Brat pack

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Brat Pack is a name for a generation of actors that established itself in clique films in the early to mid-1980s , in which the same actors often appeared together. They also met privately and were known to be wild partiers.

Her films were mostly intended for a young audience, whose enthusiasm for the majority of these actors waned as both the audience and the roles grew up.

Origin of the term

Brat Pack ( brat , English for ' brat ' or 'bellows'; pack , English for 'pack', 'pack'), also alluding to the Rat Pack , the group around Frank Sinatra (with Sammy Davis Jr. , Dean Martin et al), which is said to have been dubbed for the first time by actress Lauren Bacall . The term Brat Pack originated from a cover story in New York Magazine on June 10, 1985. In this article, author David Blum describes the wild partying behavior of a group of young actors in their 20s who have worked together in various films since the early 1980s. Even if the article highlights the talent of the young actors in part, including the lack of acting training as a criterion for membership, it is very critical, especially in its description of the group behavior and its starry airs. Most of the actors named in this way did not like the term and even blamed the article for the decline of their careers.

Members

The collaboration between the Brat-Pack members goes back to school age, with Charlie Sheen , Sean Penn , Chris Penn , Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe making Super 8 films together as young people . In the eponymous article in New York magazine of June 10, 1985, author David Blum initially assigned the actors Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson , Tom Cruise , Timothy Hutton , Matt Dillon , Nicolas Cage , Sean Penn and Matthew Broderick to the Brat Pack . The (core) group was later defined by the main actors of the films The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire - The Passion Burns Deep and, according to popular opinion, comprised eight actors:

In the course of time, this circle expanded to include more actors, as the increasing number of films also increased the frequency of roles with certain actors.

The Brat Pack also includes C. Thomas Howell , Mare Winningham and - due to their involvement in The Outsider - Matt Dillon , Ralph Macchio , Diane Lane and Tom Cruise .

Filmography

Essentially, the main actors from the films The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire are summarized today under Brat Pack . Other Brat-Pack films include Die Outsider , Class , Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink .

The literary brat pack

The term also had a similar meaning in American literature. From the mid-1980s onwards, a series of debut novels by hopeful young writers that addressed the process of growing up and became very successful in the course of this hype was aggressively marketed as the “literary brat pack”.

This loose group included the media, such as B. Pages Magazine, initially the following authors and works:

Other media such as Spy Magazine have included the following people on various occasions:

In addition to dealing with aging and topics such as drug abuse, consumption, lovesickness and disorientation, the novels shared a mostly thoughtful and sometimes even cynical view of social classes. Usually a fictional story was combined with the real culture of the 1980s (including music). Therefore, the novels are now considered an important part of popular literature . In many cases, they also shared the narrative perspective of the first-person narration .

Four of the authors listed here (Ellis, Eisenstadt, Tartt and Lethem) had also studied at the liberal Bennington College in Vermont , the most expensive college for the visual arts in the USA at the time.

A brief discussion of his time in the "literary Brat Pack" can be found in Bret Easton Ellis' semi-biographical book Lunar Park (2006).

See also

literature

  • Jonathan Bernstein: Pretty in Pink. The Golden Age of Teenage Cinema. New York 1997. ISBN 0-312-15194-2
  • Steven Paul Davies, Andrew Pulver: Brat Pack Confidential . Batsford, London 2003, ISBN 0-7134-8685-6 (English)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ David Blum : Hollywood's Brat Pack . In: New York . June 10, 1985, pp. 40-47.
  2. ↑ Samantha Miller, Dan Jewel: Brat Race. In: People . April 19, 1999.