‘Brats’ Director Andrew McCarthy On How The Initially “Horrible” Brat Pack Label Became “A Blessing”

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At the Tribeca world premiere of Brats, actor-turned-director Andrew McCarthy said the Brat Pack Label, which he had “received as horrible,” turned into a “blessing.”

That unlikely arc was actually what compelled him to make the film, McCarthy said Friday night during a post-screening Q&A. “I turned 60 last year, and you start to look at your life a little differently,” he said. “I looked back at this seminal moment in my past, that I’d been dragging around for so many years, and it seemed frozen in the past. And I wanted to bring it up into my present. And by examining it, I could sort of honor it. And if I honored it, it started to turn into a blessing. And then I was fascinated by the journey.”

McCarthy was joined onstage by acting contemporaries Ally Sheedy, Demi Moore and Jon Cryer, along with casting director Marci Liroff, Pretty in Pink director Howard Deutch and journalist David Blum. The group, along with Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe and Molly Ringwald, were labeled the Brat Pack in Blum’s cover story in New York magazine in 1985. The effect of that devastatingly succinct gloss was complicated, to say the least. Estevez and McCarthy recall the dissolution of a project they were supposed to team on after the article came out because they both suddenly wanted nothing to do with their Pack-mates. Hollywood’s upper tier of directors, including Spielberg and Scorsese, they reason, didn’t come calling because the moniker made them seem callow, shallow and unserious about their craft.

“The greatest loss of it was the time we’ve lost with each other over these years,” Moore said. “There was a fear that if we didn’t try to just move out on our own that we would somehow be seen as less. And the joy of this has been the reconnection and the opportunity that we have now, for something that was really a defining and beautiful moment of joy in all of our lives.”

As McCarthy goes on his quest to reconnect with other Brat Packers in the film, he frequently observes that they hadn’t seen each other, in many cases, in more than 30 years.

Asked if making the film gave him what he wanted, McCarthy confessed, “I don’t know what I wanted, but as Demi said, we’re all back in touch again.” Like puppies, he said, “We’re all from the same litter.” While the press initially assumed that members of the Brat Pack really did travel in a pack, that off-putting logic has come to be one of the reaffirming things about the experience, McCarthy said. “There’s something that we all have, where we can just look at each other and go, ‘Oh, hello.’ And that’s a beautiful thing. I didn’t have that for 30 years.”

Blum, for his part, didn’t shrink from playing something of a heel during the Q&A. He appears in the film for an awkward conversation with McCarthy. At the Q&A, Blum drew some jeers and groans from the crowd by divulging that McCarthy had asked him whether he wanted to apologize for writing the piece. “That part didn’t make the final cut,” he said. After Blum said in the Q&A that he had intended to “celebrate” the new guard of young actors storming the gates of Hollywood, McCarthy countered, “If your intent was to celebrate, that’s not what happened.” Explained Blum, “By celebrate, what I mean is, attention draws audiences, draws people to these films, to your careers. … Everyone in this film and everyone associated with the Brat Pack has gone on to have great careers.”

The film will debut on Hulu on June 13.