Chamelion Street

William Douglas Street Jr.

CHAMELEON STREET       B                   

USA  (94 mi)  1989  d:  Wendell B. Harris Jr.

I think, therefore I scam.

—William Douglas Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr.)

Not an easy film to appreciate, as it grates on your nerves, yet it offers a rare glimpse into the changing identity of being a black man, where this is an extremely provocative yet oddball film selected from the archives of black independent filmmakers, a mix of blackness, academia, and exaggerated satire from Wendell B. Harris Jr. who wrote, directed, and starred in this film that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1990, but only received a limited release afterwards, completely disappearing from view before falling into complete obscurity  Despite its limited success and widespread critical acclaim, the director has never made another film.  While bizarre and overly weird, at times hilarious, but also baffling, feeling intellectually aloof, distancing itself from viewers in the haphazard way it plays out, lacking narrative coherency, the essential message extracted from this film is just how complicated it is to be a black man in America.   Loosely based on the real-life exploits of Detroit conman and high-school dropout William Douglas Street, Jr. who demonstrates a chameleon-like gift for becoming what people want him to be, assuming false identities under the guise that he can make more money as someone else than he can by being himself.  Sort of the opposite of what’s portrayed in Black Like Me, a 1961 book recounting the experiences of a white journalist traveling through the Jim Crow era of the American South disguised as a black man, this portrays a black man impersonating a fictitious identity in prestigious positions more commonly associated with whites, like a doctor or lawyer, professions that require graduate degrees, while Street himself had limited education.  This was not without consequences, as Street was continually arrested, accumulating two dozen criminal convictions (and one jailbreak) for his lifelong efforts over the course of 50 years.  In this film, Harris puts himself in Street’s persona and invents his own screenplay, opening the film where he’s being interviewed by a white prison psychiatrist who’s trying to unravel his motives.  Used to being the smartest guy on the room, with a wide variety of interests, Street is the kind of guy who quickly sizes up the situation by reading others, offering what they want to hear, being the best version so that he puts their mind at ease, feeling comfortable with who he is, even if it’s all a lie.  The plain truth about blacks is that they remain an enigma for white America, who are historically immune to being understood, still outside the realm of white comprehension, even if they freely adopt cultural references, like soul music, rap albums, literature, or support Civil Rights legislation.  The original sin of slavery has permanently altered the landscape in America, where the racial divide was never deeper.   

The film backtracks to Street’s earlier years in Detroit, still living with his parents, working for his overbearing father installing burglar alarms, where we see him hanging out in a work van between jobs, smoking, shooting the shit with coworkers, spending time at a local bar afterwards with the boys, each commiserating about how they don’t have any money, conjuring up the age-old thought, “Do I have to deal drugs in order to make money?” imagining in his head the conversation he’d have with the dope dealer, the only steady job in the neighborhood, where it’s not about the dope, but the business of making money.  The fact this is exaggerated to comic extremes suggests it never happened, yet it’s an option available to every black man growing up in urban centers.  Street does all right for himself, marrying a lovely and intelligent woman, Gabrielle (Angela Leslie), yet she has a taste for shopping sprees, reminding him every morning when he leaves for work to “Make some money.”  Perhaps prodded by her incessant demands, his first scam is writing an extortion letter to the wife of Detroit Tiger baseball slugger Willie Horton’s wife, delivering it to her door when he’s out of town, asking for $50,000 to avoid making public incriminating photos of Horton having sex with other women.  However this plan backfires when his best friend and accomplice, Curtis (Anthony Ennis), signs Street’s name at the bottom of the note and sends copies to the local papers, eventually exposed as a sham.  Interviewed afterwards like he’s some kind of celebrity, he passes it off like some kind of joke, but really it was too stupid to be believed.  In real-life, Street was arrested in 1971 for extortion, receiving twenty years’ probation, but only after successfully impersonating a baseball player, where he was actually invited to try-outs by the Detroit Tiger organization.  Next he poses as a journalist from Time magazine, interviewing female USC basketball star Paula McGee (who plays herself), claiming “She had the four ‘B’s…black, beauty, brains, and basketball.”  Yet he’s eventually exposed, tipped off by a misspelling in his description of duties, which leads to a more thorough background check.  Gabrielle is dumbfounded that he misspelled a word in his own self-composed background letter, thinking he’s just another hare brained knucklehead.  Similarly, he has interactions with real-life Detroit mayor Coleman Young, playfully resurfacing in moments of history, much like Woody Allen’s earlier mockumentary ZELIG (1983).  While the film is multi-layered and complex, serving as some sort of biting social commentary, much like Jeffrey C. Wray’s recent The Evolution of Bert (2014), it also offers a black perspective akin to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where the inherent blackness in these impersonations is virtually unseen by his white counterparts. 

Among the more surreal sequences is Street’s ability to obtain a student ID at Yale University, offering free entrance to the library, which feels like a sacred entrance into hallowed grounds, where he attempts to teach himself French by immersing himself in Édth Piaf.  Surrounded by beautiful white girls, dressed in a black leather jacket, shades, and a beret, pretending he’s from French-speaking Martinique in the Caribbean, he passes himself off as some kind of looming revolutionary figure, calling himself Pépé Le Mofo, uttering phrases he’s familiarized himself with, which works like a charm until a Belgian exchange student points out the obvious, exposing the fact that he’s not even speaking French.  Undeterred, he steps into a screening of the Jean Cocteau movie BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946), identifying with the Beast, of course, while meeting up with a rapturous version of beauty, the Yale-educated, French-speaking sophisticate Tatiana (Amina Fakir, a University of Michigan student who won Miss Black America in 1985) from Kenya, who briefly becomes his love interest.  But when she discovers he’s already married and that he deceived her, she can’t trust him and loses interest.  One of the wild scenes of the film is a masquerade French Revolution party they attend dressed as Beauty and the Beast, where incredulously he runs into Gabrielle.  This kind of anarchistic freedom is short-lived, both in terms of extravagant film style and relationship-wise, as neither woman forgets his betrayal.  While Tatiana is darker skinned and more of his intellectual equal, his natural inclinations prefer the lighter-skinned, less educated woman, claiming he’s “received 400 years of conditioning by the Man,” suggesting he’s not responsible for his own sexual appetites.  Little more than a smug opportunist, the self-righteous nature of Street comes across as sexist and misogynistic, perhaps representative of the times, or more accurately the Blaxploitation era of the previous decade that this film parodies, but also his tendency to blame others and never hold himself accountable, with women bearing the brunt of his inner rage, as they never accept him for who he is.  In this way, that’s part of the challenge of being a black man, as he’s constantly nagged and criticized by black women, who offer him little wiggle room, finding him inadequate, which may stimulate his desire to take refuge in someone else’s identity.  While he takes a turn as a corporate lawyer from a prestigious law firm, easily his most outrageous stunt is assuming the role of a Harvard-educated intern at a local hospital, impressing the nurses, while lauded with praise by the white doctors.  While the film reveals one harrowing incident where he’s asked to perform surgery under the observing eyes of the ranking physician, consumed by doubt and uncertainty, immersed in his own sweat, he’s alleged to have performed 36 hysterectomies before being discovered (all successful, by the way), spending plenty of time in bathrooms scrutinizing medical journals.  The film has the unpleasant feeling of being preached to, while also hustled by the filmmaker himself, as if it’s all a con job, like he’s performing a brilliant vaudeville routine, yet the extreme severity of his situation offers clever insight into the hoops blacks must jump through to be accepted by white society.  Revealing the difficulties blacks encounter when pursuing the American Dream, so long as he can act white enough and pass for a productive member of society, he’s viewed as non-threatening, color neutral, and easily accepted, but the moment he’s perceived as “black” in an overtly racist America, it changes the entire power dynamic, effectively sending his black ass back to prison.

Cru (2014)

Director Alton Glass

 

CRU           C                   
USA  (95 mi)  2014  d:  Alton Glass    

Made for an estimated $750,000, this is another low-budget black indie film that, like his earlier films, will likely end up being released on television.  Despite winning five awards at the American Black Film Festival, including Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Narrative Feature and Actor (Keith Robinson), where the much more inventive Jeffrey C. Wray’s The Evolution of Bert (2014) was not in competition, this speaks more to the lack of a black presence in the film industry, an inherently white owned business where whites end up writing nearly all the black-oriented film projects.  According to Gregory Allen Howard from Portside, July 31, 2014, The Whitewashing of James Brown | Portside:  “There are over fifty black iconic biopics and black-themed movies in development in Hollywood, including multiple Richard Pryor projects, five Martin Luther King projects, multiple Marvin Gaye projects, and civil rights projects, and only one or two have an African American writer.  Our entire history has been given over to white writers.”  In an industry where black talents like Viola Davis and Forest Whitaker have received critical acclaim for playing maids and butlers, is it any wonder that so many black-themed films are laced with generic stereotypical characters where an important consideration is that they be perceived as non-threatening to whites, a continued reflection of how white people view blacks even in contemporary society.  Even in films written by blacks, like this one, where the producer/director owns Glassrock Entertainment in Los Angeles, there remains a perception hovering over Hollywood that in order to be successful they have to be able to sell a product that is acceptable to whites, which accounts for so many of the exact same kinds of generically acceptable characters, such as male figures who are a product of their identification with sports, where even as adults they are defined and/or imprisoned by their youthful masculinity, former athletic heroes on the basketball court during high school in what amounts to their glory years.  Now fifteen years later, each having gone their own separate ways, the film reunites these former state champions who have lost contact with each other through the years.      

Seen through the eyes of Marshall ‘M.O.’ Ogden (Keith Robinson), a rising star in a successful law firm, owner of that million dollar house in Malibu, he is written much like other single dimension characters on TV, like the prototype of the near perfect Blair Underwood part on the television series L.A. Law (1986 – 1994), where he’s perceived as rich, good looking, and a killer of a ladies man, seen early on in the company of several women in his bed, supposedly the ultimate male fantasy.  All of these are signs of male virility and success as seen through the prism of television, which strictly deals in stereotypes when it comes to people of color.  Once he becomes a partner of the firm, gladly welcomed by Harry Lennix, the CEO of the company, the audience quickly realizes something is not right.  While Marshall continues to believe he’s invincible, he’s diagnosed with kidney cancer, which begins a slow deterioration of his health.  His male cockiness is challenged throughout the rest of the film, where his standard comebacks just don’t work anymore.  He becomes a liability to the business, where his health is impeding his work, but until he’s officially instructed to go home and take some time off, he’s in utter denial about his condition.  Cue the sad orchestral music, which is uninspired, standard fare from Kurt Oldman, where the director simply doesn’t trust making more original musical choices, as if that’s a less significant aspect of his filmmaking, or working without music altogether, where the performances of his actors would be forced to carry the entire weight of the film.  Instead the director relies upon a repeated flashback sequence, which we see about a half a dozen times, losing any attempt at subtlety, but it shows the kids driving their own car back home from the state high school basketball championship.  Victorious and in a celebratory mood, there is plenty of drinking going on leading to that inevitable crash, where all survived, but their big man, Richard Hughes (Richard T. Jones), permanently injured his knee and flamed out, never becoming the pro star he was expected to be.  Instead he’s now a middle-aged family man that takes parenting seriously, coaching basketball while living vicariously through his son R.J. (Jermaine Crawford) and his budding athletic prowess, while married to his intelligent and attractive wife Michelle (Melissa De Sousa).  Richard has held a grudge against M.O. since the accident, holding him responsible as the driver, and hasn’t spoken to him in all these years. 

Through the help of perhaps Marshall’s closest friend Alex (Diandra Lyle), a sultry fox who always seems to be there when he needs someone, though she’s rarely seen in close ups like the featured male characters, instead the director always shoots her in a tight, form-fitting dress wearing heels accentuating not only her figure, but her power and stylish individuality, she urges him to reconnect with his teammates, best friends from his past, as they were once a tight-knit group growing up together, knowing each other’s secrets, where they shared the happiest moments of their youth.  Contacting them one by one, including Eric (Antwon Tanner), whose life is amusingly surrounded by child support payments with different women, Adisa (Sammi Rotibi), an Army recruiter targeting young black men, and Richard, who begrudgingly comes along, they are all invited to his palatial Southern California estate for a weekend reunion.  While there’s the usual cliché’s of good times and laughs, where they pay tribute to their seemingly unbreakable friendship, each one goes through their own personal transformation from the past, where they’ve grown yet remain transfixed in time, still reliving that one earth shattering moment that they can’t escape, as the bad blood between M.O. and Richard only resurfaces, where any hopes of healing old wounds are derailed by frayed nerves and a long build-up of mistrust.  There is obviously a special understanding between these guys, but they exist side by side with personal torment and wrenching anger, where many of these hidden emotions rise to the surface, bluntly expressing themselves in inappropriate moments, where whatever hopes Marshall might have had in finding the right time to come clean about his illness evaporates into thin air.  No attempt is really made to flesh out the characters of any of these men, as it’s all placed in a similar context of what we’ve seen before, turning this death and redemption story into a sad tearjerker by the end when the friends learn the ultimate truth.  The entire atmosphere surrounding the film exists in a kind of Southern California fantasy world, where all the money in the world seems to have been dropped at one man’s feet, yet it still can’t buy him happiness.  While Alex gives the film a special edge, where we’d like to see an entire film devoted to her character, this is otherwise trite and overly conventional throughout, yet it’s a feelgood story about boys who aspire to be men, with fair to middling results. 

The Evolution of Bert

Director Jeffrey C. Wray  

 

THE EVOLUTION OF BERT     B+         
USA  (77 mi)  2014  d:  Jeffrey C. Wray  

While indie films are rare, Black indie films are even rarer, where the two that come to mind are Danny Green’s Mr. Sophistication (2012), about an attempted comeback of an edgy black comedian, which premiered at the Chicago Film Festival in 2012 and then was never released, and Barry Jenkins’ extremely popular relationship movie, Medicine for Melancholy (2008), an award winner that played the festival circuit, but was never released on more than seven screens in any given week in the entire country, and was usually only shown on three screens or less.  Many of the more popular “black” indie films are actually directed by white directors, like Craig Brewer’s HUSTLE & FLOW (2005) and BLACK SNAKE MOAN (2007), Lance Hammer’s BALLAST (2008), even perennial indie filmmaker John Sayles took a stab with HONEYDRIPPER (2007), all set in black neighborhoods using primarily black casts.  While the title leaves something to be desired, making it sound like a quirky Walter Mitty style movie about a nerdy character, or a reference to Sesame Street, but instead it’s a funny stream-of-conscious exposé on being black in America, a well-acted film that wears its intelligence on its sleeve, featuring a terrific cast of non-professionals, blending fantasy and fiction, using a jazzy musical score by Kris Johnson, making this a thoroughly enjoyable experience.  Perhaps what’s most unusual about this film is that it was shot 15 years ago when the director was a professor at Ohio University in 1998, shot sporadically over several months, and then just sat on the shelf while family, children, or other jobs took precedence.  While now he’s an Associate Professor of Film Studies/Creative Writing at Michigan State University, it took a grant award to allow the team to shoot the epilogue nearly ten years later, where the post production aspects of the film were only finalized just this year.  So it’s like a time warp taking us back in time, yet loses none of its initial thrust, which is a satiric coming-of-age film, the development of a social consciousness, and a comment on what it means to be black in America.     

Randall Stokes is a refreshing discovery as Bert, your typically intelligent, good-looking, and thoroughly confused black college student who is completing his final semester at school as a history major, but is no clearer about how he intends to spend his future, where his parents are ready for him to enter the job market.  We realize the extent of his difficulties in a hilarious dream sequence where he envisions his future in multiple possibilities, including a black Republican, a token corporate Negro doing the soft shoe, a man following his dreams, and another more emblematic representative of the working man.  The first in his family to graduate college, Bert’s problem is how to define himself, to find what distinguishes him from the rest of the students, as he seems to be a very personable guy with an optimistic streak, hangs with his best friend Nate the DJ (Nate DeWitt), while romancing Nita (Nakeshia Knight), his friendly, attractive, poetry spouting girlfriend for the past two years.  Because he’s so close to the finish line, he starts questioning this relationship, imagining what his life would be like with other women.  Nate immediately tells him not to give up on a good thing, suggesting other girls that respect him as part of a healthy couple wouldn’t give him the time of day if he was single, as a good part of their allegiance is to Nita, where respecting him is part of respecting her.  Easily the most revelatory character is played by the director himself in dreadlocks, playing Duke, a perennial student who’s been through it all and tries to school Bert about what to expect.  His advice about the future is so uncannily accurate that he comes across as a bit of a mystic, always wearing shades, usually found with a smile on his face.  When asked why he never takes off his shades, he gives three reasons:  his eyes are sensitive to light, he refuses to give the white man the pleasure of that smiling face with understanding eyes, where despite the violent racial past, whites still expect the black man to make them feel more “comfortable,” so shades freak white people out, and lastly, he’s just plain cool.  They meet in a quiet moment when Bert is listening to the music of Walter Jackson on his headphones, Walter Jackson It's all over - YouTube (2:57), where Duke is curious what he’s listening too, claiming they both love “old-school” music. 

Losing much of the stereotypes and cliché’s that generally denigrate blacks and lessen their potential cultural impact, music is such an essential ingredient in the film, told in a freeform, essay-like experimental style that integrates black history with contemporary affairs, girlfriend issues, and anxiety about the future, where jazz music, hip hop, R & B, along with poetry readings further emphasize self-expression.  Randall Sisco is a street musician who appears throughout the film, where he acts as a kind of Greek chorus, offering blunt comments on what he observes, while there is also an unusually soulful version of “Caifornia Dreamin” reminiscent of Bobby Womack, Bobby Womack California Dreamin (1968 cover) - YouTube (3:19).  Using a handheld camera by Joe “Jody” Williams throughout, the 16 mm film has a spontaneous feel, where the pace is fast and loose and highly observant, covering a remarkable amount of territory, where the film aesthetic becomes a way of exploring the black experience, enhanced by the authenticity of such well-written, well-developed characters, even those in secondary roles, where the director leads them into inspired monologues, often expressed through long takes, with occasional jump cuts to offer jarring images that express a new experience or idea, becoming a meditation on black identity.  Whether then or now, students are well aware of stereotypes, how black men in particular are pigeonholed into acceptable, non-threatening career choices, where they are forced to follow existing rules and guidelines rather than use their imaginations to invent their own.  Some of the more inspired scenes reveal angered female indignation at the way black men typically mistreat them, where Bert is no different, though he probably realizes afterwards that he deserves a swift kick in the head.  Witty and poignant, the film offers a candid discussion on the black reality, using genuine characters and inspired musical choices, but it’s the poetry that elevates this film to another level, offering several samples from Nita as well as Bert’s final “Resurrection essay,” creating theatrical moments in time that deserve to be treasured and held in posterity.