Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/02/23

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, November 2, 2023

Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr., 1989)

Wendell B. Harris Jr. in Chameleon Street

Cast: Wendell B. Harris Jr., Timothy Alvaro, William Ballenger, Thomas Bashaw, Alfred Bruce Bradley, Margaret Branch, Rick Davenport, Amina Fakir, Anita Gordon, Gary Irwin, Jeff Lamb, Angela Leslie, Bruce Seyburn, Jennifer Turner. Screenplay: Wendell B. Harris Jr. Cinematography: Daniel S. Noga. Art direction: Timothy Alvaro. Film editing: Matthew Mallinson. Music: Peter S. Moore.

An altogether astonishing movie, Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street is raw, clumsy, funny, mordant, and almost as interesting for what happened to the movie itself as for anything that happens on the screen. It was born of its writer-producer-director-star's fascination with a real life con man, William Douglas Street Jr., who managed to pass himself off as a reporter, a doctor, a lawyer, an athlete, and a Yale student. Only once did Street try to make real money with this talent; the rest of the time he did it because he could, which ultimately wound up sending him to prison. Harris's exploration of Street's career is a kind of docudrama, and it won him the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. What it didn't win him was fame as a filmmaker, which Sundance had done for directors like Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Steven Soderbergh, among others. Hollywood showed its interest only in buying the rights to remake the movie, but not to distribute it. At the Sundance festival, Chameleon Street's chief competitor for the award was To Sleep With Anger, a film by another Black director, Charles Burnett, that was picked up for distribution by the Samuel Goldwyn Company. It's a more conventional movie, featuring stars like Danny Glover, while Harris's film is largely performed by non-professional actors. After three decades of underground circulation, Chameleon Street was restored in 2021, distributed and released on video. It can now be seen as a pointed look at the Black experience and as a commentary on the quest for identity and status, not only within the film but in the film's history.