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Orson Welles in production on It’s All True

Interchange – Ears to Hear: Orson Welles in Brazil

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Today’s show is a kind of extension of our program Big Oil, Mickey Mouse and Fascism in Latin America with Tango Wars author Mary Jo McConahay. That show detailed the fight between Axis and Allied powers over the hearts and minds AND most importantly, the natural resources of Latin America. At that time Brazil was governed by Getúlio Vargas a constitutional president who became a dictator, and there was a real chance that this vast land would side with the Nazis having become home to so many German immigrants.

As a quick aside here to point out the repetition compulsion of humankind: Brazil has just voted president elect Jair Bolsonaro, an extremist right wing Christian who has consistently praised Brazil’s former military dictatorships as “glorious.” Perhaps it’s notable that Bolsonaro’s family immigrated to Brazil from Italy and Germany in the 1880s.

Orson Welles, following hard upon the tailwind of Walt Disney, was strongly encouraged to travel in Latin America as a Goodwill ambassador at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs and to make a propaganda film as part of the trip–hopefully one as successful and on-the-mark as Disney’s. Hope’s springs are eternally sprung.

Our GUEST today is Catherine Benamou, associate professor in Media and Film Studies at University of California at Irvine, and author of the definitive account of It’s All True, Orson Welles’ film project for RKO and hoped-for propaganda for the US war effort. Benamou’s book is also called It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey. And comprehensively Benamou was an assistant producer and primary researcher for the 1993 documentary film that seeks to detail and recover this first of more than a few “lost” films of Orson Welles. It’s also titled It’s All True.

The film in its perhaps final conception would consist of four episodes, two in Brazil on Carnaval and the jangada fishermen, one in Mexico on bullfighting with a kind of children’s book spin, and one set in the United States on the history of jazz. For our show, we’re going to focus on the work in Brazil. And we’ll get an assist from Welles himself along the way as we’ll hear a bit from the first episode of his radio program Hello Americans which highlights samba music in Brazil. It aired just over 76 years ago on November 15th, 1942.

RELATED
Hello Americans
Orson Welles Sketchbook – Episode 2: Critics
Truth and Consequence: On It’s All True” by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Orson Welles On the Air by Rob Schoon
Orson Welles in Focus eds. James N. Gilmore and Sidney Gottlieb (includes an essay by Catherine Benamou)

MUSIC
“No Tabuleiro da Baiana” performed by Carmen Miranda and Luiz Barbosa
“Praça Onze” by Trio de Ouro
“Nega do Cabela Duro” by Anjos Do Inferno
“A Jangada Voltou Só” by Dorival Caymmi
“Milagre” performed by Nana Caymmi

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Wes Martin

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