Chameleon Street

William Douglas Street works for his father and is bored with his life. His wife wants more money. His solution is to reinvent himself: he becomes whoever he needs to be. First a journalist, then a surgeon, then a lawyer, then a university student. He has no training for any of it, but people believe him and he plays the part to the end. He works for months in a hospital as a doctor. Wendell B. Harris Jr. wrote, directed and starred. It rests on a real person: the Detroit impostor William Douglas Street Jr. Harris interviewed him over three years and built the screenplay from those recordings. The narrative does not present the deception as a display of skill; that Street can enter any identity so easily is a comment on what people accept a person as. The film won the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1990 but could not find a distributor for more than a year. Who it's for: Viewers who like American independent cinema, adaptations of real events, and narratives about identity. Who it's not for: The production conditions show and the sound is rough. The narrative also proceeds episodically.