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Beginning in the late 1960s and extending into the 1970s, American cinema was revolutionized by the New Hollywood movement. At the forefront of this movement was a team of directors from different entertainment disciplines (film, theater or television) who spoke of the growing youth counterculture with classics such as “Bonnie and Clyde”, “The Graduate” and “M*A*” . SH*T.” The world seemed to be going crazy, but movies were somehow helping us make sense of this descent. Before moviegoers could adapt to this novel 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’s cage in wildly different ways. Then, the studios, with the perhaps unintentional help of Lucas and. Spielberg, they found a formula: they could make hundreds of millions of dollars from a single film if they pushed the right business buttons. It was at this point that the New Hollywood era died.
No filmmaker of that era prospered more brilliantly than Coppola, whose four films, “The Godfather,” “The Conversation,” “The Godfather II” and “Apocalypse Now,” are considered by many to be an unsurpassed achievement, and no one took it for granted. as bad as he was with the “One From the Heart” debacle that almost ended his career. Coppola was reeling. He needed a hit to keep the shattered dream of his company, Zoetrope Studios, alive. So, following the advice of some schoolchildren, he made an adaptation of SE Hinton’s youth novel “The Outsiders.” In doing so, he had to populate his film with young actors who could look authentically from the mid-1960s while also selling the misguided angst that made the book so popular. Casting directors Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins dug deep and emerged with a surprising cast of new faces that included C. Thomas Howell, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe.
The “Brat Pack” moniker wouldn’t be applied to these actors until 1985, but by 1984, with sexually frank teen comedies like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” in heavy rotation on cable television and “Sixteen Candles” hooking everyone a generation on television. sarcastic and sentimental aesthetic of John Hughes, it was clear that a new cinematic movement had arrived.
If the Brat Pack had a “The Godfather,” it’s “The Breakfast Club,” and if it had a Marlon Brando at the time, it was Judd Nelson. He was attractive, rebellious and undeniably talented. The future was his. So why has his career failed to reach such heights and why is he seemingly done with Hollywood?
