I met Marvin Hamlisch once, after a Tate Lecture Series event at SMU in December of 1999. His most called-back reference was about how he found Kim B-"ass"-inger (emphasis his on "ass", which I didn't entirely get at the time) has an amazing rump. He brought this up no less than six times.

He was lively, funny, and candid. When I asked from the audience about his thoughts on the movie of A Chorus Line and film musical adaptations at large, he responded very bluntly that it was a waste of the material. He actively wished someone would remake it. He hated it.

He told me in the hall afterward that "if only the business people still cared about making something people will want to watch, the movie business wouldn't be in the toilet". That was 13 years ago, before 9/11, the explosion of comic book blockbusters, and the rise of streaming.

I genuinely love and cherish so much of his work, from the Bond tune "Nobody Does It Better" to the score of A Chorus Line to the under-appreciated musical Barnum, and on and on.