Paramount Pictures is scanning the remaining nitrate footage for Orson Welles’ ill-fated It’s All True to guarantee its preservation, according to noted Welles scholar Catherine L. Benamou.
Benamou, author of It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey and associate producer and senior researcher on the 1993 documentary It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles, broke the news on Twitter on June 16.
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 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.
RKO shelved the project when it terminated Welles and Mercury Productions amid accusations of extravagance by Welles in Brazil and the recutting of Ambersons.
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.
Some of the footage was scanned and used in It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles. The documentary was remastered by Paramount at screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in April 2019.
Benamou told Wellesnet that 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).
@Wellesnetcom, @dannywuyue, @j_grossberg, @CinemaTropical, @MediaticoMFM, @amirlabaki,
I am pleased to share the very good news that #ParamountPictures is scanning the remaining nitrate footage for #ItsAllTrue at @UCLAFTVArchive so that it can be preserved!— Catherine Benamou (@luzaccion) June 16, 2023
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