Chameleon Street

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival – yet criminally underseen for over three decades – Chameleon Street recounts the improbable but true story of Michigan con man Douglas Street, the titular “chameleon” who successfully impersonated his way up the socioeconomic ladder by posing as a magazine reporter, an Ivy League student, a respected surgeon, and a corporate lawyer. Elevated by a dexterous performance and daring direction from multi- hyphenate actor-writer-director Wendell B. Harris Jr., the film pins a lens on race, class and performance in American identity, which has lost none of its relevance.

‘[I have seen no film that is] more inventive and original than Chameleon Street. Director and star Wendell B. Harris makes use of interior-monologue voice-overs; flashbacks and leaps forward (some of which are nearly subliminally rapid); fantasy sequences; slow motion; instant replay; jittery edits that are the cinematic equivalents of a d.j. scratching; direct asides into the camera; blurred images; and animation […] he doesn’t so much reinvent the image as reprocess it, revivifying the uses of the cinema itself by channelling it into an original and personal form of Black consciousness and self-consciousness.’

Richard Brody Jr, the New Yorker.