Monday, March 11, 2013

People Magazine on Richard Grieco, 1989

It's always interesting to see what the press was saying in the moment, as opposed to the rewritten history that surfaces in bios and summaries across the web.  This 1989 People article not only sheds some in-the-moment light on the 21 Jump Street relationships, but includes a snippet of one of Richard's poems.  (Makes me glad I'm not a celebrity--I definitely wouldn't want poems from my early 20s surfacing online today!)

Picked from among 500 casting-call hopefuls to play Jump's cool-rebel newcomer, Dennis Booker, Grieco, 24, has been greeted this season by surging ratings and fan mail that avalanches in at the reported rate of 10,000 letters a month. "Girls see him and scream at the top of their lungs," says co-star Peter DeLuise. "Sometimes they achieve a pitch that's quite painful." In fact. Grieco is already such a draw that he will be spun off into a Fox series of his own next fall. Aware that his overnight stardom has caused hard feelings on the set, Grieco is unapologetic. "There are people in Jump Street who are jealous from the attention I get," he says. "The actors don't say anything, but I can tell."

I also found it interesting that People's scene-setting description included, "with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other..."  Nothing shocking there, except that the 1990 book about Grieco, Richard Grieco: Hot 'n' Cool, was quite explicit in its claim that Richard was serious about his anti-drug message and didn't even drink alcohol.  Told you those books couldn't be trusted ;)

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