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I’d like to beat the drum a little for a terrific new book just published by University of California Press, Catherine Benamou’s It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey, which is far and away the definitive book on It’s All True, Welles’s doomed documentary project about Latin America in the 1940s. Maybe the fact that the same publisher is bringing out a book of mine about Welles in a couple of months gives me a special interest in the subject; I should also note that Benamou, who’s been working on her book for well over two decades, is an old friend. (She also arranged recently for the purchase of two major Welles collections by the University of Michigan, which are going by the name “Everybody’s Orson Welles.” I was privileged to be the first visitor to this mountain of material in Ann Arbor last summer, which is where I collected the stills used on my own book jacket.)
In fact, if Welles was staying up most nights, this was partly in order to meet with his Brazilian collaborators (mainly performers and researchers) to plan the next day’s shooting, which would usually start around 8 AM. Arguably the true scandal of what he was doing was political—shooting a documentary whose major characters were all poor nonwhites, to the consternation of many government as well as studio officials.
