Chameleon Street, a true-crime comedy about the fraudster who passed as a lawyer, a surgeon and even a basketball-player, fell foul of a racist Hollywood.
Can it now be a hit? We speak to its directorWhen he won the grand jury prize at the 1990 Sundance film festival for his debut picture Chameleon Street, Wendell B Harris Jr thought his film just might be a hit.
“Gee,” he remembers thinking, “Hollywood is reaching out to me.” But despite the acclaim, Chameleon Street struggled to get a release.
Harris never made another film.Now, three decades later, things are a little different.
Chameleon Street – recently hailed by the New Yorker as a masterpiece and one of the 20th century’s greatest independent films – was finally given a US streaming release in 2021, and is available for the first time in the UK, via Mubi and BFI Player.
For Harris, this means that…