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I Called Them Brats, and I Stand by It
Forty years and a documentary later, I still don’t know why the words “Hollywood’s Brat Pack” caused so much agony.
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. 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. 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.
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