IT’S ALL TRUE: BASED ON AN UNFINISHED FILM BY ORSON WELLES
Too much effort and real love went into the entire project for it to fail and come to nothing in the end. I have a degree of faith in it that amounts to fanaticism, and you can believe that if It’s All True goes down into limbo I’ll go with it. –Orson Welles, writing to a Brazilian friend in the 40s
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Among the many film projects Welles had in development just after the release of Citizen Kane, in May 1941, were one about Landru, a 20th-century French Bluebeard (a project written for and eventually purchased by Charlie Chaplin, who converted it into Monsieur Verdoux); a life of Jesus set in America at the turn of the century, conceived as “a kind of primitive western”; a political thriller centered around a fascistic news commentator; adaptations of The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey Into Fear; and an omnibus feature called It’s All True, consisting of four true stories–a history of American jazz, a story by John Fante about his Italian parents meeting in San Francisco, and two stories by documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, one about a Mexican boy’s friendship with a bull (“My Friend Bonito”), the other about a boat captain. An anthology format had served Welles well on radio, and he launched a new weekly show around the same principle in the fall; by then, three of his film projects were in production, with Welles serving as writer-director-producer on Ambersons, producer and actor on Journey, and producer on It’s All True. In September Norman Foster began directing “Bonito” in Mexico under Welles’s supervision, and the following month Welles began shooting Ambersons. In December, two weeks after Pearl Harbor, he received a telegram from the coordinator of the federal Inter-American Affairs office asking him to undertake a goodwill mission to Brazil and make a noncommercial film there without salary to promote “hemisphere solidarity,” with RKO studios footing the bill but the government guaranteeing up to $300,000 against potential financial losses. Nelson Rockefeller, a major RKO stockholder, and President Roosevelt, a personal friend of Welles, both urged him to accept; Rockefeller was adamant that Welles arrive in February, in time to shoot the annual Rio carnival.
Things began to go badly for Welles. Not honoring its promise to send an Ambersons rough cut with Wise to Rio, RKO decided to preview the film. A week after the second preview, Jacare drowned in an accident while he and the other three jangadeiros were preparing to restage their triumphant arrival in Rio for the film.
This isn’t to argue that Welles had any business sense or even much common sense when it came to ingratiating himself with that system. Three months before the release of Citizen Kane he published an article attacking the functions of most producers, agents, and studio heads, and the implied threat to the system represented by his original Hollywood contract, which granted him almost unlimited control of his pictures, clearly made many in the film industry livid. While he inspired passionate loyalty from most of his staff, one suspects that his business associates, starting with John Houseman, regarded him somewhat more ambivalently. (When he was off in Brazil his business manager was Jack Moss. According to writer-director Cy Endfield–who was working for Moss at the time, and whom I interviewed earlier this year–many of the frantic long cables Welles sent Moss about the reediting of Ambersons went straight into the wastebasket unread.) If Welles’s troubling career carries any lesson, it’s that the same delirious risk taking that led to such unmitigated disasters paid off spectacularly in other situations, including Kane.
Most moviegoers and reviewers would still prefer to ignore this incompatibility because the business couldn’t be run as smoothly if they didn’t, and one of the most popular rationalizations for ignoring the incompatibility of the two is “retrievability.” According to this myth, it doesn’t really matter how many movies are mutilated by producers or distributors, because they can always be “restored” later, on laserdisc or otherwise. But it’s absurd to apply such a myth to Welles. We can’t “restore” Ambersons, because all the cut footage was destroyed by the new RKO management in late 1942, and we can’t “restore” It’s All True because it was never allowed to exist. That’s why the documentary It’s All True needs its awkward subtitle, Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles; without it, the film sounds like a resurrection.
