:02:00
Alland played the reporter who goes
through the whole movie in shadow,
:02:04
trying to find out what Charles Foster
Kane's dying word, "Rosebud", meant.
:02:08
I'll interrupt myself several times as I try
to tell you about the genesis of this movie.
:02:14
So much to say, and only
79 minutes to say it in.
:02:17
We're looking at a shot of Will Rogers
Beach in Santa Monica, west of Universal.
:02:21
William Alland socialised with Welles,
and at some point in the '40s,
:02:24
perhaps while making Citizen Kane, he
was invited for dinner at Welles' home.
:02:28
It was a party, I guess, because Welles'
girlfriend was there, Dolores del Rio,
:02:33
and Alland, and a guy
named Gabriel Figueroa
:02:36
who was a Mexican cinematographer,
eventually quite a famous one.
:02:39
He photographed The Pearl,
he shot a lot of Luis Buñuel's movies,
:02:43
he shot John Ford's The Fugitive
with Dolores del Rio,
:02:45
and he got an Academy Award
nomination for best cinematography
:02:48
for The Night of the Iguana,
1964, for director John Huston.
:02:52
Huston later gave Figueroa
one of his last jobs, maybe the last job.
:02:55
Figueroa photographed Huston's
Under the Volcano in the 1980s,
:02:59
when he, Figueroa, was almost 80.
:03:01
On the right is Julio López,
who changed his name to Perry Lopez
:03:05
and became a busy B-movie star
and A-movie character actor.
:03:08
He played Jack Nicholson's former
partner Escobar the cop, in Chinatown.
:03:13
So here they all are at this party at Orson
Welles' home. Just four of them, I think.
:03:17
And Figueroa somehow gets onto the
subject of a real-life half-man half-fish
:03:21
that lives in the Amazon river,
near a village.
:03:24
According to Figueroa, once a year it
comes out of the river to claim a maiden,
:03:27
and then it returns to the Amazon
and the village is safe for another year.
:03:31
Everybody stared at Figueroa, I guess.
He knew they thought he was kidding.
:03:35
He started gettin' worked up,
insisting that it was true
:03:38
and people who live on the Amazon
talk about it all the time.
:03:41
He said he'd once seen a photograph of
the monster and he could get a print of it.
:03:46
Notice the little rubber pinkie claw,
instead of scratching the sand, just bends.
:03:51
For about five minutes Figueroa
talked about this half-man half-fish
:03:55
that he said was not a myth,
that actually existed.
:03:58
I have no idea whether he was on the
level or not, or if anybody believed him,