Don't worry--I haven't abandoned my post. You didn't hear from me last night because when I'm usually blogging, I was doing my homework. By which I mean, I was reading this (so you don't have to):
As far as I've been able to find thus far, this is the only book ever published about Richard. It was rushed out in the summer of 1990, when Booker was on the air and If Looks Could Kill was a speculative possibility for the future. In addition to being wildly outdated, it's pretty bad. So bad that I kind of want to write a better one. Don't laugh--it wouldn't be my first book.Assuming that the information in this book is accurate (and that is a big assumption given the way these books are produced), I did learn a few interesting things, a few things that made me say, "Awww" and a few things that made me wonder what went wrong in the couple of years following Booker and publication of this book.
I'll share a few.
Interesting tidbits:
- Richard apparently started getting fan mail at 21 Jump Street after a commercial aired introducing him--before he'd ever appeared on the show.
- According to the book, Grieco's fan letters during his single season on 21 Jump Street far outnumbered those received by Johnny Depp.
- During Booker, Richard says he had a list of about 35 fans facing serious crises like cancer whom he called once a month to check in and ask how they were doing.
- He hired his mom to answer his fan mail, but asked her to pull out letters from teenagers writing to him about their problems in case he might be able to help.
- Grieco was already in his mid-twenties when this book was written and claimed that he didn't drink and had "never done any drugs". But in the late nineties, he admitted to entering rehab. Clearly, something slipped seriously off track in the relatively few intervening years.
- He talked about turning down multiple scripts because he "took his acting seriously" and would never do movies like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes vs. the Green Squash because he "just didn't believe in them." Looking at some of the movies he ultimately appeared in, I find myself wondering whether he expected more from them in the draft stages or was simply so eager to work that his standards had fallen dramatically.
When I was first googling around for info on him I half expected like, anecdotes and rumors about him being an A-hole or a diva or whatever, and I still have never found anything like that. What I have found is that people he's worked with ( Like Wil Wheaton and the guy that played the fake Thor in the Thor rip-off) say that he is a very nice (Wheaton said on his blog some years back that he is "generous" and "one of the sweetest guys who ever lived"),
ReplyDeleteAnd the guy who played in the SyFy version of Thor said that after he got into a falling accident on set Richard came to his trailer to see if he was ok and stuff.
I would not think those folks would lie about him being that nice. So what that says to me, that says an awful lot.
I don't doubt that. When I said it was hard to know how much was true, I meant more of the background. In the past, when I've talked directly to celebrities or those who have worked with them I've discovered that a lot of what has gone into books similar to this was recycled from teen magazines. Though this book is full of "Richard now says..." and that sort of thing, there's no clear indication that the author actually talked to him, or to most of the people she quotes. And a large percentage of the photographs in the center section are from a single event.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah! Yeah those books are just to make a quick buck XD I don't think there is any value in them even for their target audience...it's just so much fluff and not a lot of substance. I Though I still would not mind having that one. If just for the cover on the front
DeleteI got mine for $3.98 on Amazon. But if you want to wait, I promise mine will be better ;)
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