Richard Grieco: Hot 'n' Cool

Did you miss me last night?

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  In addition to being wildly outdated, it's pretty bad.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.

Things that made me say, "Awww":

• 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.

Things that made me kind of sad:

• 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.

I'm taking it all with a grain of salt, given what I know about the mill that creates this kind of book.  Most of it, though, I want to be true.  The whole picture painted made Grieco seem much more likeable than I'd ever anticipated.