Andrew McCarthy: How the Brat Pack Conquered Hollywood—and Then Fell Apart

There may still be debate about who, precisely, was in the Brat Pack (Ally Sheedy? Yes. Kiefer Sutherland? No), but there’s little argument about the seismic cultural impact of the informal group and its catchy moniker, which was first coined by David Blum’s 1985 New York cover story.

For the world, the term “Brat Pack”—a cheeky riff on the Rat Pack—was a catch-all way to refer to the young actors who were taking Hollywood by storm. For those on-the-rise artists, however, the nickname was less a cutesy blessing than a demeaning curse.

Four decades after it solidified their reputations and personas, Andrew McCarthy—one of the clique’s leading lights—revisits its legacy, and its effect on his own, with Brats, a feature-length documentary, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival ahead of its Hulu debut on June 13. The film chronicles the whirlwind phenomenon and, it turns out, the tricky process of looking back and learning to both accept the good and let go of the bad.

Read more at The Daily Beast.