"Witty, provocative and disturbing"
"The film addresses issues of race, economics, sex, anger and pride in ways that are both savagely funny and poignant. Harris is more than a promising talent; he may be a significant one."
-- Rolling Stone
CHAMELEON STREET
A True Original
“The film has a river of yearning through it. The audience floats along in fluid ecstasy.”—Gabriella Facondo, Italian auteur/journalist Chameleon Street won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival,despite some stiff competition. The jurors deliberated over Charles Burnett’s To Sleep With Anger, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, Reginald Hudlin’s House Party, Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth and Michael Roemer’s The Truth About Harry, among others.
But the clear winner was not the film touted as a paradigm of independent filmmaking conventions; instead, the jurors concurred on a true original. Wendell B. Harris’psychological comedy used the real-life story of Douglas Street, an infamous Michiganborn imposter, to explore the myth of the American Dream, the paradox of African-American male identity and the ability of the movie medium to get beneath the skin of American society.
Today, the wit of Chameleon Street is something film culture has yet to catch up with. That’s because Harris understands how Street’s story reflects something unsettled and complex in the ways that Americans decide for themselves who they are even while trying to fit into acceptable, popular ideas of behavior.
Indie films of the early ’90s anticipated the strange millennial fragmentation of American culture by spotlighting other social figures besides those who Street, in the film, calls “wily Caucasians.” It is Street’s black American status that makes him a singular affront to the essentially middle-brow taste of the American independent film movement. Suddenly, in the midst of that middlebrow context, a movie appeared that was the unexpected culmination of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man,Norman Mailer’s Rojack and Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweetback. Who was prepared for that? Appeared that was the unexpected culmination of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man,Norman Mailer’s Rojack and Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweetback. Who was prepared for that? The bold and fantastically ready actor-writer-director Wendell B. Harris, Jr. produced more than a mere bio-pic.
A film as erudite, clever and ambitious as Chameleon Street could only come about when an artist pulls its structure, nuance and impudence out of himself. With scarcely a budget, Interlochen/Juilliard graduate Harris achieved a directorial debut on a par with the most audacious. As Jean Cocteau advised, “The only technique worth having is the technique you invent for yourself,” so Harris developed his own style, taking a serious and witty look at the black American male character.
As one of the 1990 Sundance jurors, I recall that Chameleon Street appeared at the same time as Public Enemy’s controversial rap record “Welcome to the Terrordome.” I didn’t realize at the time how these pop landmarks complemented each other. Public Enemy’s explosive hip-hop screed revived old-fashioned political rhetoric while Harris turned contemporary African-American social frustration into alarming, but essentially comic, cinema. The song had adolescent exuberance, the movie had mature intelligence.
Both created a new paradigm for black artistic expression. But Harris was not being trendy; he forged a character study that revealed difficult truths. The romantic and professional sides of Street’s life are affected by the influence.
Wendell B. Harris