IT’S ALL TRUE: Orson Welles Pan-American Odyssey By Catherine Benamou
Ive just received a copy of Catherine Benamous labor of love book about the making ofOrson Welles own unfinished labor of love, Its All True. Although Ive only had a chance to scan through it briefly,I can safely attest its a must have volume for any serious Welles aficionado. Firstly, it contains almost 40 rare photos, none of which Ive ever seen in printbefore. And to highlight only one choice bit of information that captivated my attention, there is an interview Ms. Benamou conducted with the children of Jacare (the star of Welles planned episode about the Jangadeiros). All of Jacares children seem to believe that his death was not an accident, but rather a planned event.
Now, knowing today what governments and their secret spy agencies are capable of (and lets not forget that this was in 1942 when Hitler was in control of half of Europe), and given the fact that Jacare was a highly vocal critic of Brazils then president, Getulio Vargas, its not very hard to believe that this may have indeed been a planned accident. Its something that certainly deserves a closer examination and investigation. I always found it quite difficult to swallow the story that an accomplished fisherman and excellent swimmer could have died by simply falling off of his raft into Rio harbor.
Of couse, ifwe accept the reported facts in Charles Highams book, theres little doubt that Jacare had no chance, since according to Higham, a shark that was battling an Octopus swallowed Jacare up. At the time, bothThe N.Y. Times and Time reported this apocryphal story in their pages, although it was a tall tale that was later completely discredited. It now seems likely that the real monsters that claimed Jacares life were not a shark and an octopus, but perhaps the powers inBrazil's fisherman's elite, who didn't wantJacares voice of dissent heard.
Here are the two original reports that appeared in The New York Times andTime magazine. Both of these accounts contain numerous factual errors about what actually happened on that fateful day, ridiculously implying that Orson Welles was directing a battle between a shark and an Octopus. Not even Welles was that good of a director.
However, it seems that by combining the fact and fiction behindIt's All True, Hollywood might have the makings for yet another movie about Orson Welles. Vincent D' Onofrio could play Welles for a third time, showing us just how he managed to film that Shark and Octopus battle... all in the picturesque setting of Rio's harbor with Sugarloaf mountain looming in the background.
Leading Brazil Raftman Dies Starring for Movie
May 20, 1942 The New York Times
Rio De Janeiro, Brazil May 19Mandel Olimpio Meira, Brazils most noted fisherman, was drowned today off Rio de Janeiro while starring for Orson Welles film of Brazilian Life.
Mr. Meira, who sailed 2,000 miles on his raft last year to Rio de Janeiro to get President Getulio Vargass permission to form a fishermens union, was tipped from his raft today during the filming of a battle between a shark and an octopus.
The fisherman swam away from the fighting monsters into a whirlpool, where he was drowned. Two companions were rescued.
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A Report On The Death Of Jacare
June 8, 1942 Time Magazine
Workers mourned a decomposing head and two half-devoured armsthe dubious remains of a national hero. Manoel Olimpio Meira, called "Jacare" (Alligator) after his natal village, became the modern hero of Brazil's jangadeiros, half-starved "sharecropping" fishermen, last autumn when he and three mates sailed their flimsy jangada (sailing raft) Sao Pedro on a 61-day, 1,650-mile trip to Rio de Janeiro to tell President Vargas the fishermen's troubles. From Getulio Vargas they won full union rightsand pensions. Their storyso kindled Cinema Director Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) that he flew Jacare and his mates to Rio again, to enact their feat for his camera.
Jacare took to his new task with simple dignity. He had always idolized a legendary jangadeiro called "Dragon of the Seas" who kidnapped slaves, hid them safely from posses in the hinterland. If the Dragon could free slaves from slavery, figured Jacare, he could free the jangadeiros from exploitation. And the film's publicity would help.
Last fortnight, the luck ran out. During the filming of a shark-octopus battle, Jacare was spilled from the tricky jangada. Though he managed to swim away, he was caught in a treacherous current and, like his fisher-father before him, swallowed by the sea.
But last week, when a 440-lb. shark caught off Barra da Tijuca was opened, there rolled out a human head, two human arms. Jacare's own comrades, examining the teeth, were doubtful it was Jacare, though expert criminologists, judging from the skull formation and skin color, were sure it was from Jacare's region. In any case, it was another poor jangadeiro.
Deeply moved, Orson Welles revised his script, now dedicated throughout to "An American Hero." Inspired by Jacare's feat, four messenger boys of the Telegrafo Nacional planned to walk the same distance from Fortaleza to Rio to ask President Vargas for a better wage. But what would have pleased Jacare most was that the first pension won for the jangadeiros by his efforts goes to his wife and nine children.
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ITS ALL TRUE: ORSON WELLES PAN-AMERICAN ODYSSEY by CATHERINE BENAMOU
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10266.html
I'd like to beat the drum a little for a terrific new book just published by University of California Press, Catherine Benamou's Its All True: Orson Welles Pan-American Odyssey, which is far and away the definitive book on It's All True, Welles's doomed documentary project about Latin America in the 1940s. Maybe the fact that the same publisher is bringing out a book of mine about Welles in a couple of months (Discovering Orson Welles), gives me a special interest in the subject; I should also note that Benamou, who's been working on her book for well over two decades, is an old friend. (She also arranged recently for the purchase of two major Welles collections by the University of Michigan, which are going by the name "Everybody's Orson Welles." I was privileged to be the first visitor to this mountain of material in Ann Arbor last summer, which is where I collected the stills used on my own book jacket.)
Some readers may be put off a bit by Catherine's academic language, but the fact remains that so much fresh and even startling information is available hereinformation that corrects countless mythsthat if you care about Welles at all, you can't afford to ignore this book.
The received wisdom about It's All True, commonly known as Welles's Brazilian "misadventure," is that he got so carried away by partying at the carnival in Rio that he cost RKO a fortune without any clear plan in mind for the film. Benamou fully demonstrates that virtually none of this scenario is true, and it can be attributed to the studio's successful propaganda in justifying its firing of Wellesthereby dooming The Magnificent Ambersons as well as curtailing Welles's equally ambitious three-part documentary feature, which would have had other segments filmed in Mexico and Peru.
In fact, if Welles was staying up most nights, this was partly in order to meet with his Brazilian collaborators (mainly performers and researchers) to plan the next day's shooting, which would usually start around 8 AM. Arguably the true scandal of what he was doing was politicalshooting a documentary whose major characters were all poor nonwhites, to the consternation of many government as well as studio officials.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
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This is an extremely rigorous, thorough piece of superior scholarship on one of the most important figures in the history of cinema. Benamou introduces a wealth of material on the production process and the repercussions of this project in Latin America, which have been entirely missing from earlier, auteur-centered accounts; this alone makes it a book of great importance. We can't ask for a more definitive, groundbreaking study than the one Benamou has given us.
Bill Nichols, author of Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde
Tags: orson-welles
