William Douglas Street Jr. needed more money and less of a dead-end job. Working for his dad’s alarm installation company, he’d hit a wall. The only lucrative alternative was to deal drugs, but he refused to get wrapped up in that—instead, he became a conman and created his own opportunities after perceiving how arbitrary the barriers to higher-paying jobs and luxuries of high society are. Through his schemes, Street got to live the life of a Time sports journalist, a Chicago surgeon, a Martiniquan exchange student at Yale and many other personas—if only temporarily.  Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s Chameleon Street dramatizes […]

Perhaps it goes without saying that the world of independent film missed the boat on Wendell B. Harris Jr. No one, especially this author with the same surname as the now fifty-six year old Michigan native, wants to play the woulda, shoulda, coulda game. Yet whenever I think about the career I would have liked to have seen Mr. Harris have, it’s hard not to turn a bit melancholy. I guess being in the right place in the right time with the right people and a large enough sum of money counts for something, but if being at the podium […]

Mike Plante wrote about the DVD release of Chameleon Street in our Load & Play section in 2007. The film will screen at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in its Sundance Collection section. In Chameleon Street, the enigmatic Doug Street goes through a series of cons, sometimes to make money, sometimes to prove he can do more than what the world expects of him. In short time he goes from a simple extortion plot to complex impersonations, including as a reporter from Time, a Yale student, a lawyer and even a surgeon. Yes, a surgeon – who performed 36 successful […]

Independent filmmakers like to think that they are creating works of art that contribute to an enduring American culture. There’s just one problem: these works of art are disintegrating. Literally. More concerned with life rights than half-life, filmmakers are allowing their films to crumble and dissolve into analog blurs and forests of digital glitches as formats change, materials are uncared for, and elements are left forgotten on lab floors. Enter the Sundance Collection, a collaborative program with the UCLA Film and Television Archive. It is the first archive to be devoted exclusively to the preservation of independent cinema. This year, […]