Celebrity kids brat packs and their Hollywood hobbies

Brat pack

A loose grouping of young, mostly teenage, actors who rose to fame together in a series of youth-oriented films during the early to mid-1980s. The name brat pack was coined in 1985 by writer David Blum in an article in New York magazine. The inspiration for the name came from the old HUMPHREY BOGART–inspired RAT PACK of the 1950s (subsequently taken over by FRANK SINATRA and his cronies). Of course, brat pack inferred that the members of this media-created club were all of rather tender age.

The core of the brat pack came to mass attention in FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA’s failed film version of S. E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders (1983), which featured the ensemble work of Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, TOM CRUISE, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez, Patrick Swayze, and Rob Lowe. St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), another movie of young adulthood angst, helped expand the pack with the addition of Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy, DEMI MOORE, and Mare Winningham. Other teenage-oriented films brought young actors such as Timothy Hutton, SEAN PENN, and Molly Ringwald into the group.

Unlike members of the earlier rat pack, who met regularly and referred to themselves as members of a clan, the brat packers were merely a large pool of variously talented individuals, some of whom were friends and all of whom tended to resent being referred to as members of the club. Many of the actors in the so-called brat pack did, however, stick together and help each other’s careers, fostering the impression of a closely knit group.

A surprising number of these young actors have put their careers on a solid footing, and many of them may be around for a long time to come.

Breakaway prop

Any object deliberately created by a property department to be easily broken upon impact without harming anyone coming in contact with it.

Breakaway props are usually items such as bottles, windows, chairs, and tables. They are principally used in action films, such as in westerns, where there are fight scenes involving actors being hit on the head and thrown across rooms.

Breakdown

The job of distilling all the elements of the script and reorganizing them for the purpose of creating the most efficient and economical shooting schedule possible. The breakdown, usually performed by the ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, consists of taking scenes out of their sequence in the script and grouping them together in categories such as night scenes, crowd scenes, a series of scenes that require a certain actor who may be available only for a short time, scenes that take place on one particular set at different times in the film, and so on.

The breakdown gives the director the opportunity to choose the order in which he or she will shoot scenes in the film.

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