For almost 40 years, actor and writer Andrew McCarthy has suffered from what he terms PTSD — but it doesn’t involve the usual Hollywood ills like substance abuse, stays in rehab or messy divorces.
His trauma stems from a notorious New York Magazine cover story from 1985, about a group of popular young actors (including Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez and others), that was headlined: “Hollywood’s Brat Pack.”
Reading it today, David Blum’s article about hanging out with a group of movie stars with the world — and many women — at their feet as they hit Hollywood clubs and sow their wild oats seems tame and fun.
But for McCarthy, now 61, the “Brat Pack” label ghettoized and diminished the actors, who were part of a talented new generation of young stars heating up the box office with movies like “St. Elmo’s Fire” — considered the pre-eminent Brat Pack film — “The Breakfast Club,” “Taps,” “The Outsiders,” “Pretty in Pink,” “About Last Night,” “Sixteen Candles” and others.
“Oh f–k,” was McCarthy’s first reaction to seeing the cover story, as he reveals in “BRATS,” a new documentary he wrote, directed and stars in.
“I just thought that was terrible instantly. And it turns out, I was right. The article was scathing about all these young actors. And the phrase being such a clever, witty phrase, it caught the zeitgeist instantly and burned deep and that was it. From then on my career and the career of everyone involved was branded to the ‘Brat Pack,’” he says in the doc.
“BRATS,” which premiered at the Tribeca Festival this weekend and begins airing on Hulu Thursday, is McCarthy’s somewhat head-scratching journey into what was, for him, the heart of darkness of that bygone era immortalized by Blum’s catchy phrase.
“We were branded as ‘partying, wanting to have a good time, get famous’…,” he says in the movie.
“I’ve never talked to anybody about what that was like. It certainly was the defining thing in my life. And I imagined it was in theirs as well. So I thought it might be interesting to try and contact everyone who was in the Brat Pack or who might have been associated with it.”
Exactly who was officially a member remains a bit of a parlor game to this day.
Estevez, Lowe, McCarthy and Nelson, along with Anthony Michael Hall, Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy, are often cited as the pre-eminent Brat Pack members — with Tom Cruise, Sean Penn, Timothy Hutton sometimes included in the group.
Brat Pack-adjacent members include Jon Cryer, James Spade, Robert Downey Jr., Kevin Bacon, Matthew Broderick, Lea Thompson and Mare Winningham.
Blum’s story was originally just supposed to profile Emilio Estevez, now 62.
But when Estevez, who is Charlie Sheen’s older brother, invited Blum out to a night at the Hard Rock Cafe with his buddies and co-stars including Lowe and Nelson, Blum realized there was a bigger piece showing life inside their hot, privileged bubble.
“The Brat Pack is to the 1980s what the Rat Pack was to the 1960s — a roving band of famous young stars on the prowl for parties, women and a good time,” Blum wrote in the 1985 article.
“And just like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr., these guys work together, too — they’ve carried their friendships over from life into the movies. They make major movies with big directors and get fat contracts and limousines. They have top agents and protective PR people. They have legions of fans who write them letters, buy them drinks, follow them home. And, most important, they sell movie tickets.”
McCarthy is mentioned only once in Blum’s article, in a derogatory aside made by one of McCarthy’s co-stars in “St. Elmo’s Fire” who was not named.
““He plays all his roles with too much of the same intensity. I don’t think he’ll make it,” the unidentified castmate said of McCarthy.
Blum, who has in the past expressed some regrets over the article, did not return a call from The Post.
He appears briefly in the doc with McCarthy, People writes, and the two have a rapprochement as Blum explains the infamous headline was meant to be clever, not cruel.
Fortunately for McCarthy, many of his big-name former co-stars and peers of that era, including Estevez, Lowe, Sheedy, Hutton, Cryer and Moore agreed to be interviewed for “BRATS.”
Most of them he hadn’t seen, McCarthy says in it, for 35 years.
To an extent, that unidentified castmate was right.
McCarthy has not had the same success as some of the group he started out with, like Moore, Cruise and Lowe, but he’s worked steadily as an actor and director and has had a critically-lauded career as an author and travel writer.
He is married to his second wife, Irish writer and actress Dolores Rice, and has three children, one of whom, Sam McCarthy, 22, is an actor.
In the film, McCarthy is seen driving everywhere from Estevez’s Malibu home to somewhere in the upstate New York woods to check in with Hutton.
An especially gracious Ally Sheedy talks to McCarthy in her living room.
None of the actors seem to be as affected by the Brat Pack label as McCarthy, but they all gamely play along, reflecting on their own issues with it.
A running theme in the documentary is McCarthy’s frequent admissions of what appears to be low self-esteem.
In the film, he refers to himself as sometimes being “shame-based” and often feeling as if he is being “stabbed in the back” for no reason.
“I always felt like he was sort of an insider in some clubs, and I always felt like a guy on the outside,” McCarthy muses as he drives to Estevez’s house. “I lived in New York all the other guys lived here and Emilio seemed to know more than anybody like what the deal was.”
Estevez, like Sheedy and, to some degree, Lowe and others, agreed that he didn’t like the article and had felt betrayed.
“I had done some press but nothing to the extent of a real profile and it really made me think it was naive of me to think that this journalist would in fact, be my friend,” Estevez tells McCarthy in the film. “The most upsetting part of it was that I had already seen a different path for myself and I felt derailed.”
McCarthy visits a barefoot, blue-jean-clad Moore at her home and she is sympathetic to his belief that the Brat Pack label was a bit of a stigma.
But then she leans into McCarthy as if she were his therapist and gives him a bit of a reality check.
“Why did we take it as an offense? That’s why did we take it as something bad?” asks Moore, whose own real-life traumas include a neglectful, alcoholic mother, a father who killed himself and being raped as a teenager.
Moore was once engaged to Estevez and admits she had a sober minder on the set of “St. Elmo’s Fire” as she successfully battled to stay sober.
“I was irritated and felt it was a real limited perspective,” Moore says in the movie about reading the article for the first time. “But I don’t know if I took it as that personal over time, maybe then as you did. Yes it came out and it tried to diminish us but it was also an opportunity to rise above it and say no, I am much more than that.”
Moore suggests to McCarthy that the Brat Pack article was a form of something she called “an againstness,” adding that for McCarthy to continue to view it as something negative and see people as against him it would only perpetuate the problem.
“Againstness only provokes againstness,” Moore said. “Then you’re predisposed to re-creating it until you hit a point where you don’t want to do that anymore.”
Molly Ringwald, who is seen in clips from her movies, declined to participate but sounded as if she adheres to Moore’s philosophy.
“Molly said she’d think about it,” McCarthy tells Jon Cryer when they meet up and Cryer asks if he’s spoken to their “Pretty In Pink” co-star, “but that she’d probably just like to keep looking forward.”
