Beginning in the late 1960s and spreading through the 1970s, American cinema was revolutionized by the New Hollywood movement. Directors from various fields of entertainment (film, theater, television) were at the forefront of this movement, with classics such as “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” and “M*A* It spoke to the youth counterculture. S*H. ”It felt like the world was going crazy, but the movie somehow helped us make sense of this descent. Before moviegoers could get used to this new mode of cinematic art, along came the movie brats. Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg shook the industry cage in very different ways. It was a wonderful time. Then the studio, perhaps with the unwitting help of Lucas and Spielberg, fixed a formula. “If you press the right commercial buttons, you can make hundreds of millions of dollars from a single movie.” At this moment, the era of New Hollywood ended.
No other filmmaker at the time enjoyed as much success as Coppola. Coppola’s four films, The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now, are considered by many to be an insurmountable feat. No one took it harder than the fiasco that almost killed his career with “One from the Heart.” Coppola was upset. He needed a hit to keep the tattered dreams of his company, Zoetrope Studios, alive. So he followed the advice of schoolchildren and adapted S.E. Hinton’s young adult novel The Outsider. In doing so, he needed young actors to appear in the film who could faithfully recreate the mid-1960s era while selling the misguided angst that made the book so popular. Casting directors Janet Hershenson and Jane Jenkins dug deep and brought together an amazing cast of newcomers, including C. Thomas Howell, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, and Rob Lowe.
The nickname “Brat Pack” wasn’t applied to these actors until 1985, but in 1984 sexually frank teen comedies like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” In heavy rotation on cable, “Sixteen Candles” hooked an entire generation on television. John Hughes’ sarcastic, sentimental aesthetic clearly signaled the arrival of a new film movement.
If the Brat Pack had a “Godfather” back then, it was “The Breakfast Club,” and if they had a Marlon Brando back then, it was Judd Nelson. He was fiery, rebellious and undeniably talented. The future was his. So why has his career never reached such heights and why does it seem like his time in Hollywood is over?
