Demi Moore, left, and Andrew McCarthy in the documentary Brats.The Associated Press
He hated the word brat, and he disagreed with pack. But ever since a 1985 New York Magazine cover story by David Blum brushed off Andrew McCarthy and a loose constellation of his fellow twentysomething stars as “Hollywood’s Brat Pack” – Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Tim Hutton, Ally Sheedy, Tom Cruise, Judd Nelson, Matt Dillon and Sean Penn – McCarthy has been struggling to reconcile the story’s impact on his career and psyche.
Though Blum didn’t interview him, and though he’s barely mentioned in the piece, it’s clearly an engrossing struggle for McCarthy (Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire): He wrote a book about it in 2021, Brat: An ‘80s Story, and now he’s directed a documentary about it, too: Brats, arriving on Disney+ June 28.
Watching it, I felt something quite different from what McCarthy, now 61, intended: a shimmering nostalgia for the once-great power of magazines.
I moved to New York in 1984 and to Los Angeles in 1990, both times to write for GQ, and I have to admit, magazine journalists had it great and for a while. Preinternet, presocial media, precellphone camera, even pre-Entertainment Tonight – magazines were where people outside the VIP room found a way inside. They had a sensibility; they aggregated cool ideas; they opened vistas. If an actor wanted to demonstrate clout, they had to land a cover.
At GQ and later, at magazines I freelanced for, we usually required – and received – three separate, hour-long interviews for a cover: one on set at the actor’s current project; one out and about somewhere, for colour; and one in their home, where we could snoop around.
McCarthy ends up seeking peace for himself by visiting the story's writer, David Blum.The Associated Press
I went to a Herb Ritts photo shoot with Julia Roberts; roamed the Getty Museum with Meg Ryan before it opened to the public; got chased through a Prague graveyard with Kyle Maclachlan by a busload of Spanish teenage Twin Peaks fans; watched Melissa Etheridge sing to Woody Harrelson at his huge 30th birthday bash on his Malibu grounds; flew to Spain to meet the family Gwyneth Paltrow lived with during a high school exchange program; hung out at Jeff Bridges’s house and chatted with his dad, Lloyd. For a single Johnny Depp cover story, Premiere flew me to the English set of Sleepy Hollow, then to Paris, where Depp failed to turn up, then to L.A., where we met in this new club he was about to open on Sunset Strip, the Viper Room.
Which is all to say, the fact that Blum spent a night on the town for his piece with Estevez, Nelson and Lowe while they got rowdy-drunk and picked up women wasn’t remarkable at the time. But as Brats points out, they were in their early 20s – it was new to them. The story arrived precisely at the hinge point where Hollywood decided to stop making films for adults and instead to court teenagers; these baby actors were largely untrained, on top of the world and ripe for a takedown. “It was naïve of me to think a journalist would be my friend,” Estevez acknowledges in the documentary.
“Never trust anyone again,” was Nelson’s takeaway.
In the documentary, McCarthy traverses New York and California, visiting members of the alleged Pack, most of whom he hasn’t seen in 30 years – since, he claims, That Article made them all stop working together. He begins with the actors who felt the most affected – Estevez (“Suddenly we were Kryptonite to each other”), Sheedy (“We were written off”) – and journeys to those who let the magazine piece roll off their back like water from a fabulous outdoor rain shower: Demi Moore (“Andrew, you made it mean something about you that created a limitation in your expression”), Rob Lowe (“We had fun, and there would have been no CW or Friends without us”).
McCarthy does not mention that in 1988, Lowe survived a much bigger threat to his career, the release of a grainy videotape of him having sex with two women, one of whom was underage. (I watched it on cable television, on a show produced by Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine.) Nor does McCarthy mention that in August, 1991, Moore created her own, even more sensational magazine moment when she posed naked and ripely pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair.
McCarthy does include a spit-take (for me) moment where he drops a printout of Blum’s piece on Estevez’s kitchen counter – Estevez: “I’ve seen it online;” McCarthy: “Yeah, but look at it in print!” – and they marvel at how long it was. (A typical cover story ran 3,000 to 6,000 words. For comparison, this column is 1,100.) There’s also a poignant moment with Hutton, who objects to being branded, that reminded me there was a time when actors did not want to be brands.
Finally, McCarthy seeks peace by visiting Blum himself, and these two end up having the most in common. Both have the scratchy insecurities of an outsider looking in. Each hopes the article isn’t what they’re remembered for. And of course, it’s a headline on both their Wikipedia pages.
Though Blum flatly does not apologize for his hot take, the Brats certainly get their revenge through real estate. Moore has the best house (and clearly, the best therapist), a sleek aerie made of wood and glass, perched on a mountain surrounded by trees. Lowe’s sunny kitchen opens onto a vast, uninterrupted stretch of Pacific Ocean. Blum’s cluttered New York apartment features a window-unit air conditioner and the ugliest blue carpet you will ever see. Plus, McCarthy does not edit the shot where Blum’s pale belly sticks out from under his shirt.
In the end, McCarthy seems happy he made the film, but if he’d run it by a magazine journalist – me – I’d have pressed him on a few points. He interviews no studio heads or producers about whether Brat Pack-ness changed which films they made or who they cast. He doesn’t ask his manager or casting director, “Who lost jobs because of it, and which ones?” He doesn’t acknowledge that the most damning line about him in Blum’s piece came not from the journalist, but from an unnamed co-star who claimed that McCarthy played all his roles with too much intensity, adding, “I don’t think he’ll make it.” And he doesn’t even float the idea that maybe several of the Brats went on to long, award-winning careers because they simply had more talent.
McCarthy’s film gets this right, though: The days of the magazine cover as cultural touchstone are long over. Not only would no publicist allow a client to be so unguarded, no one needs to. Stars control their own image, on social. Are the stories they tell about themselves more interesting now, without a journalist mediating them? Are they truer? You tell me.