WELLESNET MESSAGE BOARD

I emailed Catherine Benamou asking about the progress of the scanning of It's All True: she kindle responded to me:

"The nitrate footage to It's All True is currently being scanned by Paramount Pictures, the current owner of the footage, in 4k. I believe that several thousand feet have been scanned, with the total to be scanned at 93,400 feet or 23 hours total of material. This is a slow process as it is not exactly a "priority" project for Paramount, but there is a dedicated staff member who is doing this. I am hoping that the footage will eventually be available for viewing at UCLA Film and Television Archive, where the original footage is being stored."

I'd hoped the job would have been completed by now, since we first heard about it two years ago, but better an active effort than the alternative.

I've been reviewing legacy articles, with this Wellesnet one being the most helpful, to try to get the statistics straight on the amount of footage shot for the project, what's left of it on dry land, and what among that is still awaiting preservation. Here's the situation as I understand it, and I welcome corrections.

A 1952 inventory by RKO accounted for something like 380,000 feet of footage.

Of that total, 200,000 feet of Technicolor negative was dumped into the Pacific Ocean, mostly belonging to the Carnaval segment, sometime in the sixties or seventies. This leave us with something close to 180,000 feet extant, which is today owned by Paramount but housed by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. It breaks down as follows:

Carnaval: ~38,000 feet, most of it black and white but some in color
Jangadeiros: ~64,000 feet, all of it black and white
My Friend Bonito: ~75,000 feet, all of it black and white

A 2000 inventory listed that 50,000 of that 180,000 had been preserved, which is to say transferred from nitrate to safety film.

Transferring the rest of it is important, but just as important is scanning all of the original nitrate negative in 4K.

Wellesnet reported in October 2023 that the 4K scanning was underway, with Catherine Benamo reporting that 60,000 feet had been scanned thus far. Now we hear from the status she gave you earlier this month that 93,400 feet remain to be scanned.

Is my math right, that we're averaging 15,000 or so feet a year?

A slow process indeed.

Still, it's hard not to see this as some kind of miracle story. Welles seems to have believed for a lot of his life that the footage was altogether sunk. For a little less than half of it to survive is not too shabby, and when it's all scanned and available, it will no doubt be the base for revealing new scholarship.

Great post! Heartbreaking that most of the colour stuff was dumped in the Pacific. I'm also always saddened by the fact that Welles was told, by the Paramount exec that accidentally found the remaining footage of IAT about the discovery c. 1981, and was invited to view it, and declined, saying it was "cursed". From this reaction we can clearly see that Welles never recovered from the triple trauma of the butchering of Ambersons, the cancelling of It's All True, and the cancelling of his RKO contract and the Mercury Theatre group being thrown off the RKO lot, all in 1942. Both emotionally and professionally, he never recovered.
Which is too bad, because it seems he could've actually worked on three films between 1977 and 1984, a period where nothing else came through for him: not The Dreamers, not The Big Brass Ring, not King Lear, and not The Cradle will Rock.. But he might've been able to complete a documentary on It's All True, and he could've completed Don Quixote., and if he'd accepted L'Astrophore's offer to come to Paris and finish The Other Side of the Wind by a deadline, he could've completed three more films.
So it's very sad.