Documentary on 1980s ‘Brat Pack’ to feature Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald and more

A new documentary that hones in on The Brat Pack will drop on Hulu on June 13.

If you were a teenager in the 1980s, you’d be well familiar with the ‘Brat Pack’, a group consisting of Hollywood’s biggest box office stars of the day – many of whom featured in movies together and several of them pairing up on the real-life romance front.

On set or off set, the media and paparazzi couldn’t get enough of these celebs, hounding them as much as today’s TMZ might.

Key members of the pack were Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Timothy Hutton, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Robert Downey Jr and Andrew McCarthy.

McCarthy himself directed the doco, aptly titled Brats, calling on his old pals to dig up much ancient history and seeing the film icons reflecting on their memorable rise to fame.

Key films that featured members of the Brat Pack include The Lost Boys, St. Elmo’s Fire, Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, War Games and Pretty In Pink, but perhaps the biggest blockbuster of them all was the John Hughe’s classic The Breakfast Club.

McCarthy says that the hype surrounding this band of so-called radicals began with a 1985 cover story in New York magazine that gave the budding stars the enduring label.

“I just remember seeing that cover and thinking, ‘Oh, fuck,'” he recalls in the trailer. “From then on, my career and the career of everyone who was involved was branded to the Brat Pack.”

The trailer then shows McCarthy reaching out to his fellow Brats to get their take on the experience. When he connects with Estevez, he notes that the actor has spent years avoiding the topic.

Says Rob Lowe of the group’s influence, “Being in the Brat Pack not only changed all of our lives, it changed what entertainment is.”

McCarthy said that before making the doco, he hadn’t connected with many Brat Pack members for ages. “I hadn’t seen Rob Lowe in 30 years, Emilio Estevez in 35 years. Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy… I went to each of them and said, ‘Hey, will you talk to me about this? Because we were members of a club that we didn’t ask to join that no one else was. We’re the only ones that know what it was like.”

Being a part of the ‘club’ meant constantly making headlines with everything they did, from beginning new relationships to breaking up from them, partying in clubs to detoxing off drugs. It’ll be interesting to see if the doco covers anything on the brattiest of them all, Charlie Sheen. We’ll have to wait and see.

Antonino Tati

For now, the only way to access Hulu in Australia is to use a VPN: a virtual private network masks your location and tricks Hulu into thinking you’re accessing it from within the U.S. or Japan. Try it on one of the VPNs available to download here.