Andrew McCarthy is Still Mad About Being Called a 'Brat' in 1985

'Brats,' Hulu's Brat Pack movie, looks like a cheap nostalgia exercise. It's actually something more interesting, an unintentionally revealing self-portrait.

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When Brats first popped up in the featured movies row on Hulu, it didn’t immediately jump out at me as something I wanted to watch. “The Brat Pack” was slightly before my time as a pop culture consumer, and didn’t seem especially important as a story to relive. Wake me when the Brat Pack takes on the Pussy Posse on Family Feud, I thought.

At a glance, Brats seemed to fit easily into one of the usual categories of disposable streaming documentary — namely, a “hey, remember that?”-style journey into something for which the distributor owns the IP. The other being a hagiographic exercise in image management, usually promoted by a famous person’s estate and/or whoever granted the distributor the rights to the subject’s music/sports footage/etc. (Á la the Beach Boys doc on Disney+, which I was not surprised to learn is Mike Love propaganda. Guessing they don’t get into the Charles Manson stuff much in that one.).

Luckily a friend tipped me off to what Brats actually is, which is an insane film in which Andrew McCarthy (who directed it) travels the country attempting to have a pity party with his fellow members of the Brat Pack over an New York Magazine article written in 1985. Their reactions to McCarthy range from “how long before you get out of my kitchen” (Emilio Estevez) to “here are some things I learned in therapy” (Demi Moore), to “aw shucks, you’re so sweet for thinking of me” (Jon Cryer). Brats isn’t necessarily brilliant filmmaking, but I found myself weirdly riveted, as a sort of unintentional portrait of young actors and their fragile egos.

Throughout, McCarthy seems obsessed with this article, a piece by David Blum published in June 1985, headlined simply “Hollywood’s Brat Pack.” McCarthy states, again and again, what a profound effect this article, this label, really, had on his own career. Over and over McCarthy describes how much it hurt him, essentially painting it as a hit piece, the usual case of a bloodthirsty press loving to see famous people fail, while never acknowledging that those famous folks they were tearing down were super young kids, who they’d built up in the first place. (Essentially echoing the theme of virtually every recent revisionist documentary about a big tabloid story from 20 years ago, from Britney Spears to Pam and Tommy: aren’t the press so mean??).

As McCarthy continues making his case, trying to get us into his mindset in 1985 and what all this meant to him, it was impossible for me not to think of the mullet. The mullet was similarly popular around the same time, and surely the mere act of someone figuring out what to call it (“a mullet, that’s what it looks like!”) and that catching on, contributed to its decline. That’s sort of the inevitable life cycle of any trend. New and cool, undeniably hot, followed by named and acknowledged, which leads quickly to overexposure and backlash.

Only, in McCarthy’s mind, it was the guy who named the mullet who was responsible for the mullet’s demise, not its ubiquity. If only that one guy had never said “mullet,” it never would’ve gone out of fashion! (Yes, I know the mullet is back. That’s just the 20 year nostalgia cycle — from hack thing to punchline to ironic joke, until the ironic joke loses its irony and then it’s just a trend again. It’s part of why we have a Brat Pack movie).

I understand, and McCarthy may too on some level, that he wants us to question how defensive he’s being. “Jeez, dude, let it go.” Partly he’s probably performing, giving himself room for a character arc in the documentary he’s making.

Even so, many of the things he says seem so head-slappingly self-involved and myopic that it’s impossible to give him the benefit of the doubt. “No actor wants to be called a ‘brat,’” McCarthy commiserates, to I think Rob Lowe, who clearly had bigger things to worry about in the eighties. “I mean, Martin Scorsese is not gonna call up someone in the ‘Brat Pack,’ you know?”

An ironic statement, given the existence of the term “movie brats,” which is what Pauline Kael famously called filmmakers like Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Coppola, and yes, Martin Scorsese (who had come out of film schools rather than going up through the studio system like most of their predecessors). If anything would’ve scared off Scorsese, I doubt it would’ve been the term “brat.” And in fact Scorsese cast Nicolas Cage, who believe it or not gets more ink in the Brat Pack article than McCarthy, in 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead.

I know it’s a little unfair to “well actually” McCarthy on this point, since he’s trying to be honest about how the article felt to a 22-year-old, not write a research paper. Still, it’s McCarthy’s obsession and apparent naivete even almost 40 years later that ends up driving the movie, intentionally or not.

Most of Brats takes the form of a road trip movie, intermixed with interviews and movie clips. At one point in his journey of self-discovery, McCarthy travels to Malcolm Gladwell’s house. There’s so much pathos in an aging Gen Xer trying to unlock a new layer of self-understanding by seeking out fucking Malcolm Gladwell that I almost fell out of my chair. But anyway, Gladwell makes the fairly obvious point that part of the reason “Brat Pack” caught on is that, well, it’s easy to say. And “it’s kind of funny.”

At which point McCarthy deadpans, tightlipped: “We didn’t find it funny.”

Wow, you don’t say.

When McCarthy speaks to Emilio Estevez (in Estevez’s magazine-ready natural wood kitchen, that he seems to wish McCarthy would just vacate), McCarthy says something like “…and you thought this writer was your friend!”

It’s a fun reversal of the usual trope — as immortalized in the scene between Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the old sage and teenage Rolling Stone writer Patrick Fugit in Almost Famous. “Aw, man. You made friends with them. See, friendship is the booze they feed you. They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong.”

It’s quaint to hear McCarthy’s version, in which these young movie stars didn’t understand the mutually transactional relationship between celebrities and the people who write about them. The young stars really just wanted to be pals. Only to be stabbed in the back by some cruel son of a bitch who called them “brats!” (Brats! Can you imagine!)

The actual article is the elephant in the room for the entire movie. In what was presumably meant to be Brats’ climactic scene, McCarthy goes to New York to interview its author, David Blum. They end up having mostly a nice, nostalgic conversation (Blum was 29 himself when he wrote it; remember how cool it was having a magazine industry?). During the course of it, Blum admits that, sure, maybe he could’ve been a little less flippant. And maybe he wrote some things that weren’t entirely fair in his drive to be punchy and memorable. That they end up hugging at the end of the conversation instead of McCarthy punching the guy out presumably completes McCarthy’s character arc, in which he realizes that the problem wasn’t so much being labeled a “brat,” but how he let that affect him. Hollywood endings and therapy speak, a beautiful combination.

Meanwhile it’s impossible not to be preoccupied with the question: what was actually in this article and why did McCarthy think it was so mean-spirited? The most he gives us about it is a few close-ups of individual words and out-of-context phrases that fly by too fast to retain. It almost feels like a test to see if you can get through the whole movie without Googling the article.

Here’s what I found when I actually read it: about the meanest thing Blum writes in it is to call Judd Nelson “overrated.”

The Overrated One—Judd Nelson, 25. He made his reputation as a hood in Making the Grade and The Breakfast Club. And now, in St. Elmo’s Fire, he shows—with his role as a congressional assistant—that he was better off when typecast.

Blum also calls Matt Dillon “not likely to replace Brando,” which is guess is sort of a diss, depending how much one actually seeks to replace Marlon Brando. It’s hard to blame him, he did write it without having seen There’s Something About Mary.

Otherwise, the article paints “the Brat Pack” (whose blurry boundaries are a subject both of both Brats and this piece) as a group of young actors who are perhaps preoccupied with sex and fame, but certainly having the time of their lives. The main thrust of it is that these kids had basically become the center of the pop culture universe and were understandably enjoying every second of it.

Over the blare of rock music, the boys and girls were shouting jokes and stories to one another, talking about their jobs and their classes and their dreams, eating enormous cheeseburgers and washing them down with swigs from long-necked bottles of Corona beer. The waitresses were dressed in punk uniforms, and they smiled and laughed as the boys and girls floated from table to table, partying with the endless spirit of those who have no place to return to, no person waiting nervously at home, no responsibility the next day that could possibly be more important than this night, right here, right now.

Even now, that sounds sexy as hell. Of course people got obsessed with “the Brat Pack.” They wanted to be them. Miles more aspirational than being a Nepo Baby, that’s for sure (with all due begrudging credit to NYMag for being so successful at coining such terms).

Meanwhile, Andrew McCarthy himself gets mentioned exactly one time in it:

For actors so imbued with the ensemble spirit, the Brat Pack members are out for themselves. “Sean is crazy with all of his role preparations, becoming the character in every way,” one says. And of Andrew McCarthy, one of the New York–based actors in St. Elmo’s Fire, a co-star says, “He plays all his roles with too much of the same intensity. I don’t think he’ll make it.” The Brat Packers save their praise for themselves.

Throughout the entire one hour and 50-minute documentary McCarthy never once acknowledges the possibility that seems so obvious when you read the piece: that maybe part of his grudge over the “Brat Pack” label stems from barely being acknowledged as part of it. And only warranting mention when one of his costars (the piece was written as part of the press tour for St. Elmo’s Fire) anonymously trashed him.

I would’ve been salty too! And not because some writer maybe kinda sorta obliquely called me a “brat.”

It seems so much of McCarthy’s journey of self-discovery could’ve gone much quicker if he’d just re-read the thing and gone straight to what was probably the actual source of his hurt: who the hell said that about him? I’m reminded of the late Allan Weisbecker’s axiom about the film industry: no one in Hollywood actually reads anything.

Based on how some of the Brat Pack members react to McCarthy in the film, I’m guessing the culprit was either Estevez (whom Blum was initially sent to profile before expanding it into a trend piece), or Judd Nelson, who successfully avoids McCarthy for the entire film.

Maybe it was Jason Mewes in Dogma who had it right all along.

“See, all these movies take place in this small town called Shermer in Illinois, where all the honeys are top-shelf but the dudes are all whiny pussies. Except for Judd Nelson. He was fuckin' harsh.”