{"id":16447,"date":"2024-05-03T20:00:35","date_gmt":"2024-05-04T00:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=16447"},"modified":"2024-05-02T13:03:06","modified_gmt":"2024-05-02T17:03:06","slug":"chameleon-street-1989-wendell-b-harris-jr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/16447","title":{"rendered":"Chameleon Street (1989, Wendell B. Harris Jr.)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Our guy (played by the director) has a new wife Gabrielle, is tired of working for his dad installing burglar alarms, so he pretends to work for Time to interview a basketball star, figuring if he can sell the interview to Time afterwards then he basically told the truth.  Less justifiable is hanging out in a hospital doing real surgeries with no training.  He spends some time in prison for that one, then escapes.  &#8220;That afternoon I went to Cocteau&#8217;s <em>Beauty and the Beast<\/em> to get my mind right,&#8221; hell yeah.  He identity-thieves his way into Yale, calls himself Pepe le Mofo, sees a band called Fantomas Judex, has a grand time while his pregnant wife is left forgotten at home.  I&#8217;m not clear how they both end up at the same masquerade, but after they win best costume he goes back to the family, donating blood to get by.  Suddenly he&#8217;s a fake lawyer, meeting the mayor, a promising young political volunteer, until the cops arrive because his wife sold him out.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image24\/chameleon1.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Harris is narrating much of the time.  Lines repeat, characters talk into camera, reminded me of <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/15596\">Story of a Three-Day Pass<\/a><\/em>.  Terrific end credits scene, the frog\/scorpion story told by an array of readers fast-cut together.  Won a Sundance grand prize (over <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/8337\">Metropolitan<\/a><\/em>, <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/342\">To Sleep With Anger<\/a><\/em>, <em>The Unbelievable Truth<\/em>, <em>The Plot Against Harry<\/em>), and feels at times very much like a 1990 Sundance movie.  Based on the life of a real guy who, per a delightful <a href=\"https:\/\/thefilmstage.com\/wendell-b-harris-jr-on-30-years-of-fighting-hollywood-suppression-to-get-chameleon-street-in-front-of-audiences\/\">Film Stage interview<\/a> with the director, hated the movie but appreciated the residual checks he got from it.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image24\/chameleon2.jpg\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our guy (played by the director) has a new wife Gabrielle, is tired of working for his dad installing burglar alarms, so he pretends to work for Time to interview a basketball star, figuring if he can sell the interview to Time afterwards then he basically told the truth. Less justifiable is hanging out in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[357,885,30,247,3252],"class_list":["post-16447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1980s","tag-fraud","tag-identity","tag-prison","tag-wendell-harris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16447"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16461,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16447\/revisions\/16461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}