Brat Pack
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The "Brat Pack" was a group of young actors and actresses that became famous in the 1980s and frequently appeared in teen-oriented films together. The name "Brat Pack" came from a 1985 cover story in New York magazine by David Blum (June 10 1985, pp. 40-47). The term is a play on the Rat Pack from the 1960s. Popular films that featured members of the "Brat Pack" include:
- The Outsiders (1983)
- Sixteen Candles (1984)
- The Breakfast Club (1985)
- St. Elmo's Fire (1985)
- Weird Science (1985)
- About Last Night (1986)
- Pretty in Pink (1986)
- The Lost Boys (1987)
- Young Guns (1988)
The actors most often mentioned as Brat Pack members are:
- Emilio Estevez
- Anthony Michael Hall
- Rob Lowe
- Andrew McCarthy
- Judd Nelson
- Molly Ringwald
- Ally Sheedy
- Demi Moore
- Mare Winningham
Other actors could be considered auxiliary members of the Pack: Tom Cruise, C. Thomas Howell, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Melissa Gilbert, Charlie Sheen, James Spader, Robert Downey, Jr., Jennifer Grey, Kevin Bacon, Jami Gertz, Kiefer Sutherland, John Cusack and Matthew Broderick. Frequent directors of Brat Pack films were John Hughes and Joel Schumacher.
The name Literary Brat Pack was given to a quartet of up and coming, young, and mediagenic authors in the 1980s: Jay McInerney, Mark Lindquist, Bret Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz. While their books did not have much in common, they were seen by the public as closely related because of the way they were typical 80s celebrities, making videos on MTV, and because of the way they wrote about and typified pop culture trends of the 1980s. Three of the four, Ellis, Lindquist, and McInerney, were edited and published by Gary Fisketjon. All were known to party together and their books were collectively hyped. Lindquist, however, was based in Los Angeles, while the others were in New York City.
Pages Magazine, in the 2005 September/October issue, published a Where Are They Now piece about all four of them, reporting that Ellis and Janowitz had new books out and Lindquist and McInerney were working on new books. Their main impact on literature was making it relevant for young people.
There is a song entitled "Brat Pack" by The Rocket Summer
