Here’s what Christopher wrote (my bold italics for highlight purposes):
I appreciated the background details you provided a number of posts ago when the subject of why Welles went to Brazil was under discussion. The patriotic fever that existed at the time, and which you described so well, helped me understand even more why Welles accepted the government's offer. I can only add that if Welles made a mistake, Rockefeller made an even bigger one. If the government wanted a feel-good-about-Brazil documentary, they should have hired Walt Disney.
As I discovered, the government did exactly that: http://waltandelgrupo.com/ — to their mutual benefit. Also intended as “an offering of Inter-American friendship,” Saludos Amigos would instead show South America the way the studios -- and we can assume the government -- wanted North America to see it.
Now that I’m putting the two together, I’m wondering whether Christopher has seen this film and if so, whether she can comment on it and Disney’s “South American Trip” in the context of Welles’s, the politics of both the era and the studios, the almost mirror-image impact these similar assignments had on the two directors’ careers — and anything else she might like to add.
