I Called Them Brats, and I Stand by It

Most people credit me with the birth of the Brat Pack. That’s flattering, but not really true. What happened was, I destroyed the Brat Pack. The Brat Pack was left for dead on the night I named them in 1985.

I didn’t set out that evening with premeditated murder in mind, just excitement over the possibility of a cover story. I was 29 years old and restless for success in my new job at New York Magazine when young actors Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, and Rob Lowe agreed to join me for dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe, presumably so confident in their capacity to charm that they neglected to notice my murder weapon: a notebook and pen. While the St. Elmo’s Fire stars amused themselves for hours by repeatedly toasting “na zdorovye!” with vodka shots, shamelessly flirting with an endless parade of eager women, and boldly cutting lines at nearby after-hours nightclubs, I quietly scribbled what I saw. It didn’t take long to land on a line that would perfectly capture the narrative I’d stumbled on — a story vastly more interesting than the one I’d set out to write. Here was Hollywood’s Brat Pack.

I’d originally pitched my editors on a story about Estevez, a lead in the new teen movie The Breakfast Club and a budding movie director at the time, and I went to Los Angeles with that angle in mind. But after a Monday night out, and several days trailing Estevez around Los Angeles, I had a notebook bulging with examples of bratty behavior: Estevez worming his way into an empty movie theater for free, trash-talking actors like Andrew McCarthy, asking me to follow him in his car and then gunning his engine to 90 miles an hour through the hills of Malibu. It wasn’t the profile I’d intended to write, but I felt certain the young 1980s stars I’d grouped together in Estevez’s crew would easily survive a headline. If anything, a good lawyer would get my sentence reduced to involuntary manslaughter.

Nearly four decades later, actor, writer and director Andrew McCarthy has released a Hulu documentary all about the agony inflicted on this era of Hollywood up-and-comers by my two words. Naturally, it’s called Brats. In truth, I still don’t understand why some Brat Packers feel so victimized. My headline paid homage to a beloved Hollywood institution known as the “Rat Pack” — a phrase invented by Lauren Bacall to describe several drunk actors, including Frank Sinatra, David Niven, and her husband, Humphrey Bogart. I applied the term to several actors I hadn’t even met or interviewed; I was aware, for example, that the notion of a “pack” first formed on the set of Taps in early 1981, involving that hunks-in-uniform movie’s three leading men: Sean Penn, Tim Hutton, and Tom Cruise. For Hutton, the added pressure of already winning an Academy Award at the age of 19 (as the troubled kid in Ordinary People) made it an especially stressful shoot, and mandated regular goof-off sessions.

This much had already been documented in “The Angry-Young-Manhood of Timothy Hutton,” a cover story published in May of 1984 in Moviegoer magazine, in which veteran Hollywood journalist Gregg Kilday writes: “Hutton spends much of his free time with other actors and actresses his own age. His friends include Tom Cruise [and] Sean Penn …. the group, says Hutton, offers its members an escape from the constant pressure of their burgeoning careers; by mutual agreement, they avoid talking about their work.” It seemed to me fair game to include Cruise, Penn, and Hutton in my story, along with actors Matt Dillon and Nicolas Cage. Looking back now, I realize I must have deemed the Brat Pack an all-male club — but history has correctly reconfigured the group to include Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, and Molly Ringwald. And some actors have simply decided they were in the Brat Pack, even though they never appeared in my story, hung out at the Hard Rock, behaved brattily or even lived in Los Angeles.

I figured my cover story — with “Hollywood’s Brat Pack” splashed above a publicity still from St. Elmo’s Fire that fortuitously caught Estevez, Nelson, and Lowe in a bar, grinning and hoisting brewskis — would likely annoy these young stars for a few days, and perhaps cause some brief agita among Hollywood publicists who tend to want to control the stories that come out about their clients. Nothing prepared me for the firestorm of attention that resulted. It managed a mention in nearly every St. Elmo’s Fire-related story that year; I saw the phrase inserted in dozens of headlines, profiles and reviews. Johnny Carson name-checked the Brat Pack in his monologue.

But I didn’t hear from anyone directly and still assumed that whatever problems I might have created would blow over. I learned much later that the Brat Pack’s agents and publicists had immediately ordered their clients to avoid one another at all costs — no more Hard Rock burgers, no more na zdorovye! and especially no more ensemble movies. After a couple of weeks of silence, an exhausted, defeated Emilio finally called me at home. I heard his voice in my answering machine, and quickly picked up, naively hoping he was calling to forgive me. It didn’t go quite that way.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Emilio asked, plaintively.

“I don’t know,” I replied, honestly enough. After a long beat of silence, I added, “I’m really sorry.”

I wasn’t, though. And even after he hung up, I felt certain he’d realize that the phrase would be forgotten. He would have his still-ascending career, and I would have mine. But as all too often happens, the actors’ public responses to my story only served to add fuel to the fire. Lowe and Nelson lashed out at me repeatedly in interviews, “David Blum burned a lot of bridges,” Lowe seethed to the Chicago Sun-Times. “He burned people early in their careers. He took on the wrong people, though. He’s not Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe; he’s David Blum living in a cheap flat.” (I did indeed rent a two-bedroom Upper West Side apartment near an express stop for only $1,500.)

Penn piled on. “All it is, is a condescending load of shit written by some person with a big vibrator up his ass,” the Fast Times at Ridgemont High star said dismissively in an American Film interview. “Sometimes writers, like actors, like anybody, do their work to impress three or four of their cool friends in Soho.” (For the record, I only had two cool friends in Soho, and they weren’t the least bit impressed.)

Despite this tongue-lashing, I still maintain my story didn’t change anyone’s career trajectory. Sure, in the ensuing decades some members of the Brat Pack would subsequently fail to reach the starry heights they’d dreamed of when they first got famous. Was that my fault? It certainly seemed so to less successful members, who have watched the phrase live on for almost 40 years. In 2017, Judd Nelson told Bret Easton Ellis on his podcast that “I should have punched him out when it happened.” Ahead of the premiere of Brats at the Tribeca Film Festival last week, where I appeared on a post-screening panel with McCarthy, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy and Jon Cryer, a friend texted me wise words: “The distance from Judd Nelson to John Wilkes Booth may not be that far.”

But the fact that a Brat Pack documentary even exists in 2024 — let alone deserves a Times Square billboard, a glittering red-carpet premiere and an after-party — demonstrates the lasting and emotionally resonant hold this group of actors had on the culture, then and now. McCarthy’s cleverly edited film, even while purporting to portray the Brat Pack as put-upon by the phrase, manages to smooth over the fact that no real animus exists anymore between the Brat Pack actors and me. At the end of our interview, McCarthy and I even hugged it out, sitcom style. At the Brats premiere, Demi Moore introduced herself to me, and clasped my hands in hers as though greeting an old friend.

In truth, the Brat Pack has been ingrained as a happy memory for a generation of moviegoers who came of age in the 1980s, learning life lessons from the likes of directors John Hughes, Francis Ford Coppola, Cameron Crowe, Paul Brickman, Joel Schumacher and Amy Heckerling. They’re avatars of a once-vibrant celebrity culture that minted movie stars to last a lifetime, not a year or two. The epic, enduring star power of Brat Packers like Cruise, Lowe, and Penn — with Robert Downey Jr. and Matthew Broderick right there with them — have kept the Brat Pack brand alive and well. They’ve racked up a remarkable record of durability in an industry that now casts actors aside on a daily basis.

It struck me as an odd omission that the Brat Pack’s current careers and successes don’t even earn a mention in McCarthy’s Brats. Maybe all their success contradicts McCarthy’s thesis that the Brat Pack moniker mortally wounded everyone in its path. “You’re called a brat!” McCarthy whines to Demi Moore, who correctly pushes back by asking, “Why did we take it as something bad?”