This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between.
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I.
There is a very bad movie from 1988 with the equally terrible title of Johnny Be Good, starring Anthony Michael Hall as a blue-chip high-school football quarterback who is enticed by various colleges with all of the requisite temptations—cars, girls, money—a teenager could possibly imagine. Unless you are into masochism, I do not recommend watching this film. It is largely offensive and stupid; Roger Ebert generously gave it half a star out of four. This was a movie that was literally made for me as a kid—Anthony Michael Hall and football!—and yet I remember watching it once in the late 1980s, and I cannot bring myself to re-watch it ever again, because it makes me very sad.
Here is one of the highlights of the film, a self-serving pre-game speech by the delightfully smarmy Paul Gleason, best known as the principal from The Breakfast Club:
I had not thought about Johnny Be Good in many years, but I thought about it the other night, as I watching Brats, the surprisingly introspective documentary by Andrew McCarthy about the Brat Pack, a group of young actors from the early 1980s—including McCarthy—who were essentially marginalized by a New York magazine piece that bestowed upon them that condescending nickname. What sets Brats apart from the flood of nostalgia documentaries on streaming services is that it actually has a point. That point is to probe the very nature of fame itself, and how it affects people who achieve it at such a young age, and how that stigma stuck with at least some of them for decades.
Anthony Michael Hall is hardly mentioned in McCarthy’s film, perhaps because he was never considered quite cool or handsome enough to be a part of the Brat Pack in the first place. But it is clear in retrospect that Johnny Be Good was Hall’s last attempt (after the equally forgettable action movie Out of Bounds) to escape his own Brat Pack-era stigma—the dorky stereotype that had established him as a star over the four-picture run of National Lampoon’s Vacation, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science. Here, in Johnny Be Good, he was playing a jock alongside Robert Downey Jr., and when it went badly, he essentially disappeared into the void of character acting.
Maybe that’s what Anthony Michael Hall was always meant to be. But the most interesting thing about Brats is that it raises fascinating questions about why certain Brat Pack-associated actors succeeded, and why others failed, and how much of that perception of themselves was in their own heads, and how much of it, if any, was the fault of journalism itself.
II.
At the heart of Brats is an interview with the writer David Blum, who wrote the original New York magazine piece about the Brat Pack. Blum does not come across particularly well in the film (nor did he redeem himself with this piece reacting to the documentary, which is larded with retroactive snark). He is defensive and entirely unapologetic about the article he wrote, which in a way is a justifiable response—it was not his role to be friends with Estevez or McCarthy or any of the other members of the Brat Pack. And yet I’d argue that lack of introspection is part of the problem with journalism as a profession.
Now, a lot of people don’t feel the same way I do about this. A lot of people—like Blum himself, I imagine—view this kind of “takedown piece” as part of the DNA of journalism itself. Those people will watch McCarthy’s documentary, which mostly consists of very wealthy people conducting interviews inside the insanely beautiful homes that they were able to afford because of their fame, and think, What’s the problem here? I just made you even more famous than you otherwise would have been.
Celebrity journalism existed long before the Brat Pack came along; it has long served as an adversarial force meant to humanize celebrities, which often means bringing them down to our level, and often resorting to cruelty and mockery to make that point. In fact, given how it’s evolved in the Internet age, Blum’s piece seems downright tame by comparison—a story about a bunch of actors in their early 20s who acted like most of us would have if we were rich and famous in our early 20s. It’s inconceivable to Blum that anyone like McCarthy could have been truly affected by a story like this; but I’d argue that his inability to even ask those questions is what makes this particular article just as shallow as the scene he was attempting to portray.
III.
I have written a lot of profiles and in-depth features in my life. And I view my obligation to them differently than I would a column, or even this newsletter. If I am given access or delve deep into reporting, then is my job to capture something about the subject that no one has before; it is my job to understand both sides, and to empathize, and to deliver a story that is uniquely truthful and says something entirely new. That is very difficult to do, and sometimes it completely fails, and in those cases you have to absorb the blowback and think hard about what you might have gotten wrong. (Sometimes it is also manipulated by editors in order to make it more confrontational, which is a whole other story.)
But I suppose Blum didn’t view his job that way. And I suppose a lot of other writers don’t, either.
The most telling line in Brats is when McCarthy sits down with a wonderfully zen Demi Moore, who appears to have shook off any stigma that stymied her career, most likely after years of therapy. And as Moore talks, she mentions the obvious fact that Blum was a young journalist in his late 20s who was merely looking to take the next big step in his career, just like McCarthy and Moore and Emilio Estevez and Anthony Michael Hall. He was using them just like they hoped to use him.
I’m not sure if Blum fully acknowledged that truth. But in an era where interviewers have become far removed from their subjects, an era where access journalism is on the verge of a complete breakdown, I’d like to think it’s pretty important for jounalists to at least ask those questions. It’s not our job to be a subject’s friend, or to portray them in a positive light, but it is our job to create something real, and in order to do that, we need to think about our subjects in more than one dimension. We need to understand where they’re coming from, even if we find it reprehensible.
“What we do not have are characters who seem complicated and human,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review of Johnny Be Good. I’d argue that the worst journalism lacks that same quality, and this is why it is worthy of at least a little regret.
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