I met him once: in Elaine's in New York in the late 90s and, yes, I was drunk. Fortunately, I told him that Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which he wrote, is a great film -- a kind of weird, left-field masterpiece. I wasn't making it up, either. He was so chuffed he introduced me to his teenage son who was sitting in the back and got me to repeat everything I'd just said. The son was incredibly skeptical -- he thought, like most people, that Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is just a piece of soft porn trash -- so I told him how wrong he was and what a great writer his father is.