In truth, they were barely a pack at all. Despite some casting that put a bunch of 20ish-year-old actors in the same movies, Emilio Estevez and Molly Ringwald and Demi Moore and Jon Cryer and Tom Cruise and Andrew McCarthy and Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn all ended up on different career tracks. Some of them knew one another socially, and a bunch of ensemble movies like The Breakfast Club had grouped them in the public eye. Very broadly speaking, they displayed a vague generational similarity of acting style onscreen, a sort of earnest naturalism — or perhaps you could convince yourself that they did. There were a lot of movies for and about teenagers being made, so there were a lot of teen parts for them at that moment. Also, a few of the guys, particularly Estevez, Rob Lowe, and Andrew McCarthy, looked a little bit alike. They shared a vibe — pretty, clean-cut suburban boy with a faint tinge of misbehavior — that almost compelled one to lump them together.

In early 1985, David Blum, a 29-year-old writer on contract to New York, had just published an uncontroversial feature about the sale of The New York Review of Books. Perhaps looking for something showier, he pitched a profile of the young actor Emilio Estevez to run after the release of The Breakfast Club (which had come out in February 1985) and preceding that of St. Elmo’s Fire (due in late June). The interview session with Estevez went well, and the actor invited Blum to tag along into the evening as he met a couple of his friends. The guys were not dramatically ill-behaved — at most they were crass and entitled, young-handsome-bro actors being young-handsome-bro actors — and Blum expanded the story to include some scenes of them flirting with starstruck girls, talking their way past velvet ropes, and getting into some relatively tame shenanigans. Blum gave this circle a playful name, riffing on the Frank Sinatra–Dean Martin–Sammy Davis Jr.–Peter Lawford–Joey Bishop crew, a.k.a. the Rat Pack.

“Hollywood’s Brat Pack” was published 39 years ago this month in the issue dated June 10, 1985. Read it today, and it seems merely like a better-than-average magazine story, one that, without those two words on top, would probably not be much remembered. The name, however, turned out to have absolutely insane sticking power. Didn’t matter what these actors did or did not have in common or how little they hung out in real life: The term caught, or created, the idea that they were nightclubbing buddies. Audiences love the idea of onscreen friends who are also offscreen friends — it’s the core idea of every sitcom reunion special — and here it was especially evocative because everyone was barely out of teenagerhood. High-school and college moviegoers could project their own social circles onto it and imagine themselves more stylish and attractive.

And the stars hated it. Hated it. The word brat was much of the problem — almost nobody wants to be called that — and the lumping together of so many disparate talents, plus the louche and unserious worldview that the story implied, was annoying to the earnest part of these earnest naturalist actors. Mare Winningham (co-star of St. Elmo’s Fire) hadn’t met with Blum, and she later joked that she’d “dodged a bullet.” Sean Penn called it “a condescending load of shit written by some person with a big vibrator up his ass” with that familiar sneer and maybe a little homophobia tossed in? Even other writers, like the Time critic Richard Schickel, called it “scuzz journalism” and “slob work.” Actors under the Brat Pack umbrella deliberately started rejecting projects that put them together. Andrew McCarthy, in particular, believes that the label kneecapped his career, partly because it made him seem like a frivolous person. (McCarthy was not out that night with Blum and barely appears in the story.)

Four decades on, McCarthy can’t get it out of his head. His 2021 memoir is titled Brat: An ’80s Story, and this past week, his documentary BRATS — for which he spoke to a number of his old B.P. co-stars — premiered on Hulu. He spends most of it driving around the country to reminisce about the B.P. effect with several B.P. members. It is weirdly fascinating to see them as they have become, not least because most of them appear at home. Demi Moore, in her spare, enormous house, speaks fluidly in terminology clearly influenced by recovery. Jon Cryer is amiable (and also has a great house; Two and a Half Men will do that), if less chic. Timothy Hutton lives in a farmhouse in the Hudson Valley and keeps bees. Ally Sheedy has a modest apartment with pleasantly battered furniture and comes off like your arty New York neighbor. Judd Nelson cannot be located. There’s also commentary from an array of critics and writers (including Bret Easton Ellis and also Malcolm Gladwell, who provides something akin to intellectual heft). Near the end, McCarthy sits down with David Blum himself, and it’s probably the sharpest conversation in the movie. Until then, they’d never met.

Was McCarthy’s career hurt by the label? The telling moment comes when he asks Emilio Estevez whether he wished the term had never come along, and neither man will quite say  “yes.” Because they know! Being a Brat Packer probably neither hurt nor hindered much, apart from a few immediate casting decisions. Some of the actors’ careers zoomed thereafter (Rob Lowe, Demi Moore), and some trundled along in lower gears (Anthony Michael Hall, say). That is also true of all young performers at all times in history. McCarthy sidles up to but does not engage the blindingly obvious answer, which is that some of them were better actors than others, or were funnier or had more range or were hotter, or simply got lucky, or found different gears in which to operate as they moved into adulthood. Not everyone gets to be Sam Seaborn or an extremely sensual potter.

For your evening reading, here’s the original. You can follow that with David Blum’s new essay on the Brat Pack phenomenon. And we as an institution do have one very specific belated apology: Back in 1985, the magazine misspelled Nicolas Cage’s name as “Nicholas” throughout the story. We’ve corrected it in the online edition. Sorry about that, Nic(h).