Jake Tapper Gets Starstruck by Brat Pack’s Andrew McCarthy on CNN: ‘My Life Is Flashing Before My Eyes Here’ | Video
Ahead of an interview about Andrew McCarthy’s documentary “Brats,” which explores the group of young actors who became known in the 1980s as the Brat Pack, he and CNN’s Jake Tapper took in a series of clips from the movie that featured key players, including Rob Lowe and Demi Moore — prompting Tapper to gush, “My life is flashing before my eyes here.”
“My life too,” McCarthy replied in the Wednesday interview, before he added that he and the other members of the group — typically defined as Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe and Anthony Michael Hall — thought the term was “really a pejorative negative thing.”
“I mean, who wants to be called a brat?” he continued. “Who wants to be stuck in a pack? And it changed our lives, really.”
Andrew McCarthy: "Brat Pack" was part of a "cultural shift". Watch the full video here: https://t.co/WaUSaMbT1P pic.twitter.com/vpXMY0tUdD
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McCarthy added that though he once “hated” the term, his feelings have “changed pretty much 180 degrees,” which became the motivation for the documentary.
“I hated it so much when I was a kid, and now I’ve grown to realize it’s probably the greatest blessing of my professional life,” he said. “And so, I thought I’d go see what everybody else thought about it, because I haven’t talked to most of those guys in 30 years.”
Not everyone participated in the documentary. The most notable absences are Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson, who both starred in “The Breakfast Club” alongside Estevez, Hall and Sheedy. Nelson, Estevez and Sheedy also joined the cast of “St. Elmo’s Fire,” the second movie that defined the “Brat Pack” era.
McCarthy and Tapper touched on the “real seismic cultural shift” the two films and their casts caused at the time. “I mean, before that, movies were adult entertainment — you know, ‘The French Connection,’ ‘The Godfather’ … and then suddenly Hollywood discovered that kids go to the movies five, six, seven times, grown-ups go once,” McCarthy said.
The solution? Studios thought, “Let’s make movies for kids.”
The pre-internet, pre-social media era meant “it was such a unified youth culture then, because now everything is so fractured.”
“But back then,” McCarthy continued, “everybody was looking in the same direction, and the direction they ended up looking was our direction.”
It is unclear exactly why Ringwald and Nelson didn’t participate in the film. In a February interview with NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Ringwald said she should have worked with director John Hughes on a fourth movie after the success of their first three (“Sixteen Candles” in 1984, “The Breakfast Club” in 1985 and “Pretty in Pink” in 1986), but at the time she hoped to diversify her acting chops.
When she was asked by Hughes to star in 1987’s “Some Kind of Wonderful,” Ringwald said no. “He asked me to do it, but I didn’t. Because at that point I was really worried about people never seeing me in another project,” she said. “So that was my feeling, was that I had to work with somebody else because I was going to get typecast. But you know what? I got typecast anyway, so I should’ve just kept working with him.”
You can watch an excerpt of the interview with Andrew McCarthy and Jake Tapper in the video above and the full interview at CNN.
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