In collaboration with Tableau’s partnership with IMDB; Today, we leverage the DataPlusMovies dataset to get an isolated view of The Brat Pack and their respective filmography.

In June of 2024; Vulture.com came out with a revised article about the 80’s phenomenon known as the ‘Brat Pack’. This was a play on the Rat Pack from the 50s and 60s in the entertainment industry. The term Brat Pack was coined by writer David Blum in his New York Magazine article in June of 1985. He noticed a group of young actors being mobbed by adoring fans and realized there was a peculiarity there, they had all recently been in the same movies together; portraying teenagers finding a place in the world. Once the article was published; the 80s version of social media (teen magazines) took over. All these actors in the group began to witness enormous amounts of attention. Some argue that this drove a lot of projects towards these actors; while the majority agree that the term Brat Pack may have led to a negative connotation; one that most studio execs avoided. On the contrary, this led studios to ‘typecast’ the Brat Pack members which is something that they still fight to dissolve to this day.

The revised article notates three circles to the Brat Pack group:

Inner Circle(rose colored): These are your original members

Adjacent Circle(purple colored): They were around the same cinematic works of the Inner Circle

Next-Gen Circle(gray colored): The teen stars that emerged in the last part of the 80s and represent a more Gen-X sensibility.

First things first: Connect to the DataPlusMovies dataset and significantly filter down your data via extract creation. In this situation, I am only interested in the actors identified as part of the Brat Pack ‘cohorts’ (explained above); so I created a Level of Detail calc for those actors and only kept those films that the Brat Pack and associated co-workers have worked in. This creates what I coined as the Brat Pack Universe. Once filtered down; you have access to all the films that had a Brat Pack member has acted in and the filmography of associated co-workers in those brat pack films.

I did this because I specifically wanted to see a chart of film count by the Brat Pack exclusively compared to the filmography of what I called Brat Pack co-workers. I wanted to see if there was any significant disparity. Take a look below:

The area chart (shaded in blue) shows the film count of the Brat Pack members; notice the origin beginning in the 80s when the phenomenon was coined by the New York Magazine article. One cool thing I liked to see was that some Brat Pack members have worked with actors whose careers spanned all the way to mid-teens. You can also notice a disparity beginning in the early aughts. This can be due to multiple factors; younger actors working with the Brat Pack are now getting older and more work; while concurrently Brat Pack actors are diminishing in their film work, moving to Television/Streaming (remember this is only films) and/or Directing (case in point Emilio Estevez). One thing is certain, Brat Pack members are still active in the industry as confirmed by the recent Brat Documentary directed by Andrew McCarthy (on Hulu).

I wanted to recreate the visual in the article, I first tried to use layers and circles, but noticed that every time I resized the container the Brat Pack headshot images moved out of place. So I created a visual in Powerpoint and used the image as a background image for the scatter plot visual. As long you fix your X/Y axis’, the headshot if applied correctly will stay in place. I also grabbed some headshots of the actors and cartoonized their appearances for the dashboard (using befunky.com a free editing software).

Lastly, I created a quick radial bar chart to show each actors’ filmography along with their respective IMDB ratings for each film. This was cool because I was able to place their headshot in the middle of the visual along with their average IMDB score so far. Along with a quick dashboard action that changes the Brat Pack actor parameter, you are now able to click on a headshot to change the radial bar chart and headshot.

This was a really cool exercise, I grew up on these films and it brought back a lot of interest to rewatch these films. Overall, I wanted to keep the dashboard clean and simple while still holding true to the theme (colors of the background scatter image) and usage of the Magneto font I feel calls it back to the publications of Teen Magazines where these actors found themselves in during the 80s.

Please feel free to check out the tableau dashboard at this link.

What was your favorite Brat Pack film? Let me know what you think of the dashboard?

Feedback is always welcome.

Rafael