Is it?

First of all, this is not the Orson Welles movie that would have been called It's All True. This is a documentary about the failed making of said film, co-directed by Welles's assistant director on the earlier project, Richard Wilson, that incorporates all the finished footage from the project. The complete title of this film is It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film By Orson Welles. IMDb should really list it that way. There isn't much "finished footage" from It's All True. It's All True was, however, going to be an anthology of Robert Flaherty-like shorter documentary films, and one of those short segments, called "Four Men On a Raft" is more or less complete and is included as part of this movie: it's worth seeing just for that. The other material is interesting too. Some of it is the first color footage that Welles (who was notoriously unsupportive of color in movies for most of his career) ever shot. It's hardly a coherent movie, but it is certainly interesting.

So you should totally see it. And read Catherine L. Benamou's It's All True: Orson Welles's Pan-American Odyssey(although be warned that it is incredibly pretentious and thickly written).

These are the parts of your post I disagreed with:

he shouldn't have made this

As stated above, "he" didn't make this. As for "shouldn't," well, I've always gotten the feeling that the film was closer to his heart than Ambersons was, at least after the fact. He made numerous attempts to complete the film, independently of the studio, over the rest of his life. Also, the experience of making what of the film he managed to make evidently prepared him for the experience of working outside of Hollywood from the 1950s on, and he made some fascinating work in that time.

It ended up costing him what should have been his masterpiece

The contract for Ambersons, which was to allow him to make It's All True and Journey Into Fear (he was going to direct originally), is probably what did it: regardless of whether or not he'd been in South America at the time, the terms of the contract essentially allowed RKO to take control. True, if Welles had been there in person, his massive voice screaming into the faces of the execs, he could maybe have done some damage control, but it was not "his" film anymore, and the new executives, the ones that did the cutting, were not particularly impressed by Welles and may not have been moved.

Also, the opposite is true: The Magnificent Ambersons prevented him from completing It's All True. And Welles had other masterpieces to come.

I'm certainly not going to attack The Magnificent Ambersons. It's a wonderful film as it is and could possibly have been wonderfuller in the long form (although I don't believe such a discussion is any longer prescient: the film is what it is), but at the same time I find it a more "normal" (comparatively) film than Citizen Kane and most of Welles's other features. It seems like a more cynical, somewhat more twisted, variation on sentimental Hollywood classics like Ford's How Green Was My Valley (which Welles loved despite the fact that it beat Citizen Kane for the Oscar that year) or even Gone With the Wind. I don't honestly think it is any more brilliant than they are.

So,

Though The Mangnificent Ambersons is still a great film...

Definitely agreed.

...if they hadn't cut 50 minutes out of it, it probably would have been the best film ever made.

I wouldn't go that far. Have you read the complete screenplay? Or the novel for that matter? Neither have I.

it was a huge mistake on his part to leave his film with a studio. Even he admitted that was a mistake.

It's always a mistake to leave your film with a studio. Or anybody, as Welles found out later with Mr. Arkadin. Welles did indeed say this several times. But he never said that it was a mistake to make It's All True.



"Tis a coward I am - but I will hold your coat."




PS: As for my "question" - I was just playing around. The title of the film is It's All True. My question is "is it?" i.e. "is it all true?" It's obviously not funny, and I didn't think anyone would "get it," but then I never thought anyone would ever come by this board.

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