The first big project he dreamed up, aged 24, was to reimagine the music Nino Rota had composed for the films of Federico Fellini. He signed up Blondie's Debbie Harry and Wynton Marsalis, then a promising young trumpeter who was not even 20, and flew to Rome to ask Fellini for the rights. It was like meeting Dickens, he later recalled. The two discovered they shared a passion for Laurel and Hardy.

Lucinda Williams, a luscious American country singer, crooning Irish shanties like "Bonnie Portmore" or Marianne Faithfull, the chanteuse with the coal-tar voice—perfect for the music of underground Weimar Berlin—reimagining "The Ballad of the Soldier's Wife" by Kurt Weill. In 1980 he became the music coordinator for the sketches of "Saturday Night Live" (snl), which allowed him to mine his musical memory and gave him a regular income while he worked on one-off projects like marrying up Scarlett Johansson, Courtney Love and the emcee from "Cabaret", Joel Gray, for a charity evening at Carnegie Hall to raise funds for aids victims in Africa.

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