Simple Minds’ eternal lyrics of “Don’t you forget about me” at the end of 1985’s “The Breakfast Club” ring truer than ever as members of the Brat Pack have reunited for a look back at their success in the decades of decadence. However, “St. Elmo’s Fire” star Andrew McCarthy, who directed the new Hulu documentary “Brats,” admitted that he and his fellow actors didn’t always appreciate the term coined by a journalist at the time.
McCarthy told “Good Morning America,” “It was such a crazy thing when it first happened. We all hated it. Who wants to be called a brat when you’re a kid? Particularly when you’re a kid, and you think you are a brat, so you don’t want to be called it, and you don’t want to be a member of a pack and all that, and we felt it affected our lives, you know?” He added, “Over time, it’s become this wonderfully iconic, affectionate term, you know? And so I just want to see what everybody’s relationship to it was.” McCarthy stressed that being part of the Brat Pack was “like a relationship” in itself. He said, “It’s followed me – every day I hear it.” McCarthy told People Magazine that while the public appreciated the term, the industry didn’t.
He explained, “It had professional ramifications. The public embraced us, but the business reacted to it in a negative way.” McCarthy told GMA he “thought it’d be great to go back and reconnect with the old gang. I hadn’t seen most of them in about 30 years. It was such a seminal moment in all our lives, and none of us had ever talked about it before, so I just thought it’d be good to sort of go see what everybody felt about it.” He added that despite initially hating the moniker, some in the group have a different view all these years later. “As you get old, you start to look back on your past in a different way and go, ‘You know, that was a beautiful thing.’”
McCarthy said he hadn’t seen some members of the Brat Pack in 30 years. “Rob [Lowe] and I walk into, you know, he walks into the room, and I hug him, and he’s like ‘How long has it been,’ and I’m like, ‘I think 30 years.’” He said he hadn’t seen Emilio Estevez since the premiere night of “St. Elmo’s Fire.” David Blum of New York Magazine first coined the term Brat Pack in 1985 when he compared the teen stars to the infamous Rat Pack. The stars, who came of age in the 1980s with movies like “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “The Breakfast Club,” “About Last Night…,” “Sixteen Candles” and “Pretty in Pink,” defined a generation’s teen angst and became a pop culture touchstone.
Along with McCarthy, the Brat Pack members include Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald, Lowe, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Estevez and Jon Cryer, among others. However, which actors fit into the group hasn’t always been clear. Nelson told Us Weekly earlier this year that he wasn’t interested in reminiscing with the others.