Interesting. This site doesn’t list it as one he directed. He also seems to have disappeared. He has a Facebook account, but nothing posted on it. His blog ends in 2011 and his website is defunct.
Maybe the video is cursed and everyone is being killed off really slowly, one by one. Denisof should be careful, he may be the only one left.
Given what has (or hasn’t) been uncovered about the actress, my hypothesis is that she (unlike Denisof) never wound up with a significant acting role, and dropped out of acting.
If that’s the case, then, unless she cared to look up things online about the video, out of curiosity, or one of her kids happened across the video and said, “hey, that’s my mom!”, we may never know who she was.
Also, Gary Weis (who apparently may or may not have been the director) does have a website, which has a 2019 copyright date on it.
I saw her being interviewed about leaving the show and she didn’t mention Cameron by name, but since it was inconceivable to my teenage brain that someone so young would have a stick up their butt about this, I assumed for years that it was Alan Thicke who had a problem.
Given that music videos were largely just a way of marketing artists and it was all so new, I don’t think they considered preserving anything for posterity. Other than a few key moments, Elvis or the Beatles on Sullivan for example, what kind of shelf life did performances have?
I would guess live performances like that would have even less information available. I’d guess when MTV videos started out, no one thought there would be any lasting presence. They probably just figured once the songs fell off the charts, who would care about the videos.
Linda Purl has a Twitter account that’s current, but I’m apparently too stupid to start a separate question rather than tack it on to something she posted. Anyone willing to give it a try?
That’s kind of what I expect to happen, but I thought I’d give it a try.
I’ll note that Linda Purl has been acting since the 1960s, and was a pretty well-known actress in the late '70s and '80s; in 1986-87, she was one of the leads on Matlock, playing the main character’s daughter and law partner.
Also, she was born in 1955, so she would have been 32 years old when the Harrison video was filmed; the actress in the video looks more like she’s in her early 20s to me.
Here’s what she looked like on Matlock, at about the same time that the video was made:
I should be so lucky. That one only took seven years to solve.
Another actress I think looks similar is Faye Grant, mostly known for playing the female lead in V, the tv show about aliens. Again, she’s too old and too well known to have actually been in the video.
I once asked Julie Brown (via Twitter) if Bebe Neuwirth was in her video to “Girl Fight Tonight”, because the backup singer on Julie’s left could be a younger Neuwirth, at least to me. Ms. Brown was quick to respond in the negative, but seemed like she have loved it to be true.
Apparently neither Gary Weis nor Alexis Denisof is willing to answer the question. No luck with Willy Smax/William McLellan either. I’ll show them by not watching any more of the stuff they direct/act in. Bet they’re sorry now!
Anonymous apparently, but maybe not Hollywood if it was all filmed in England.
Coincidentally, the woman they chase in that video looks a bit like the woman from the Steppin’ Out video. Maybe we’ve stumbled on a massive conspiracy that Big Music is trying to hide from us. Who knows how far it goes, this could be bigger than Elvis being alive!
I actually wondered about that. That was a pretty good sized stack of coins for it to be US money.