Though the filmed footage was edited and released, as of today there is reportedly a very large amount of footage not used still in the UCLA archives that is slowly becoming damaged for lack of preservation.
The black-and-white portions of this film were filmed in 1942, when Orson Welles was asked by Nelson Rockefeller to make a "goodwill" film documentary about South America. RKO assumed Welles' film would resemble an innocuous travelogue; instead, he began to film a documentary about ordinary daily life in Brazil. Legends (ultimately proved untrue) sprang up about Welles' riotous behavior in Brazil, and RKO pulled the plug on the film after a fatal accident involving fishermen. For years, the original footage was considered lost, but what was left was eventually found in the Paramount stock footage library and edited into this 1993 release.
Welles died in 1985 without seeing the surviving footage from "It's All True."
Most of the Technicolor footage from "The Story of the Samba" sequence was thrown into Santa Monica Bay in the 1960s because the combustible nitrate film had deteriorated to a point where it represented a storage hazard.
A story segment that Welles originally planned involved a profile of Louis Armstrong to be filmed in New Orleans. It was the only segment of the four parts that Welles never filmed any footage of.