crew which he funded himself, but eventually had to return when he ran out of film and RKO refused to send him any more. After Welles was sacked in 1942, RKO had no plans for the It's All True footage. Some of it was dumped in the Pacific Ocean. Welles tried to buy back the negative, convinced he could fashion It's All True into a commercially successful film about samba, and he wrote the studio an "IOU" note for it, but when he could not afford the first installment on payments, the footage reverted to the studio. The footage was long presumed lost (though some of it was found again in 1985 and incorporated into a partial restoration in 1993), and Welles was unable to find a directing job for over three years, and even then, only for a formulaic low-budget thriller. In the meantime, the Mercury Theatre had disbanded for good. Later cinema The Mercury Theatre production team of John Houseman and Orson Welles separated during the making of Citizen Kane, but as the RKO Mercury unit retained its name until its removal from the studio in 1942. Since the Mercury Theatre name was not trademarked, Welles continued to use it for some of his subsequent projects. As well as the 1943 variety act The Mercury Wonder Show and the 1946 radio series The Mercury Summer Theatre. Mercury Theatre actors in Welles's films Welles cast a number of regular Mercury Theatre actors in his later films. Unless otherwise noted, information in this table is taken from Orson Welles at Work (2008) by Jean-Pierre Berthomé and Francois Thomas. Publishing and recording One book was released under the Mercury Theatre imprint, with accompanying sets of records: Orson Welles and Roger Hill, The Mercury Shakespeare (Harper and Row, New York, 1939) This was in fact a revised omnibus version of three volumes released in 1934 under the umbrella title of Everybody's Shakespeare, published by the 19-year-old Welles and his former school teacher & lifelong friend Roger Hill, by the Todd Press, the imprint of the Todd School for Boys where Welles was a pupil and Hill became Headmaster. The book contained "acting versions" (i.e. abridgments) of Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice. Accompanying the book, the Mercury Theatre released three sets of specially-recorded 12-inch 78-RPM gramophone records of these plays. Each of the three plays filled up 11, 10