Add Catherine L. Benamou, preeminent expert on It’s All True, to the list of distinguished speakers at My Name is Orson Welles, an upcoming three-month event organized by Cinematheque francaise in Paris.
Benamou will be participating virtually via recorded video at a 35mm screening of the the 1993 documentary It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles on October 13. A professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California at Irvine, Benamou was an associate producer and senior researcher on the documentary and author of It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey.
She told Wellesnet she will be be discussing the ongoing preservation effort of the footage, as well as the history of the wartime project.
It was during the editing The Magnificent Ambersons that Welles, at the urging of Nelson Rockefeller – an RKO Radio Pictures stockholder and the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in the Roosevelt Government – took on a multipart film to improve relations between the U.S. and South America. Welles’ colleague, Norman Foster, directed a segment, My Friend Bonito, in Mexico, and Welles went to Rio de Janeiro in 1942 to film footage of the carnival as well as a story about four fishermen, known as Jangadeiros, who sailed a raft from the port of Fortaleza to Rio.
The film was shelved and contributed to Welles’ dismissal from RKO Pictures.
The footage remained in the vault when RKO was acquired by Desilu Productions in 1957. A decade later, the footage came under the control of Paramount Pictures when the studio acquired Desilu. At the urging of Fred Chandler, then director of technical services at Paramount, the footage was donated to the American Film Institute in the 1980s.
The AFI arranged for the footage to be stored at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The UCLA archive houses 75,145 feet of My Friend Bonito, 32,200 feet of Carnaval, and 28,000 feet of Jangadeiros (Four Men on a Raft).
Paramount Pictures is scanning the remaining nitrate footage to guarantee its preservation
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