It's All True (film)

It's All True
Orson Welles on location in Fortaleza, Brazil (June 26, 1942)
Directed by	Orson Welles Norman Foster ("My Friend Bonito")
Produced by	Orson Welles Richard Wilson (associate producer) Robert J. Flaherty ("My Friend Bonito")
Screenplay by	Orson Welles John Fante Norman Foster Robert Meltzer
Story by	Robert J. Flaherty (The Story of Bonito, the Bull)
Cinematography	Floyd Crosby ("My Friend Bonito") William Howard Greene ("Carnaval" and "Jangadeiros" Technicolor) Harry J. Wild ("Carnaval" black-and-white) George Fanto ("Jangadeiros")
Production company	RKO Pictures
Budget	$1.2 million

It's All True is an unfinished Orson Welles feature film comprising three stories about Latin America. "My Friend Bonito" was supervised by Welles and directed by Norman Foster in Mexico in 1941. "Carnaval" (also known as "The Story of Samba") and "Jangadeiros" (also known as "Four Men on a Raft") were directed by Welles in Brazil in 1942. It was to have been Welles's third film for RKO Radio Pictures, after Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). The project was a co-production of RKO and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs that was later terminated by RKO.

While some of the footage shot for It's All True was repurposed or sent to stock film libraries, approximately 200,000 feet of the Technicolor nitrate negative, most of it for the "Carnaval" episode, was dumped into the Pacific Ocean in the late 1960s or 1970s. In the 1980s a cache of nitrate negative, largely black-and-white, was found in a vault and presented to the UCLA Film and Television Archive. A 2000 inventory indicated that approximately 50,000 feet of It's All True had been preserved, with approximately 130,045 feet of the deteriorating nitrate not yet preserved.

The unrealized production was the subject of a 1993 documentary, It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles, written and directed by Richard Wilson, Bill Krohn and Myron Meisel.

In 1941, Orson Welles conceived It's All True as an omnibus film mixing documentary and docufiction. It was to have been his third film for RKO, following Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). The original sections of It's All True were "The Story of Jazz", "My Friend Bonito", "The Captain's Chair" and "Love Story". Welles registered the title of the film July 29, 1941.