This week's classic clip is the 1982 Daryl Hall & John Oates smash "Maneater," directed by Haggerty & Taylor, who were responsible for nearly all of the Hall & Oates videos of the period, in addition to the Go-Gos biggest hits... Stephen Pitalo of The Golden Age Of Music Video chatted with Haggerty, getting this great anecdote on one of music video's less typical complications...
Mick Haggerty, a graphic designer of countless classic album covers, and C.D. Taylor, a special effects designer, teamed up to direct many popular videos of the time but the black cougar on the set of this video turned out to be one of the biggest challenges of their music video career.
Haggerty:
"So we're at the A&M Studios, and a guy pulled up in this car outside. I mean, in the back he had a cougar, and the cougar had two operational modes. The word catatonic I think applies. He was either completely inert, I mean, like a piece of luggage and had to literally be dragged around by his neck and wouldn’t walk or anything, or he was going to tear your f*cking throat out. I mean, this was the scariest animal you have ever seen in your life. And it had four minders, I think. I think there were three or four guys with this cat. This is a dangerous animal.
So what happens? We have to make it walk across the stage, and we have to make it move in the dark. We cleared the set, all the doors are locked, the alarm lights are on. Okay, we’re ready to shoot. And we have to take what we’re getting because we can’t make it do anything. I mean, it is truly scary. And so we prod it and prod it and prod it, until it gets up and it goes, and it’s mad and it charges around. What does it do? It escapes. It gets into the gap between the cyc and the back of the soundstage, which is about a thirty inch gap where all the main cabling for the entire recording studio at A&M, and then it proceeds to lie down and starts chewing on some giant coaxial cable."
For more coverage of classic videos, visit Stephen Pitalo's site, The Golden Age Of Music — the internet's home for authorative takes on videos from 1976 — 1993...
