Orson Welles on location in Fortaleza, Brazil, filming the Jangadeiros/ Four Men on a Raft segment of It’s All True in 1942. (Paramount Pictures)
A restored It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles will have its premiere Thursday, April 18, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Former Focus! editor-publisher Myron Meisel, who was a writer, director and producer of the 1993 documentary, will be on hand for the screening. (Tickets are available online at moma.org.)
The restored film is being screened on DCP courtesy of Paramount Pictures. Also being shown is a 16mm print from the New York Public Library of The Four Temperaments, a 1946 short featuring choreography by George Balanchine.
After its theatrical run, the 87-minute documentary examining Welles’s unfinished three-part film about Latin America was released on VHS, laserdisc and DVD. It has not been released on Blu-ray.
It’s All True was to have been Welles’s third film for RKO Radio Pictures, after Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. The project was a co-production of RKO and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.
During filming in 1942, RKO underwent major management changes. Nelson Rockefeller, the primary backer of the Latin America project, left its board of directors, and Welles’ chief backer, studio president George Schaefer, resigned. The new faces at RKO were hostile toward Welles and drastically edited The Magnificent Ambersons while he was out of the country. The Latin America project was subsequently shelved.
Fired by RKO, Welles unsuccessfully attempted to find backing and release It’s All True.
The footage was believed lost, but 309 cans of black-and-white nitrate negative and five cans of unidentified positive film was discovered in the Paramount vaults by Fred Chandler, director of technical services, in 1981.
The 1993 documentary includes scenes from two parts of the film My Friend Bonito, directed in Mexico by Norman Foster, and the Welles-helmed Carnaval/ The Story of Samba, shot in Rio. It concludes with a reconstruction of the third segment, Jangadeiros/ Four Men on a Raft, directed by Welles in Fortaleza.
Written and directed by Meisel, Bill Krohn and the late Richard Wilson, It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles was named Best Non-Fiction Film of 1993 by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and its filmmakers were honored by the National Society of Film Critics.
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