Marfa Film Festival 2009

This legendary film written, directed and starring Wendell B. Harris arrived like a lightening bolt in the dark twenty years ago and disappeared just as quickly. After years of (equally legendary) banging on studio doors and countless meetings suffering actors from Arsenio Hall to Will Smith trying to remake his movie -- Smith has repeatedly "borrowed" from a rubik's cube scene in this film -- Harris finally packed his bags and headed back to Michigan, cementing his status as a cult hero. The film tells the mostly true story of Detroit con artist and high school drop-out William Douglas Street, Jr. who successfully impersonated professional reporters, lawyers, athletes, extortionists, and surgeons (he performed more than 36 successful hysterectomies!). A biting satire, it was one of the first films to examine how race, class, and role-playing morph into the social fabric of contemporary America, and perhaps the first film ever to spotlight an African American man deftly skating over the strange ice of white guilt (here, professional), a prescient precursor to our "post racial" culture. Chameleon Street won the Grand Jury Prize at 1990 Sundance Film Festival. Director Wendell B. Harris will be in Marfa to show his film for the first time in the state of Texas. Thanks to Jon Ausbrook for his assistance with this program.