01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, August 7, 2005

BY ANDY SMITH and MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writers

He was brilliant, charismatic, visionary and beloved. He was ruthless, vindictive, corrupt and hated.

And for Cherry Arnold, a Rhode Island native, he was a natural subject for a documentary film.

That film is called Buddy, and, for Rhode Islanders, that can only mean one person -- former Providence Mayor Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci Jr., the mayor with the longest tenure in the city's history.

Cianci is gone now -- serving a five-year sentence in federal prison after being convicted of criminal conspiracy -- but certainly not forgotten.

Now, after 3 1/2 years in the making, Buddy makes its local debut at the Rhode Island International Film Festival. It will be shown at Providence's Columbus Theatre Thursday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 10 p.m. and next Sunday at 10 a.m.

(For the complete festival calendar, see Page E4.)

"Most Rhode Islanders want to know how I come down on Buddy Cianci in the film: Does the film treat him positively or negatively?" Arnold said in a director's statement. "This question gets to the heart of the movie."

Arnold said she sees Cianci as a modern-day Shakespearean figure, a gifted man destroyed by his own flaws.

"I try to show all sides of this complex man, set against this fantastic cultural backdrop of Providence," Arnold said.

As for his guilt or innocence of the federal charges that resulted from the Operation Plunder Dome investigation, Arnold said she wants her audience to draw its own conclusions.

"This film is not an investigative look at Operation Plunder Dome," she said. "I tried to view the case as a Rhode Island citizen would see it while it was going on, through the media."

In a sense, the orgins of Buddy go back to Arnold's childhood.

She grew up on Grotto Avenue, on the East Side of Providence, near Cianci's house on Blackstone Boulevard, where he lived from 1973 until he moved to Power Street in the early '80s.

Arnold remembers Cianci riding around the neighborhood on a police horse. Another time, she said, he showed up at her sister's Christmas party while a jackbooted police driver stood guard at the door.

But Arnold left Rhode Island at age 13, first for private school in the Berkshires and then for Roanoke College and the University of Vermont, before attending the University of Rhode Island.

After college, Arnold worked in New York City. She's represented commercial photographers and filmmakers, was involved in several Internet startup companies and did marketing for barnesandnoble.com, a spinoff of the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain.

She got the idea for Buddy in early 2001, after reading an article about Cianci in The New York Times Magazine by former Journal reporter Dan Barry that ran at the very end of 2000.

"I read that article and I thought, 'This is a film,' " Arnold said during an interview at her office in the Wanskuck Mills building on Branch Avenue in Providence. "I assumed someone else would do it. When they didn't, I decided to try it myself."

By then, it was the fall of 2001. Arnold had moved back to Rhode Island to care for an ailing family member.

Arnold persuaded Cianci to allow her to follow him around the city with her camera during much of 2002, the year he would be tried and ultimately convicted on federal corruption charges. She was also granted access to Cianci's extensive archives.

Arnold said Cianci was initially very reluctant to have her follow him.

"I think he was waiting for me to go away, and I just didn't," Arnold said. "I don't know why, ultimately, he let me stay."

Cianci's permission, Arnold said, does not mean Buddy is an authorized project.

"He didn't give his approval. It wasn't authorized. It doesn't really work that way in film. . . . Really, all that meant was that he wasn't going to kick me out when he saw me.

"It wasn't carte blanche at all. I had to fight my way in every day. I had to keep asking permission to get in to film a meeting or to go with him to an event in his car . . . he gave me the evil eyeball a number of times."

Was Cianci on his best behavior because he knew he was being filmed?

"I don't think he tailored his behavior because we were there," Arnold said. "He's sort of on all the time, whether there were cameras on or not."

Arnold said Cianci would tell her to turn off the cameras when he was smoking. Other times, she said, he would just grow tired of having her follow him around, and tell her to stop shooting.

Still, Arnold got hours and hours of footage of Cianci in action.

"That guy fills a room like I have never seen anyone before," she said. "Not only does he fill the room, but he knows something about every person in that room."

She also managed to get a sit-down interview with Cianci, but it wasn't easy.

"That's the challenge of him -- getting him to slow down and take a question from you. Because once he gets going, it's like [she snaps her fingers five times] this is everything that happened da-da-da-da-da-da."

155 hours of film

But Arnold's Cianci footage was only part of the material.

Local TV stations donated footage. Filmmakers Louis Alvarez, Andrew Kolker and Paul Stekler, who followed Cianci for three days in 1994 as part of a PBS series called Vote For Me: Politics in America, donated their Cianci material.

"That was an unbelievable gift," Arnold said.

She also conducted interviews, lots of interviews, with everyone from former Brown University president Vartan Gregorian to Providence Phoenix columnist Rudy Cheeks.

Then there were Cianci's own archives, which included big leather-bound scrapbooks for each year of his first administration, starting with his run for mayor in 1974.

By the time she was done, Arnold had 155 hours of film, and even more printed material, covering a tumultuous three-decade political career.

Somehow, Arnold and her colleagues -- editors Jeff Zimbalist and Cob Carlson and cinematographer Stephen McCarthy -- had to pare that down to a manageable size. (Buddy clocks in at 86 minutes.)

What's more, Arnold said she always envisioned Buddy with national distribution, so it couldn't appeal only to Rhode Islanders.

"This needs to play in Peoria. This is a story of a flawed character. It's a universal story. We can't get too tripped up with everything that happened between 1974 and 1984 because it's just too much, it's too local."

Arnold's movie never mentions Cianci's run for governor in 1980, when he was soundly defeated by incumbent J. Joseph Garrahy.

"It was just too much to pack into the film," she said. "It wasn't important to the larger story, as we saw it, when it plays in Peoria."

On the other hand, Arnold said she always wanted to make the city of Providence itself -- its decline and revival -- a part of the story.

"At first we were very excited about incorporating a lot of ideas about city politics, we were going to teach people about this, that and the other," Arnold said. "But when we started showing it, we realized it had to be character-driven. We discovered in test screenings that people didn't want poli-sci lessons, they wanted to know about character."

A work in progress

So far, Buddy has been through 12 different cuts. Arnold said a work-in-progress screening at the Boston Independent Film Festival in April was particularly valuable.

After that screening, for example, Arnold decided that she needed to move the material on Cianci's childhood to later in the film, and first hook her audience on Cianci, the charismatic politician.

And it wasn't until June, Arnold said, that she was able to land actor James Woods, a Warwick native, as the film's narrator.

"I found out he was a big supporter of independent film. I didn't think we had a shot at first. The more I learned about him, I thought, OK, maybe we do."

Arnold said she had already recorded another narrator when she got a call from Woods agreeing to take part. Woods did his narration from a Los Angeles studio on June 21.

"We couldn't pay him more than scale, but he was fine," Arnold said. "He was really generous and very good to work with.

"He went into a studio in L.A. and I was calling in direction over the phone. He was incredibly professional. When he had to reread something, he took direction really well, although he got it right most of the time."

Like many independent filmmakers, Arnold had to struggle to raise the money to produce her film. (She won't disclose its budget.)

"Buddy always wondered why I would do something that didn't stand a chance to make a lot of money," Arnold said.

When Arnold hasn't been working on the film for the past 3 1/2 years, she's been teaching yoga, which she said is a refreshing change from immersing herself in the life and times of Buddy Cianci.

Some of the funds came from her own savings, some from family and friends.

Arnold also received grants to help fund Buddy. The Rhode Island Council for the Humanities gave Arnold three grants, of $16,000, $5,000 and 2,000.

The Rhode Island State Council on the Arts donated $2,500, and the LEF Foundation, which is based in California but has an office in Cambridge, Mass., provided a grant of $10,000.

Then there have been "in-kind" contributions, such as the footage from local TV stations or the work of unpaid interns from Brown University who transcribed the videotapes.

Arnold hopes to get Buddy shown on the festival circuit, which could lead to wider distribution in theaters or on TV.

"Every indie filmmaker dreams of a theatrical release, then TV, with a DVD as the last stop," she said. So far, she added, HBO and PBS have expressed interest in seeing copies of Buddy once it is finished.

'He'll be back'

As for Cianci, Arnold has not visited him at the federal prison in Fort Dix, N.J. "He wasn't interested in having me visit," she said.

By letters, Arnold has been keeping Cianci up to date on Buddy's progress. She said he hasn't written back.

Arnold said the federal prison system has very strict rules about what prisoners may receive, but she will try to send him a tape of Buddy.

Arnold ends her movie with an intimation that there still might be more to the Cianci story. Cianci, 64, is due out of prison in 2007.

Buddy cited an opinion poll from Channel 6 indicating that 38 percent of the people they polled in Providence would welcome Cianci back as mayor, and then points out that Cianci won the three-way 1990 mayoral race with 34 percent of the vote.

Buddy also points to reports that local radio stations have already expressed an interest in putting Cianci back on the air after his release from prison.

"I didn't just want to end it at Fort Dix, because a lot of people said 'He'll be back,' " Arnold said. "It's a challenge to tell someone's life story when he's not dead yet."