I had very rapid success with a series of films when I was young. This was in the 1980s, and there was a cultural shift happening and I was in the right place at the right time.
It's hard to imagine now, but Hollywood hasn't always been as obsessed with young people as it is today. But the focus of movies changed seemingly overnight. No longer were 70s directors dictating the type of entertainment we watched. Hollywood discovered the purchasing power of younger audiences and redirected its revenue streams towards them.
I and a group of other young actors benefited from this change of direction, and our careers blossomed quickly, much to our own surprise. Some older actors resented the upheaval, and many in Hollywood chuckled with satisfaction when New York Magazine published a derogatory article lumping our group of young actors together as the “Brat Pack.” We had been rectified and removed from the spot.
People were desperate to make sense of this cultural realignment, and the catchy phrase was a big hit. The nod to the Rat Pack simultaneously placed us in Hollywood's historical continuum and diminished us by stripping us of our individuality. It forever stigmatized my career and that of six others. As the magazine put it, “This was Hollywood's 'Brat Pack.' Like the Rat Pack of the 1960s, the 1980s was a roving band of famous young stars on the prowl in search of parties, women, and a good time.”
We hated the label. We were now members of a club no one wanted to be a part of. I felt like I had lost control of my career narrative overnight. I shook off the “Brat Pack” label, hoping it would go away. But something just didn't make sense to me.
I may have found the term derogatory and belittling, but kids of my generation loved it: being part of the Brat Pack ultimately meant I was one of the cool kids, the kids you wanted to hang out with and emulate, the kids you looked up to.
Who exactly made up the Brat Pack has never been revealed, but that doesn't really matter: the Brat Pack was always more of a concept than a fixed reality, and it left its mark on a generation.
For years, the disconnect between what I experienced and what the public thought created an uneasy relationship. The Brat Pack label hung around every room I walked into. I dragged it around like a corpse of my youth. Then, a few years ago, when I wrote a book about those years, I discovered that something had been happening while I wasn't looking. I not only accepted the label, but came to view it with deep affection. After all, I'd been looking through the wrong end of a telescope, but when I turned it, the view was vast.
For decades, people would approach me on the street and quote lines from these films or tell me how much they meant to them. Many people related their youth to these movies. It was these people who taught me the most. In time, I came to understand that I and the other members of the Brat Pack represented that exciting transitional period, when life was a clean slate and possibilities could be stepped out onto the horizon. We had become emblematic of a generation of young people.
During that frenetic, confusing time in the '80s, the great French film director Claude Chabrol said to me: “My dear child, what is true today is not true tomorrow.” For a long time I didn't understand what he meant, but now maybe I do. Something that I felt was casting a long shadow over me, obscuring my identity, clouding who I knew myself to be, has turned into something like a blessing; a gift I can offer if I just accept the affection of another.
I began thinking about the experiences of other Brat Pack members who hadn't seen each other for decades. Had their perspective on events from so long ago changed in a similar way? Since the Brat Pack was born entirely out of a connection to film, I wondered if it would be OK to film their meeting.
Although some were hesitant to participate, the majority did, and the reunion was joyous. The competitive spirit and insecurity of youth faded away. What remained was recognition and affection for one another among survivors.
But something else also happened during these meetings: the revival and sharing of long-frozen experiences from the past revealed much of what was left of those times as illusion, allowing us to re-experience the Brat Pack in the present. The truth of the past yielded to the truth of today. The Brat Pack was no longer an ancient burden but something that, over time, had been transformed into something we should admire as a cultural touchstone, something to be gazed upon with a shared, bemused affection, something to be reexamined and embraced with something akin to wonder.
