Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival, yet criminally underseen for over three decades, CHAMELEON STREET recounts the improbable but true story of Michigan con man William Douglas Street Jr., the titular "chameleon" who successfully impersonated his way up the socioeconomic ladder by posing as a magazine reporter, an Ivy League student, a respected surgeon, and a corporate lawyer. Elevated by a dexterous performance and daring direction from multi-hyphenate actor-writer-director Wendell B. Harris Jr., the film pins a lens on race, class and performance in American identity which has lost none of it's relevance. At once piercingly funny and aesthetically mischievous, CHAMELEON STREET is a lost masterpiece finally securing it's rightful place in the independent film canon.
A triple-threat filmmaker of orginal and eccentric talent. --New York Times
Chameleon Street is a gloriously strange one-off that deserves to be appreciated by a new generation…a lost masterpiece of black American cinema. --Bfi
The film addresses issues of race, economics, sex, anger and pride in ways that are both savagely funny and poignant. --Rolling Stone