The CineFiles

2 Cool 2B 4Gotten! You can’t talk 1980s John Hughes teen films without talking about the Brat Pack. A group of young actors who starred in most of the teen hits of the decade, the Brat Pack were first described in a 1985 New York magazine story by journalist David Blum about super successful film stars in their early 20s. The membership of the Brat Pack was sort of nebulous, but the original article follows actors Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe and Judd Nelson on a night out on the town in Hollywood, where they are mobbed by groupies at the Hard Rock Cafe.  If there were a Venn diagram to describe who belongs in the core of the Brat Pack, it would generally be where the Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire met.  Core members include Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe and Molly Ringwald. Outer tier members include Robert Downey Jr., James Spader (included in my little yearbook comic for both number balance and because of personal reasons – you are welcome, Jemiah Jefferson, Spader Superfan), as well as many of the cast members of The Outsiders (Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon and C. Thomas Howell.) Other satellite members (perhaps the asteroid belt of young Hollywood that circled its inner planets?) include Matthew Broderick, John Cusack, Kevin Bacon, John Cryer, both Coreys (Haim and Feldman), Jami Gertz, Mary Stuart Masterson, Lou Diamond Phillips, Keifer Sutherland, Lea Thompson and Sean Penn. Weirdly, Mare Winningham from St. Elmo’s Fire was never included in the list.

The article portrayed the young actors as callow and shallow and had such a negative effect on the group that they soon stopped socializing together. Almost everyone from the list went on to make quite a number of films as they aged and many broke out of the mold of teen idols, with a few exceptions.