How Hollywood killed a Black identity masterpiece we need today more than ever

“Sucks” isn’t pejorative enough to describe Americans’ relationship to their country’s racial history. The strategy that the right calls Critical Race Theory Opposition is our moment's mind-blowing example of flight from legacy facts, and living through it sucks. How did we land here, with millions all-in on not knowing settled U.S. history? Were America’s racialized life even reasonably reflected, this red meat end run wouldn’t have a base to stand on.

Learning happens outside of classrooms enough that not just faulty textbooks and faulty politicians alone cannot be blamed for incubating ignorance. As much as school, if not more so, we learn who we are through popular media — seeing ourselves in movies, especially.

Since deep in Hollywood’s origin story festers Birth of A Nation — the explicitly white supremacist history lesson from 1915 — it should not surprise that institutional Hollywood suppressed a Black masterwork that might have nudged awake the nation like no pop art before it.

Relentlessly illuminating “what goes on under the skin in this country,” writer-director Wendell B. Harris’s debut, Chameleon Street, won the 1990 Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Prize. Then, instead of having its brilliance properly introduced to the world, Chameleon Street faded — so much so that the film can seem to have never existed at a time when our nation needs it most.

“When I meet somebody I know within the first two minutes who they want me to be.” — Douglas Street, Chameleon Street

One hundred-twenty years ago, the writer and sociologist W.E.B. DuBois invented “double consciousness” to describe the chasm between how us products of the slave trade see our individual selves and how American society views us. Real-life con artist Douglas Street is the Harris film’s central figure and genius code-switcher. We meet Street in 1978 while he’s unhappily installing alarms for his father's Flint, Michigan, security business. It's a gig he describes as “like earning slave wages in the ninth circle of hell.” Our protagonist may be in possession of sextuple consciousness.

“This is boring!” Street screams into the film’s bleakly realistic urban universe.

Portrayed with gifted-school haughtiness by Harris himself, Street is urged out of frustration and into action by the need for money, his “twoness” starting to mutate. He leads his half-drunk and slumping gang into an extortion scheme that’s planned with hilarious ineptitude before splintering off into the business of impersonation. Hyper-literate-yet-funky in a black Bauhaus t-shirt and wraparound Lou Reed shades, Street channels Gwendolyn Brooks, Edith Piaf, and Jean Cocteau’s Beauty & the Beast en route to reinventing himself as a sports journalist, lawyer, and most impressively, a surgeon.

In Chameleon Street, it takes a sociopath to speak upon the acting we do each day.

In real life, Street performed 36 hysterectomies before being arrested and imprisoned. Director Harris plays his character’s shenanigans as black comedy worthy of the twoness that truly black Black comedy demands; eyes wide open, you have to laugh or else you die.

Harris’s film debuted to strong reviews at the Toronto Festival of Festivals, earned kudos from the European arthouse scene, and took the top prize at Sundance. The festival carried only a fraction of the clout that it does today, but it did help get Warner Brothers to fork over $252,000 for the film’s distribution and remake rights.

But Chameleon Street premiered with the visibility of a war in Central America and had a microscopic theatrical run before going to VHS. Neither Warner or any other company would distribute the film nationally.

Harris took a lot of meetings, but could only watch as his landmark film and momentum for it died on the vine. Will Smith’s name would pop up in trade publications as a potential star of the remake — without explanation for why the film should be remade in the first place. Years passed and a realization set in among the film’s fans. The project could not have been more textbook caught-and-killed if an ascendant presidential candidate and a payment to an adult film star were at the heart of the deal.

Harris would not make another movie.

Amazon tells me the film’s not available in my area, and I’ve not come across anyone American whose region it is available in. If you’re German and would like to see Chameleon Street, you’re in luck. A few old, used VHS and DVD copies are for sale on eBay — none cheap. The little-known Criterion Channel is a pricey option.

“Distribution is key,” Harris said in 2021. “Hollywood could not stop the film from being made, but they sure could stop it from being distributed.”

To comprehend the sadness of having lost Chameleon Street, you must (re-)envision the United States’ culture of 1990. Addled-era Reagan, but a summer off of Spike Lee’s dazzling Do the Right Thing. Critics don’t fully embrace it; the nation also has a fantastic hard-on for Bill Cosby’s well-dressed bullshit. That same year the NAACP boycotted Canada’s Genie Award-winning How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, starring Isaach de Bankolé (Chocolat, Black Panther).

Rodney King had a beatdown coming that would echo across decades. Corporate folk hadn’t yet implemented their ideals for Black male behavior. But Charles Barkley was becoming more proficient at golf.

Harris had more cinematic techniques than Street has scams. In this film America finally had a piece of pop that conveyed the feelings of trying to connect with a Black protagonist who on sight one would dislike. Trading Places, but with no Dan Akroyd. Harris presented the culture with a film that’s as existential and postmodern as it is Black, trafficking in emotions and moods previously secreted into our underground lives.

“When the film came out in 1990,” Harris told the New York Film Festival, on the occasion of his film’s 2021 streaming debut. “I got these amazing reactions from people. It was almost as if people who saw the film thought it represented something new that was about to burst forth, in terms of how Blacks are portrayed in media, in narrative motion pictures.”

The period was considered a mini-boom for independent Black filmmakers. Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) and Marlon Riggs (Tongues Untied) were among the figures whose importance was recognized. John Singleton became the first Black director to get an Oscar nomination. But so too marked as genius were immature filmmakers. Matty Rich’s borderline unwatchable Straight Out of Brooklyn got him a deal and reams of positive press coverage.

There is a coyly racist joke that went around Hollywood corridors in that would-be heyday of Black people making movies in America:

How do you be a talented young Black filmmaker in Hollywood and not get a contract?

Be Wendell B. Harris.

“That’s not funny. it’s tragic,” cinematographer Daniel S. Noga said to me last week.

Under the skin of America, there’s so much to talk about. Take me, for example. I take the denial of Black America’s suffering as though Tucker Carlson is calling my mother a liar on national television. A proper release for Chameleon Street just might have been the death knell of respectability politics and made our humanity less cartoonish.

An absolute must for anyone who’s ever asked themselves is it because I’m Black, Wendell Harris’s film has yanked me through its narrative about a dozen times. On each occasion I find something new to admire. There’s not 10 more satisfying minutes in my more than 50 years of consuming cinema than Chameleon Street’s prison sequence. It contains laugh lines that I’ll repeat until calling it a wrap on this American predicament.

Twenty-first century talk has Keegen Michael-Key playing Douglas Street. Today they give Oscars to art films. And for what it’s worth, the man who shot the film disagrees with me about the harm done through suppression.

“That film’s time is now. When it came out it was way ahead of its time for the general public,” cinematographer Noga told me. “The way it presents. The way it works. That film is now.”