Les Blank's recently completed Burden of Dreams had its World Premiere at Los Angeles' Filmex in March, when L.A. Times critic Kevin Thomas wrote, “It's hard to recall a more revealing portrait of a filmmaker and filmmaking,” and Herald Examiner critic David Chute called the film “a chilling chronicle of an artistic obsession that tips over into near-lunacy--one of the most vivid studies of the creative process ever filmed.” A work-print was presented at PFA in January 1982, under the working title, Pelicula o Muerte (Film or Death). At that time, narration writer Michael Goodwin supplied this description:
“For much of the last five years, famed German filmmaker Werner Herzog and a tiny film crew have been in the remote upper reaches of the Amazon jungle of Peru, struggling to film a surreal action-adventure called Fitzcarraldo. Set at the turn of the century, it tells of a penniless, opera-mad dreamer (Klaus Kinski) who gets hundreds of Indians to pull a full-sized steamship over a mountain so he can reach otherwise-inaccessible rubber trees and make enough money to open a grand opera house in the jungle riverport town of Iquitos. Bay Area filmmakers Les Blank and Maureen Gosling have made several extended expeditions into the jungle in order to film a documentary about Herzog's feature, scheduled for national telecast on PBS in 1982. As disaster after disaster has befallen Herzog, Blank's film has grown into a fascinating (and highly controversial) record of an obsessed, genius filmmaker and his desperate battle to finish his picture in the face of plane crashes, torrential rains, attacks by armed, hostile Indians, the loss of several sets of leading actors, and a full-fledged border war breaking out all around him.”