Lecture discussed creating your own identity and making it real. With the TV series Jackass, the performers do funny and shocking things, but have succeeded not because of pure shock value (though it helps), but from being cultivated specific characters for the audience to follow. Similar shock groups are less successful - Jackass being the only shock TV show to be able to jump to a movie version, not to mention three of them, with the last one grossing over $50 million in its opening weekend. The "actors" on the show pull off some amazing stunts, but with each character playing a different type of role, with good comic timing and thought-out camera moves and editing. Its undeniably real, but very controlled with performers in their created roles for audiences to get into, like, and cheer for.
In Chameleon Street (1989), director-writer-actor Wendell B. Harris captures reality by telling the true story of con-artist Doug Street. But he explores the reality he knows as an African-American man through the film. Although Harris says he followed just what Street personally told him happened, there is an intensity to the film that shows Harris has a connection to the material and a drive to tell the story his way. In the Cinemad interview with Harris, he talks about the level of frustration of being black in the United States for the last century, and looking for a media portrayal to properly represent that. Mainstream film has not done that - the first feature-length film, Birth of a Nation (1915, D.W. Griffith) is so blatantly racist that it has the Klan winning the civil war. Inspired by that film to make a contrasting image, writer Oscar Micheaux started making films to portray more realistic versions of African-Americans, with his landmark Within Our Gates (1920). Griffith, his father a confederate general, was trying to defend his Southern heritage and warped reality in his movie to rewrite history. Micheaux, whose parents were born into slavery, was also defending his heritage, but portrayed an image of reality he knew of African-Americans that was never depicted onscreen.
In a similar way, Harris was inspired to make Chameleon Street. The mainstream African-American cinema of his time consisted of either soft social dramas (although very important in their own way as positive representations) like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, or violent "blaxploitation" films, which did give audiences a fun and wild release to frustrations, trapped themselves in thin, badly produced genre trappings. Wanting the anger against racism of the genre movies in a more realistic drama, Harris found the perfect story when he read a newspaper article about conman Street.
Trained in acting, Harris decided to write and direct a film when he realized the only way to tell Street's story in his own style would be to make it himself rather than try to make it with a major motion picture studio interested in genre or happy endings.
The film displays the lengths the real Doug Street went to in order to create a new identity for himself. As Harris says, “Racism insists that your Present, Past, and Future are all identical.” Frustrated by society’s assignment of his identity based on the color of his skin, Street gets himself elite jobs (Time magazine reporter, doctor, lawyer) simply by talking his way in, as others believe his fake credentials and his attitude. Not for the money, as Street only made a few thousand dollars over 14 years of scams. Rather, to show how identity can be wrongly based on shallow terms, like clothing, what you say your degree is, assumed experience, and your level of confidence.
The film also explores the identity of Harris, declaring himself a filmmaker and following through. If he wanted to become a director in the studio system, it would have been only as a genre filmmaker in the 70s and 80s. In order to make a film his own way, he had to decide he would do it on his own without society’s approval.
After his film premiered and won the 1990 Sundance Film Festival, studios gave him meetings. They listened to ideas but no one would release the unusual film, with its harsh social satire and low budget style, which spent more time on character development, moody dialogue and ideas, than simplistic anti-heroes and car chases. The only deal made for the film was selling the remake rights, as studios wanted to turn the story into a pure comedy with Will Smith or an action film with Wesley Snipes (both real suggestions). No remake, distorting the identity of the original film, was ever made.
reading for class #6 here
reading for class #6 here
