The 1989 shoestring production Chameleon Street was directed and written by Wendell B. Harris, who also plays the lead role of Doug Stone, a con man and sort of serial impersonator. In the movie, Harris's Street pretends to be a Harvard Medical School graduate and talks his way into a residency at Wayne State Medical School; he enrolls at Yale as a French exchange student, despite the apparent handicap of not speaking French. ("J'accuse, Jacques Cousteau.") Fixated on a woman who's a basketball player for Midwestern University — Paula McGee, who appears in the movie as herself — he presents himself as a Time magazine journalist and snags an interview with her. Other movies about successful impersonators share the joke that a big part of life is just appearing to be what you say you are, but Street's story has a special wrinkle that gives it extra potency: Street is black, and he knows from angry first-hand experience how important something as irrelevant as skin color is when it comes to deciding who gets ahead, or who just gets his foot in the door.
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