I MET JOE Jacoby for the first time in the early sixties, when we were students at NYU. Like me, he was born and raised in the city. Like me, he loved movies. And like me, he loved the TV talk shows of the fifties and sixties, especially The Steve Allen Show and The Tonight Show with Jack Paar. For me, those shows were actually like a gateway to the outside world — they truly opened my horizons. Those shows gave me my first glimpses of people like Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan, people familiar to those who traveled in hip circles but unknown to neighborhood kids like me, and they exposed me to a kind of sophistication that we couldn’t even dream of. Those days are over, of course, because now the talk shows are just part of the massive entertainment machine. It’s important for young people to know that they once meant so much to people like us, and why. In fact, the nature of celebrity in America was nurtured by this TV form. Cinema and celebrity became one — in our very living rooms — every night. All this eventually ran its course for me in making The King of Comedy in 1983.

I was on the outside looking in. Joe, on the other hand, had actually worked on a show Merv Griffin was hosting and was getting more jobs in television when I met him. He was working part-time on network game shows — at this point in history, TV was still live and a lot of the programming was coming out of New York. He was also doing some work for The Bunin Puppets, the people who did The Adventures of Lucky Pup in the late forties and who created Foodini and Pinhead (to many younger readers, I realize that these seem like mysterious names from an ancient era, if not a lost world — they were puppet characters in early television, and they were icons of my childhood). Later, when I needed a straight razor to spurt blood for my short film The Big Shave, I brought it up to Bunin’s shop. Joe went to work and rigged a small tube and a rubber syringe that my actor, Peter Bernuth, could hide in the palm of his hand.

In 1968, I finished my first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door? I remembered that Joe had made contact with a distributor on Forty-second Street after he’d made his own first feature. I asked him for the lowdown, and he gave it to me: “Marty, this guy’s a goniff, but he’ll get your picture out.” He was right, on both counts.

Joe was the kind of friend you could count on — he knew the score, and you knew that he would always be straight with you. At the time, I didn’t know much about his background or his life before I met him. I do remember him as kind of a loner. Maybe I saw something of him in myself.

As I read this frank, touching book, I was astonished to learn that Joe was in and out of foster homes and various institutions from the time he was seven until his eighteenth birthday. That experience — that range of experience — must have played a big part in his solitude, and in his worldliness. Of course, it wasn’t important that I knew. Sometimes, friends don’t need to know absolutely everything about each other — you can just sense what someone needs without spelling it out, and that’s enough. That was the way it was between Joe and me. I had lived a sheltered life, at least compared to his, and we gave each other something. I hope you’ll find this book by my friend Joe Jacoby as rewarding as I did.