Opinion | The Brat Pack, Reconsidered

When I was a very young man I became very successful very quickly in a string of movies. It was the 1980s, and I was in the right place at the right time, as a cultural shift was taking place.

It’s difficult to imagine now, but Hollywood was not always as enamored of the young as it is today. But seemingly overnight the focus of films shifted. No longer would the auteurs of the ’70s dictate the type of entertainment we would watch. Hollywood had discovered the purchasing power of a young audience and refocused its moneymaking tractor beam directly on it.

I and a cluster of other young actors were the beneficiaries of this redirection, and our careers quickly flourished — surprising no one more than us. There were some in the old guard who resented this upheaval, and when a disparaging article in New York magazine appeared lumping a group of us young actors as the Brat Pack, many in Hollywood snickered with satisfaction. We had been put in our place, brought down to size.

People had been eager to get a handle on this cultural realignment, and the catchy turn of phrase caught fire. The nod to the Rat Pack placed us on a historical Hollywood continuum while simultaneously reducing us by stripping our individuality. My career and those of a half dozen others were forever branded. As the magazine put it: “This is the Hollywood ‘Brat Pack.’ It is to the 1980s what the Rat Pack was to the 1960s — a roving band of famous young stars on the prowl for parties, women and a good time.”

We hated the tag. We were now members of a club none of us wished to join. I felt that I lost control of the narrative of my career overnight. I tried to shrug off the Brat Pack label, hoping it would fade. But I didn’t understand something.

While I may have felt the term was pejorative and diminishing, the young people of my generation loved it. Being in the Brat Pack meant that I was one of the ultimate cool kids, the ones you wanted to hang out with, to emulate — we were the ones you admired.

There has never been a precise accounting of which actors constituted the Brat Pack, but that is largely beside the point. The Brat Pack was always more of an idea than any fixed reality. And it put a stamp on a generation.

For years the disconnect between what I experienced and what the public felt made for an uneasy alliance. The Brat Pack preceded me into every room I entered. I dragged it behind me like the carcass of youth. Then a few years ago I wrote a book about that time and discovered something had happened while I wasn’t looking. I had grown not only to accept the Brat Pack but also to regard it with deep affection. It turns out, I had been peering through the wrong end of the telescope, and when I spun it around, the view was expansive.

People had approached me on the street for decades to quote lines from those films or to express how much they meant to them. Many people spoke about their own youth in relation to those films. Those are the people who taught me the most. I eventually came to understand that I and the other members of the Brat Pack represented that thrilling transitional time when life was a blank slate to be written upon, when possibility was just a step over the horizon. We had become the avatars of youth for a certain generation.

During that heady and confusing time in the ’80s, the great French film director Claude Chabrol said to me, “My dear boy, the truth today is not the truth tomorrow.” For so long I didn’t understand what he meant, but perhaps now I do. Something that had cast such a long shadow over me, that I felt had obscured my identity and even clouded who I perceived myself to be, had transformed into something like a blessing. It was a gift I could offer others by merely accepting their affection.

I began to wonder about the experience of other Brat Pack members, most of whom I hadn’t seen in decades. Had their perspective on the events of so long ago shifted in a similar fashion? I had the notion that since the Brat Pack came into existence entirely because of its relation to film, I might film the encounters.

A few of the pack were reluctant to participate, but with the majority who did, our reunions were sweet. Gone was the competitive and anxious edge of youth. What remained was a survivor’s recognition and mutual affection.

But something else happened during those meetings — by reviving and sharing experiences of our long-frozen past, so much of the detritus of that time was revealed to be a phantom that fell away, allowing the Brat Pack to be reexperienced in the present. The truth of the past had yielded to the truth of today. No longer an ancient albatross, the Brat Pack had been transformed by time into something to be celebrated by us as the cultural touchstone it was, a thing to be looked upon at last with a shared and bemused affection — re-examined and embraced with something akin to wonder.