Did Andrew McCarthy convince me he wasn't a brat?

Like many people my age, movies like The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire were critical to growing up. I can recite lines from both movies verbatim, even though I haven’t watched either for a couple of years. Like many guys, I had a crush on Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy, and let’s be honest Rob Lowe and Judd Nelson were the epitome of cool.

So, when I saw a promo for the new documentary ‘Brats’ about the Brat Pack I was excited to check it out. Only recently, after listening to the Rewatchables podcast episode for St. Elmo’s Fire I learned that the members of the Brat Pack found this title offensive. There was an interview with Rob Lowe where he talked about it and how the title had impacted them. I’ll admit that as a teenager living in Australia, I didn’t read New York Magazine, so the actual genesis of the title “Brat Pack” was unknown to me.

I was hoping that this documentary was going to be a revisit to those movies that played a large part in my psyche, engaging with the original cast and maybe learning more about them. What I got, however, was vastly different.

The documentary is directed and mostly narrated by Andrew McCarthy, he opens up about how the title being applied to him impacted his career and how after that happened, he didn’t work with any of his Brat Pack alumni again. He then starts wondering how profoundly the article and the title being applied had impacted his colleagues. McCarthy then starts calling people that he hasn’t spoken to in 30 years or trying to track down their contact details (Judd Nelson is the most elusive of all).

It then is a journey of catching up with old cast mates and others who were “Brat Pack adjacent”, as Lea Thompson described herself. There was less talk about the movies and how they’d made them stars and more about how McCarthy felt wronged by the article. Others don’t seem to have carried their resentment into later life, instead either accepting that it was a point in time or simply leaving it in the past.

At one point, Marci Liroff, the casting director for several Brat Pack films including Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire, points out that even at the time she saw the title as a positive. McCarthy, however, won’t stand for someone telling him there was a silver lining and continues to lament the issues he perceives that his career had after the title was labeled on him.

The meeting between McCarthy and David Blum, the original author of the article in New York magazine showed a degree of irony that McCarthy didn’t detect. Blum acknowledged that he was young and trying to get a bit of a name for himself, the same thing that McCarthy and his fellow Packers were also doing. Whilst Blum wouldn’t state that he could have written some things about the group nicer, he was also surprised by how much they disliked the article and the title which has endured over 30 years.

It is worth pointing out that after St. Elmo’s Fire, McCarthy went on to star in a few more blockbusters including Mannequin, Less than Zero, and Weekend at Bernie’s. He has 85 credits as an actor on IMDB and a further 28 as a director. Sure, he hasn’t had some of the stellar success many of his colleagues had after St. Elmo’s Fire, but he’s been working relatively steadily in the entertainment industry which doesn’t always accept people aging.

As already mentioned, even though most of the other Brat Packers were happy to appear on screen, Judd Nelson was a no-show, but I will say the recycled Breakfast Club ending was pretty fitting.

In short, if you’re trying to say you weren’t a brat all those years ago, and your approach is to complain about an article and that being the reason you’re not successful, then maybe the title of a brat is appropriate.