Dear Jackie,

Was Jackie Starlight ever in a movie called "The Bachelor's Friend"?

It's OK if he wasn't.

- Eddy from Liver City, Ohio

Dear Eddy,

Although any Starlight publicist that one can reach on the phone will vehemently deny any involvement in the failed film project, "The Bachelor's Friend," the truth is that Jacob P. Starlight was very much involved in this ill-thought-out endeavor.

Although when pressed on the issue Jackie will typically launch into a long, meandering tangent somehow related to mohair, careful research and countless interviews with lesser known cohorts has incontrovertibly verified that not only was Jackie Starlight involved in "The Bachelor's Friend," but it was the one (of so many) failed film projects that was entirely conceived, self-funded, and poorly executed by Jackie himself, until of course that fated day on January 29, 1966, when the entire set was mysteriously consumed in flames.

In short, upon seeing the opening of Neil Simon's award-winning stage comedy, "The Odd Couple" on Broadway in 1965, Jackie loudly confided to nearby audience members, "I could do dis schtick wit twice the yuks!" Friends and associates relate that soon after Jackie's viewing of the hit play in New York, he disappeared for weeks, emerging from his apartment only for quick runs to the local liquor store for white bread, pineapple jam, and the cheapest hooch he could find. Three weeks later, Starlight approached Hollywood Executive Mel Steinbergmanson with a thick, coffee-stained sheaf of unpaginated, sloppily typewritten script.

"He dropped this hideous ream on my clean desk and began mouthing off on how 'The Odd Couple' had been his idea all along, and how Neil Simon had stolen it and tried to make it funnier by infusing all sorts of New York-related jokes and references in it," complains the now-very-elderly Steinbergmanson. "Only Simon did it without the booze lines, which really, is the heart of the story," Starlight insisted.

Mr. Steinbergmanson, in his autobiography, expounds—

When I read the first draft of "The Bachelor's Friend" (working title: "The Weird Guys"), I was aghast at the sheer idiocy of that shoddily crafted piece of.... work." Every page had at least three lines relating to "getting shmeared" or "tying on a loose one" or "shifting the sheets." What the hell is "shifting the sheets" anyway?

I tried to be diplomatic about it—after all, Mr. Starlight at the time was a known quantity, and a solid B-movie actor based on his increasingly distant film forays like "Bugle Bomber Boy," but even so, he pounded on my desk and swore, "This is the original story!" (This, notwithstanding the obvious fact that he had just written it and that the actual "Odd Couple" script had been written two years prior and performed on stage before thousands of witnesses just earlier that year.)

And whereas Simon's work was awash with light comedy of manners, with perhaps the slightest subtext of homosexuality, Starlight's version was heavily laden with the darkest, un-plot-supported, inopportune references to "all the queers in this city." Worse than that, it was inexplicably set in Ohio City, Ohio, a town of approximately 500 residents, regardless of the many ham-handed references to "thumbing our nose at a thousand of them hoity-toits that hang out uptown." I was eventually able to get Mr. Starlight out of my office, but only after a white-lie allusion to the likelihood that in the office next door there would soon be a delivery of oven-fresh crullers.

Suffice it to say that Jackie Starlight's script was never picked up by Steinbergmanson's studio and in frustration Starlight sought to self-fund, direct, and star in the production, bankrolled in large part by a very questionable "win" at the dog track owned by his brother-in-law's male "mistress."

The rest is abortive, regrettable, uncinematic history.

- Editor