When he won the grand jury prize at the 1990 Sundance film festival for his debut picture Chameleon Street, Wendell B Harris Jr thought his film just might be a hit. “Gee,” he remembers thinking, “Hollywood is reaching out to me.” But despite the acclaim, Chameleon Street struggled to get a release. Harris never made another film.

Now, three decades later, things are a little different. Chameleon Street – recently hailed by the New Yorker as a masterpiece and one of the 20th century’s greatest independent films – was finally given a US streaming release in 2021, and is available for the first time in the UK, via Mubi and BFI Player. For Harris, this means that his shocking true crime comedy about race in America may finally be widely seen. “I have spent 30 years fighting for the distribution of Chameleon Street,” he says. “Fighting and, frankly, failing.”

The film’s genesis was in the summer of 1985. Harris – who had just graduated in drama from the prestigious Juilliard School – stumbled on a news item in his native Detroit about a recently jailed serial identity fraudster called William Douglas Street. “Immediately he solved two great problems for me,” Harris says via Zoom from Detroit. The first was that Harris was an actor looking for a hefty leading role. And second, his story was “something that would lay bare the racial interplay in America”.

In the 1970s and 80s, Street reportedly conned his way into a succession of occupations: human rights lawyer, Yale student, journalist, basketball-player, even a surgeon who helped perform a shocking 36 (successful) hysterectomies. Harris began interviewing Street at length in prison. “I had something that he wanted,” says Harris, “and he had something that I wanted.” What did Street want? “Enhanced notoriety.”

Harris spent four years trying to finance the picture, a process he describes as “akin to scraping dried blood off the sidewalk with a butterknife”. When he eventually raised the $1.5m budget – the majority of it from black investors who included his parents and brother – Harris wrote, directed, edited and starred in the picture.

Chameleon Street, which premiered at the Toronto film festival in 1989, radically framed Street as an autodidact antihero, a sardonic and informed citizen using assumed identities to exact his revenge on a rigged and racist society. As the film’s tagline posits: “I think therefore I scam.” The film’s motor is Harris’s rich, deadpan orotundity – redolent of Orson Welles, Harris’s hero – and a shockingly funny script tightened during the film’s long gestation.

The story is told totally from Street’s point of view. The director says he was not interested in the now fashionable idea of giving voice to victims. “The people who end up actually dealing with Doug in his life end up feeling ravaged,” says Harris, “because he is not really functioning as a husband or a father or a friend.” Harris has continued to be contacted by Street’s victims, furious over a film they perceived as glorifying the man who had damaged their lives. How does that make him feel? Harris pauses. “I always responded.”

After his Sundance victory, Harris did in fact go to Hollywood. Years passed as endless meetings produced nothing. The film did not find a distributor, and trickled into a handful of theatres in 1994. Harris sold remake rights, which took Chameleon Street even further from screens. Hollywood, in the years afterwards, produced 1999’s The Talented Mr Ripley and 2002’s Catch Me If You Can – palatable stories of con artists with white protagonists.

“Mine is a dangerous film in many respects,” says Harris. “It’s not an Adam Sandler film.” Chameleon Street depicts white America as susceptible to exploitation. “The attitude in the film is not one of subservience,” says Harris. “It is one of mastering and even superiority over a system. Over racism.”

Those very same structures ended up, in Harris’ view, blocking him. “As we speak here now,” says Harris, “the film is still being suppressed.” Harris pays tribute to co-star Angela Leslie, who played Street’s wife Gabrielle, who he says had her career “destroyed” by Bill Cosby. (In 2014, Leslie publicly accused Cosby of sexually assaulting her in a Las Vegas hotel room, and Harris’s film remains her only film role.)

There was almost a second Harris film: Negropolis, a comedy-epic set in an ancient Rome with black emperors and white enslaved people. “I would pitch that,” he laughs, “and the white executives would look at me as if I had defecated on their carpet.” He says Spike Lee signed up to direct the film before pulling out of negotiations at a late stage.

Instead, Harris returned to Michigan. “There was a joke going around Hollywood,” says Harris of the 1990s, “that to make a film you only had to be black, male and not Wendell Harris.” The experience must have had a psychological effect on him? Harris pauses. “I mean, yes. Of course. But the psychological reaction is dwarfed by the financial reaction.” Harris had to face up to his family and investors losing their money. “The financial impact was quite overwhelming.”

A DVD release in 2007 failed to secure Chameleon Street a large audience, but did garner it cult recognition. In 2021, Arbelos Films restored it in 4K, which Harris supervised. The Black Lives Matter movement gave focus to the film’s ideas of code-switching, passing and confirmation bias. Street, meanwhile, kept offending: he was imprisoned again in 2016 after impersonating a military veteran.

Today, Harris does have a new film in the works: he is in post-production on a documentary called Yeshua Vs Frankenstein in 3D, using the writings of philosopher Theodor Adorno to show how media has been used to control society “from Michelangelo to Michael Jackson”. Adorno and the Frankfurt school, Harris argues, “predicted it would take 70 years to make America stink like a rotten corpse. I don’t know if you can smell it from where you are, but there’s a powerful rancid odour right now in America.”

For Harris, the film’s recent shift in fortunes is welcome but contains its own traps. “When Chameleon Street is relegated to art house or cult film status,” he says, “that is code, my friend, for no money. You take all the amazing reviews for Chameleon Street and add 15 cents, and I still can’t buy a cup of coffee.” Thirty-five years on, Chameleon Street remains a classic-in-waiting, the lonely masterpiece of a prophetic voice.

• Chameleon Street is streaming now on Mubi and BFI Player