Nov 3, 2026 · 2 min
Chameleon Street turns fraud into a racial performance
Live Event: Movie Night for New Yorker Radio Hour Listeners
The film’s shifting identities and provocative humor make its critique of ambition, manipulation, and race the focus of the event.
- 1Chameleon Street follows a fraudster who adopts professional identities to advance himself.
- 2An excerpt uses psychological manipulation and provocative humor to unsettle an evaluator.
- 3Richard Brody and Adam Howard are slated to discuss the film after the screening.
Don't miss
The excerpt’s speaker taunts an evaluator, jokes about manipulating the analysis, and riffs on “Notorious Negro” as a possible autobiography title.
The brief
The event centers on Wendell B. Harris, Jr.’s 1989 film Chameleon Street, which follows a fraudster moving through borrowed professional identities.
Its central tension is less simple deception than performance: the protagonist uses confidence, manipulation, and racial commentary to control how others read him.
The excerpt catches that strategy in action as a speaker taunts an evaluator, jokes about manipulating the analysis, and proposes “Notorious Negro” as an autobiography title.
Film critic Richard Brody and producer Adam Howard are slated to discuss the movie in a post-screening Q&A, extending the film’s questions beyond the excerpt.
The event frames Chameleon Street as a provocative study of self-invention, where humor makes the fraud’s psychological and racial implications harder to dismiss.
Weekly email
State of the Pod, every Monday
The week's most-discussed names and stories from podcasts, with the moments behind them. Free, five minutes, unsubscribe in one click.