It's All True
The intended follow-up to The Magnificent Ambersons, It’s All True, never saw the light of day. The film received only a portion of Welles’ energies during its production, was plagued by mishaps, and was the subject of much sparring between Welles and RKO. The idea for It’s All True was for Welles to film a series of an ingenious and thoroughly eclectic melange of documentary material and fictional narratives meant to tie together all of the Americas. Included would be a look at the development of jazz, in which, chiefly (as best we can tell) Duke Ellington was to tell the story of Louis Armstrong; the story of the courtship of Italian writer John Fante’s parents in San Francisco; “My Friend Bonito,” in which the possessive pronoun signified a young boy, with Bonito being a bull. Welles conceived of these stories during the infancy of his work on The Magnificent Ambersons. He knew Ambersons was the more viable project, so he went ahead with it, placing It’s All True in the posit