we’re still talking about it,” he said. “It certainly continues to exist as an entity, culturally. I found the experience of making the film quite liberating in a certain way.”

The journey the filmmaker never previously wanted or planned to take started when he wrote his best-selling memoir, Brat: An 80s Story, which had him reflecting on his career. It came out in 2021.

“I finished that and thought, ‘Well, what the hell did everyone else experience?’ I knew the other people in this group had the same starting point, and we all didn’t like it when it happened. I just thought it would be interesting to turn the gaze and see them, talk and see what their experience was,” McCarthy mused. “People ended up being game to talk about that to a large degree. I was most interested in how my experience as part of the Brat Pack has changed 180 degrees from when it first happened. I hated it initially, but now I’ve realized it’s one of the largest blessings of my professional life.”

“Our perception of things can shift over time. The Brat Pack was the skeleton I hung this on because that’s hopefully an interesting thing for people to see a movie about. To me, a trip down memory lane wasn’t that interesting. However, reconciling and asking myself, ‘How do I deal with my past and how does that change over time?’ was very interesting to me.”

Class star McCarthy and his fellow members, including Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, and Ally Sheedy, loathed the label bestowed on them by a cover story written by journalist David Blum and published in New York Magazine in 1985.

Brats premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Where can you watch the Brat Pack documentary? It streams on Hulu from Thursday, June 13, 2024. The film is a journey that starts with the filmmaker wearing an albatross around his neck. By the end of the documentary, you can see on McCarthy’s face that he is lighter and he is visibly in a different place.

“That’s probably true in a certain way,” McCarthy confirmed. “It was a journey of coming to terms with something that was a seismic event in my life. There’s a moment in the movie where I’m just sitting in the car, and I can’t remember exactly what I said, but just knowing that other people felt the same way about this was really important. That meant I wasn’t alone. I kept saying to myself that the movie takes place now. It’s not about something that took place over 35 years ago; it’s about my relationship now to what happened back then.”

However, Brats could have been over before it began. It could have gone nowhere. McCarthy knew that when he started the camera rolling but did it anyway.

“I went out one day to film. Just one day. One of the things about the movie, and I kept saying this to everyone involved, was that this was a homemade movie. I said, ‘We’re going to show cameras, there’s going to be no makeup, and when I call somebody up, I’m calling somebody up. There’s no artifice in this.’ I said, ‘Let’s go out for one day; I’ll sit on a stoop and talk about what I felt about the Brat Pack. I don’t know what I’ll say, but I’ve thought about it for most of my life, so something will come out. Then I’m going to call everybody up,” the filmmaker recalled. “I was like, ‘I’ve got everybody’s number, so I’m going to call them all up on that day, and we’ll film it and see what happens.’ If nothing happened, then I would have eaten the day of filming, and that would have been that. It absolutely would have ended there.”

As we see in the documentary, McCarthy started calling.

“Who called back first? Emilio. He called me back right there on the street and said yes, and that’s in the film. I was shocked. Ally called me back about minutes later. Emilio never talks about this stuff, so when he said yes, I was like, ‘Oh. We might have a movie.’ A couple of days later, I talked to Rob and then Demi. When Ally called back, she said, ‘I can do it today, right now.’ I don’t have a film crew, so I went and quickly rented two cameras, put them each on a tripod, put my iPhone up, and I and Ally had a conversation alone in their apartment.”

“Until then, I didn’t see how this would ever happen because everyone did not want to discuss it. I thought, ‘I’ll try it. I’m taking it one inch at a time, and I’ll see if it sprouts roots.’ I wasn’t reluctant; I was eager, but I didn’t imagine anyone would do it. When Emilio said yes, I was shocked, and then when Demi was like, ‘Come on out tomorrow,’ I was like, ‘Shit. I can’t.’ She was going to Paris for two months, so she was like, ‘You’d better hurry up.'”

When things started to move, the actor, known for movies like St Elmo’s Fire, Pretty in Pink, and Mannequin, was clear about what he did and didn’t want Brats to be. The goal was low-fi, honest authenticity.

“I was like, ‘I want to come to your house with as few people as possible and just talk to you. I don’t have a list of questions.’ I did not want to make a talking head movie with stilted, canned answers, or canned questions,” he told me. “I can’t remember who it was, but they asked, ‘Do you have a list of questions you want to send me first?’ I was like, ‘I have no idea. I want to come to you because I don’t know you, yet we share something very seismic in both of our lives. I’m sure we have something to talk about. If you’re willing to go on to that topic, I’ll show up.'”

McCarthy didn’t want to have interviews; he wanted to have conversations “and share as openly and intimately as we could.”

“That’s the only thing that would have had any value to me. Even if people weren’t willing to be open, and some people didn’t want to talk, that says something, and that’s fine, too. There was no judging. This sounds cheesy, but the movie was made with love for everybody.”

Most people who were in the Brat Pack or “Brat Pack adjacent,” such as Some Kind of Wonderful actress Lea Thompson, Pretty in Pink‘s Jon Cryer, and Taps‘ Timothy Hutton, also agreed to be part of the documentary; however, others, such as The Breakfast Club‘s Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald, declined, although McCarthy offered to show them the documentary and invited them to Brats‘ Tribeca premiere.

One interview that McCarthy went into, not knowing where it would take him, was a conversation with David Blum, the journalist who wrote the article that coined and created the Brat Pack label.

“I had no idea what to expect. I was surprised by how much affection we had in the other conversations, but I had no idea what to expect from David. He was fascinating to me,” the filmmaker said. “All I knew was I didn’t want to do a gotcha on him the way he did it on us. That was the midst of the 80s. Snark journalism was quintessential, and in New York Magazine, it was very that way back then. He came up with a great phrase. I wanted to let him have his say, and I think he was one second apologetic and the next second defiant.”

“One of the interesting moments to me is when he’s reacting, talking about on the Donahue show when the critic Richard Schickel said something about David that he perceived to be nasty, and he was deeply offended. I was gobsmacked and like, ‘Uh huh. You’re not even seeing the irony of this, David?’ I just wanted to let him talk. At the end of it, I had this affection for him. That was seismic and a huge surprise to me, this journey from loathing this person to having affection for him over time.”

There’s a moment in Brats where McCarthy is ordering food, and the young person serving him, just off camera, asks what they are filming. He explains that it’s a documentary about a group of actors from the 80s called the Brat Pack. They’re polite but don’t seem particularly interested or impressed. That made the Weekend at Bernie‘s star think.

“I turned 60 last year, and your relation to time changes when that happens. Maybe it happened for you at 50 a little bit, but it didn’t happen for me. That person behind the counter was part of a much younger generation, so the Brat Pack didn’t mean anything. It was some vague ancient history to them, but it still lives inside me in a certain way,” he mused. “Nostalgia is looking back through rose-colored glasses and deliberately deceiving ourselves about a time to feel better about our present. I spoke to Rob Lowe about this in the film, and he said we’ve become the avatars of youth for a generation. They look at us, and they see themselves. When I saw Rob for the first time in 30 years, I finally saw what everybody else saw when they saw me. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m seeing myself at 20 years old, and I’m having affection for my youth again.’ It feels so warm and so nice.”

“People come up and see me or other members of the Brat Pack, and they talk about how they love their movies, and their eyes glaze over. They’re not talking to me anymore. They’re talking about that wonderful moment in their own life when they were just cusping adulthood because that’s a thrilling time in life. I, and the others, represent that to people. As we get older, that becomes even more important to a certain segment of the population. In reality, that young person behind the counter is right when they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s just ancient f**king history.'”

Many of the people McCarthy interviewed for Brats had already had that realization, but he gets it now. For the first time, he’s at peace. Looking back, they might all have handled it a little differently, but the fact remains that Hollywood wasn’t ready for them even though they were ready for Hollywood.

“We represented this seismic cultural change that was happening. I didn’t understand that before I made Brats,” the Less Than Zero actor reflected. “Movies were not about young people until that moment in time; they were about grown-ups before then, like The French Connection or The Godfather, and then suddenly, Hollywood discovers that kids go to movies five or six times and grown-ups go once. They were like, ‘F**k this! Let’s make movies for kids.’ Overnight, teen movies were being made, and every Friday, there was a new movie for teenagers that was landing in theaters. The old guard in Hollywood was not too pleased about it. They were like, ‘Who are these f**king punks? Everything’s about them,’ and then this article puts a label on us, a great zippy title; it captures the seismic cultural shift happening, and the old guard and Hollywood go, ‘See? Little f**king punks.’ We instantly reacted to their reaction and said, ‘See? They resent us,’ and from there it grew.”

“The public didn’t see any of that because they’re not in showbusiness; they were home in Ohio and were going, ‘I love these guys. They are in all these movies, and their name is the Brat Pack. I love that. It’s easy to remember,’ and boom. It took me decades to go, ‘Oh, wait a minute.’ I thought people had a reaction, whereas these people understood something that I didn’t. I was reacting, and there was a big difference between reacting and understanding. It took me a long time to ultimately get that they were right.”