Remembering Wendell Harris Jr.’s 1989 masterpiece CHAMELEON STREET
Arguably the best American independent film ever made. Its humor and insight are unmatched. Its rawness and dead cool intellectualism are rare to see on screen -- and, sadly, even more rare to experience from a Black American filmmaker who uses the screen to not merely tell a "true story" but express the bizarre world of identity, race, class, and madness in a country that is truly - and may always be - upside down. Writer and independent film historian Maxx Pinkins and Luminal writer Dennis Leroy Kangalee discuss the MTV generation’s magnus-opus and the audacity of great Black satire.
A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but I couldn't resist the urge. It's in my nature.
--Russian fable about capitalism used masterfully by both Orson Welles and Wendell Harris, two of the great masters of Cinema in the 20th Century
Black Barbie: The scene that was as wonderfully chilling as “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane.
(courtesy of Getshemane 84 Inc.)
Funnier than Woody, more conscious than Spike, stranger than Jarmusch, and as funky as a mangled sofa in a burned-out basement. “Chameleon Street” is a masterpiece - the comedy Fanon would have made had he been a filmmaker. Wendell Harris, Jr. inspired many, but received a cold shoulder after his Sundance win in 1989. And we all know why: Harris is a majestic cinematic talent on par with Orson Welles. Put anyone else of his generation or the succeeding one beside him and they all pale in comparison.
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Maxx Pinkins: You introduced me to Chameleon Street a number of years ago.
DLK: Did I?
Maxx Pinkins: Yes…
DLK: It’s the best film of the 1990s. It closed the 1980s but was really a line in the sand for the opening of that next decade. I remember seeing it on VHS shortly it won Sundance in 1989. It was like a message from another planet. From those first startling moments it was not only a remarkable picture, but a spiritual experience. I shared it with my friends, those who didn’t get it – I dropped. And then I would watch it alone, the way I had Citizen Kane.
Maxx Pinkins: It is a touchstone film for me, much as your film As an Act of Protest is. I have mixed feelings about them. I view them as a source of inspiration, a reminder of what a Black independent filmmaker can attain given the right amount of determination. I also view them with some trepidation, because I am humbled by their force and power. But more than both of these, I love and enjoy watching them as films and I regret being born in a world where such artistry fails to be given its due.
DLK: That’s humbling. And astute because we both agree that Wendell Harris is our Orson Welles.
Maxx Pinkins: Many of us feel this way. He’s our Orson not simply because he too quotes the “Scorpion & and the Frog” fable Welles used in Mr. Arkadin (just as Spielberg re-appropriated Wendell's Chameleon Street in the masterful Catch Me if You Can), but because of their shared artistic temperament as expressed in their vision.
DLK: Yes. And both triple threats. They prove my theory that the best American dramatic pictures are made by actor-writer-directors.
Pinkins: Yes, and concerned with the relationship between truth/fiction, Wendell offers us a delightful interpretation of Douglas Street, weaving real art through the mendacious audacity of a con man. What could be more American, what could be more Wellesian?
DLK: I love that impulse to blur and continually blur; what is truth in life and in film; what is “true story,” what is a documentary versus a narrative…it’s all interesting to me because all cinema – if edited especially – is fiction. It’s all art. It’s the majestic mischievousness of F for Fake, for example, which covers them both; you can imagine Wendell having made that film as well…Chameleon’s a twisted, winding tale, its hall of mirrors feeling is only one an actor-director could make. I used to watch Chameleon Street & David Mamet’s House of Games, back-to-back like some bizarre double feature; a double-sided A single spinning on the jukebox about America and its con games; capitalism & racism pulsating through its veins…those films taught me a lot about life. And how systems are constructed.
The con artist is the elite of all criminals, he is the most intriguing. He uses his mind. He’s also one of the hardest to relay in a movie because not only is his own mask transparent for the audience, we have to believe that he could truly survive on his wits alone. It’s a kind of tour de force for any actor and a marvelous challenge for a director.
No one understands the confidence game better than an actor – except maybe a religious leader or politician – and absolutely no one brings it to great use as an actor in a movie – other than an auteur who sees the world from an actor’s perspective. That already divides the line between them and born-in-the-bone montage artists like Eisenstein or Godard and that tradition that gives us Hitchcock or what is regarded as the standards of filmmaking.
Pinkins: Welles and Wendell are the artist as narrator of his own story, master and slave to his own fate. Magician, Jester, Lover, King, and ultimately Hanged Man. They’re emblems of boldness and ambition, innovation and improvisation, grandeur and gravitas.
DLK: Yes. And an added reason why they were simply too much for the establishment. Forget about their ideologies, it was their imagination. And imagination – for the artist – is the political meaning. That’s where the radicalism resides. And they paid dearly for it.
Harris may be the film universe’s Satchel Paige! We claim we want “Black excellence” and whatnot and yet every single brilliant Black filmmaker in this country has been maligned. The white world has their Christs as well but at least Cassavetes (Shadows, Woman Under the Influence) could work as an actor, and Elaine May was given more money for Ishtar than Wendell Harris will ever see (not that anyone should have millions of dollars for a motion picture, I am vehemently against that!) and someone like Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces) – who was always a bit of an outsider – at least had insider friends. Wendell’s a loner. Period. And he was simply disrespected. Simple as that, there’s no mystery and its indefensible.
One day someone will mine all of this history, there is something there…Why is it that a writer like Henry Dumas was so good that Ralph Ellison was so intimidated that he shunned him, that Toni Morrison copped from him (benevolently)…and the publishing and Black Literati left him to be shot by white cops in a subway station. There should be an enormous guilt that Wendell Harris was not supported and enabled to make the pictures I know he wanted to. Wendell has been used as a kind of whipping boy, a warning from the White Movie Establishment to the Black auteurs from outer space or in the gutter: if you use your mind and your talent like a rapier, we will crush you. Wendell’s writing alone is brilliant. You’re a screenwriter yourself, what are your thoughts on the Chameleon Street script?
Pinkins: His screenplay is revolutionary in its biting critique of the white dominated social structure. And to this day, not a single film exhibits as many displays of...wit and dazzling verbal takedowns of racism as Chameleon Street. This is real satire, worthy of Oscar Wilde, as offhanded as Joe Orton.
DLK: Good point. It’s Charles Wright, classic Pryor in its world-weary consciousness. As self-satisfied sometimes as Dick Gregory’s best barbs. A kind of tidy encapsulation of the Black urbane comedic rancor. It’s bookish, savvy. Chris Rock and even Chappelle, sorry to say, would lose their way eventually because the gaze never wavers: he is speaking specifically to the Black person who’s just lost his job. This specificity becomes universal. That’s the power of art. As opposed to flattering an audience, which a lot of comics do and most movies in general do, regardless of genre. Comedy is a deadly serious artform, tragedy demands grandeur and the capacity for big feelings and ideas, satire must be unsatisfied and pugnacious. If comedy is about acceptance, satire is about destruction of the status quo. And often it can just come from the barb of a witty mind…
Pinkins: If Black satire is what you're into, you can't do much better than Chameleon Street.
DLK: And despite their talents, the Wayans and Spike Lee just didn’t do it for me. That didn’t make me very popular as a kid, people had a hard time relating to me and I to them. I didn’t care about high-tops and Brooklyn and doing Da’ Butt. I always got the impression they were biding time until they could prove their ability to be as venal in their capitalist zeal as much as anyone.
But this strange cinema of Harris was for the oddballs and the outsiders, the kids who stood askance at the zeitgeist, who were outside it as much as they were outside the society that they might have comfortably grown-up in. Spike’s early films were rife posturing and grievances, they were clever Black expressions emitted less from an enclave than Madison Avenue. It was more mugging for the camera with a sort of fey Buppie Nationalism that irritated me. I didn’t like or bond with his humor. And his preaching seemed disingenuous. I like preaching. But there are very few preachers who do it well. The same goes for satire and filmmaking.
Wendell Harris has more in common with Preston Sturges and the Sex Pistols than he does with Spike Lee. And it’s our loss that the mainstream welcomed Spike with open arms, but they made their decision and there was no way a filmmaker more talented than Spike was going to be on the covers of magazines and certainly not one with a droll, sharp sense of humor. Harris is like a razor. Imagine if the New Yorker printed his stories or thoughts; imagine if he had been able to compete against Jarmusch…or wrote for the actors Spike had in his stable. It would have been astounding! The only satiric filmmakers I seriously include in Harris’ orbit are Kathleen Collins (Losing Ground), who as a wit could give Woody Allen a serious run for his money, and Robert Townsend (Hollywood Shuffle) And again, Collins and Townsend both were marginalized. It’s something I harp on because it’s disconcerting to me. Almost as much as the annoyance of how people mis-read films or judge them for their production values. One critic I remember was obsessed with how low budget the film looked. That’s what I love about the real independent-minded films! They are rich in talent, not window dressing.
Chameleon Street makes lemons out of everything and stretches the rubber until it snaps. His aesthetic is gritty and theatrical. It also impresses itself within the tentacles of Black artistic traditions aesthetically and politically (hip-hop for example developed out of a beat and a cardboard box, poetry and the desire to express something…now it’s as moribund as any other shiny car in the world.) The acting alone is remarkable, the alien, knowing style…when it works, it’s dead on. It doesn’t matter that it’s uneven.
Pinkins: If the film suffers in its acting it is simply because the rest of the cast struggles to keep pace with Harris' loquaciousness and, with the exception of Anthony Ennis, appreciate the subtlety of his humor. But Wendell liberates the monotonousness of the weaker performances with the dynamism of his editing, and cuts through dryer moments with his use of voiceover…
DLK: His voice - alluring, dreamy, and stately…
The editing of the film is aggressive— like it’s trying to climb up a mountain (its rhythm is contagious) and the surrealistic sketches are like intervals of both divine kookiness and majestic absurdism. The funky interjections of Douglas Street roaring over his back to the camera is sublime (an homage to Gerima’s Ashes and Embers; the intellectual acumen of both leading characters is similar, different only in context and tenor).
Pinkins: And we go one step further in our acclaim of Wendell. Critic Andrew Sarris emphasized the way in which Welles' work concerns itself with the ordinary feelings of extraordinary people. But with Wendell and with Street, to find that one is young, gifted, and Black is to be thrown into an existential maelstrom, to have extraordinary feelings as an extraordinary person. Or perhaps to have extraordinary feelings as an ontological-non-person. No wonder Hollywood was confounded by Chameleon Street and Wendell's talent. The same fate awaited him as did Welles - a work of art so successfully realized that everything after would always pale in comparison.
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Wendell Harris, we salute you.
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preview image Chameleon Street poster by Arbelos; main article image courtesy of Getshemane 84 Inc.