Off-Centerpiece : Maybe He Should Have Impersonated a White Studio Boss

When Steven Soderbergh’s “sex, lies, and videotape” won the top prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1989, the resulting buzz swiftly transformed the low-budget film into a hit and the rookie director into a hot Hollywood commodity. When “Chameleon Street” was honored with the same prize the following year, Wendell Harris, the film’s black star-writer-director, thought that he too was headed for the big time.

But 18 months later, Harris’ film is only now about to open in Los Angeles, and at that, it’s getting just a one-week stint beginning Friday at the Nuart. While many of the films Harris beat at Sundance--”Metropolitan,” “To Sleep With Anger,” “House Party” and “Longtime Companion”--already have enjoyed wide release, “Chameleon Street” has languished unseen, leaking out the past few months in a one-city-at-a-time tour of metropolitan art houses.

Based on the true story of a Michigan man named Doug Street, the film depicts the amoral, chilling and often hilarious behavior of a black man who poses as various accomplished individuals in order to advance in white society. At one point, despite no medical training, Street impersonates a surgeon and performs dozens of operations, including a hysterectomy filmed and acted out by Harris in hide-your-eyes, medical documentary style. Made for about $2 million, the droll, weird and very black comedy ends ambiguously, leaving it unclear whether the audience should sympathize with or condemn the compulsive imposter.

“Many distributors told us that they could not find an easy hook to sell the film with,” Harris said. “One major distributor said, ‘This is great, but it’s not like an Eddie Murphy film and it’s not like Spike Lee.’ They didn’t know what to do with it.”

So despite enthusiastic film festival audiences and reviews around the world, “Chameleon Street” has been the odd man out. While such neophytes as 19-year-old Matty Rich (“Straight Out of Brooklyn”) and 23-year-old John Singleton (“Boyz N the Hood”) have hatched Hollywood futures with laudable debuts, Harris, now 37, has been left a bit behind the curve.

Harris applauds the “so-called black film renaissance,” insisting that the audience is “starved for this product” and that every new film from Rich, Singleton, Lee or any other black writer-director expands the possibilities for everyone.

Still, the bulk of these films have been visceral, unflinching re-creations of life in the ghetto. Harris is a former Juilliard classmate of Robin Williams and a man more versed in existentialism and the films of Jean Cocteau than the inner-city realities of gangs and crack. In trying to sell it, he said, he actually heard comments like, “Where is the drug dealer, where is the black-on-black crime?” He chuckles at the irony in the fact that his film about a black man who goes to amazing extremes to be what white society wants him to be has had difficulty finding a home in an industry that seems willing to embrace only one specific black reality.

“White people have not let us breathe, and still they are the ones doling out the oxygen,” Harris said. “ ‘Chameleon Street’ is unique enough to be without precedent and Hollywood has always been suspicious of anything new. Everyone knows the existence of and can rally around the black ghetto. But just as there are a rainbow variety of black complexions in the world, there should be that same diversity in film. The life of Doug Street is every bit a part of the black experience as ‘Do the Right Thing’ or ‘Boyz N the Hood.’ ”

Harris, who lives in Flint, Mich., where the film was made, nonetheless is optimistic about today’s climate in Hollywood. And it is in Hollywood, where Harris came 15 years before with unfulfilled dreams of writing for “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” that he intends to thrive. Two-time Oscar-winner Milos Forman has met with Harris about directing Harris’ script about the life of boxer Joe Louis, and Harris said that he is also in various stages of negotiations with several movies, including a black Western, a dark comedy about the ordeals of four Juilliard-trained actors and a drama set in Trinidad.

“It’s a hopeful time because there seems to be an awareness in Hollywood now that was not there in 1976 when people couldn’t even spell black correctly,” Harris said. “Now there is an openness and a willingness to deal with us. And we’re in such a primitive state with our black cinematic expression that every film that comes out is making history.”