Orson Welles' `It's All True': The Proof Is In The Celluloid

Seattle moviegoers may be forgiven if they experience a rush of deja vu at the news that the late Orson Welles' unreleased 1942 Latin American movie, "It's All True," finally arrived at the Neptune last week.

Long presumed to be lost, the footage was discovered in 1985 in a Paramount vault. The following year, the Seattle International Film Festival announced that "Embrafilme of Brazil has put together Welles' legendary footage"; the 95-minute result would be shown as "Not All Is True."

A cinematic fiasco

But that May 1986 screening turned out to be a fiasco. What arrived at the festival was an amateurish new Brazilian movie, created by Latin filmmaker Rogerio Sganzerla, with a Brazilian actor doing a ridiculous impersonation of Welles frolicking in Rio during the early 1940s.

Later that year, Seattle Filmhouse mounted an ambitious retrospective that included "lost" Welles films and pieces of lost films. In 1987, the film festival apologized for "last year's cheez-o Brazilian docudrama" by programming "It's All True: Four Men on a Raft," a legitimate 22-minute short from Welles' longtime collaborator, the late Richard Wilson.

So what's new about this 85-minute movie, which had a heavily publicized world premiere two weeks ago at the New York Film Festival?

"The focus is on what's never been told before," said Myron Meisel, a critic/lawyer/journalist who produced the film with Wilson and Cahiers du Cinema correspondent Bill Krohn. "It's not in any reference work anywhere."

Made up not only of old film clips but South American newsreels and interviews with Brazilians who remember Welles, "It's All True" gradually becomes something more than a restoration. What emerges is the horrific story of a brilliant filmmaker destroyed by gossip, shameless reporting and the endless recycling of stories about his antics at carnival time.

Not just carousing

"Whatever fun Welles was having in Brazil, he was not being irresponsible," said Meisel. "He wasn't just carousing."

The most conclusive evidence is their reconstruction of "Four Men on a Raft," a black-and-white docudrama Welles shot after the money ran out, partly as a tribute to Jacare, the Brazilian working-class hero who inspired it. Jacare was drowned during the shooting when a giant wave hit him.

"You can't find the truth in contemporary news reports," said Krohn. "The New York Times reported that Jacare was killed while Welles was shooting a battle between an octopus and a shark."

"Nearly everything in print confirms what the studio put out," said Meisel. "No one went down to Brazil and saw what he did. The final proof is the film."

When the nitrate negative was discovered, Krohn wanted to have it preserved and delivered to Welles for editing. But by the time it got to UCLA for preservation it was September 1985, and Welles died in October.

"At that point, Dick became the obvious candidate," said Krohn. "But no one had put up money at this point, and Dick got sick and died in 1991. Then a French producer came up with most of the money, while Paramount got certain distribution rights for allowing us to use the footage."

Even Rogerio Sganzerla played a pioneering role in the film.

"He was the first to do any of the research in Brazil," said Krohn. "He found the newsreels we used, and he's made two films on the subject."

"I hope this is a highly plausible version Welles would be pleased with," said Meisel. "He would have narrated `Four Men on a Raft,' so that was not an option we could even attempt. It was futile to put another actor's voice in Welles' place. It's better to have no soundtrack than a compromised track."

Rio scenes destroyed

Much of Welles' Technicolor footage for another section of the film does not survive. Racism apparently played a part in the destruction of these Rio scenes. RKO executives had complained about too many black faces in the carnival scenes before pulling the plug.

"This still leaves a huge gap," said Krohn. "Studios have a need for stock footage, and that wouldn't have been thrown out."

Meisel thinks there's a remote chance that more Welles footage survives. The original 131-minute version of "The Magnificent Ambersons," which was cut to 83 minutes and partly reshot while Welles was in Brazil, was destroyed in 1957-58, when RKO went bankrupt and vault space was cleared. But there may be another copy in existence.

"Welles had a workprint of `Ambersons' when he was in Brazil," said Meisel. "He sent back 30-40 pages of detailed messages about how to cut it. We know he had a print in Rio. And a preliminary cut of the carnival footage was sent to Mexico and never returned. Could they still be around? It's almost ridiculously speculative."

Yet Meisel can't rule out the possibility because archival treasures keep turning up.

"Just this year we did find additional footage for `It's All True,' " he said. "And they were the exact shots we were missing."