The Buddy saga Cherry Arnold tells Cianci’s story BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	The Fest facts From Kilmer to Keach — and beyond After nearly a decade, the Rhode Island International Film Festival (August 9-14) has gotten plenty of experience in making things happen. So not only is the long-awaited Buddy Cianci documentary coming, but also films with such familiar Hollywood names as Val Kilmer and Stacy Keach. As usual, taking advantage of the vest pocket size of the state, venues will be all over, at eight locations from Woonsocket to Westerly as well as Providence. Attendance is expected to top 20,000 as filmmakers and film industry people mingle with moviegoers in Newport and Kingston, Barrington and Pawtucket. A total of 221 films will be screened, including 36 documentaries and 16 full-length narrative features, culled from 1511 international entries. Most of the works are shorts, since RIIFF is one of only 47 festivals that qualify films in that category for Academy Awards. (Worldwide there are nearly 2000 film festivals.) The world premiere of Keep Your Distance, directed by Stu Pollard (Nice Guys Sleep Alone), will be shown August 12. Set in Louisville, Kentucky, the thriller stars Gil Bellows as a successful racehorse owner whose life begins falling apart; Stacy Keach plays his powerful and concerned father. Also premiering is The Baxter, written, directed, and starring Michael Showalter, a former "correspondent" on The Daily Show, which will be shown August 12. Brown graduate Showalter co-wrote and starred in the 2001 comedy Wet Hot American Summer. He will be attending the festival to receive a first-time director award. Also on hand will be Danny Trejo (Heat, Con Air, Spy Kids), to receive the RIIFF Humanitarian Award. Chronicling the life of the actor, familiar in films as a tattooed tough guy, is the documentary Champion, directed by Joe Ekardt, which will be shown on August 10. Appearing with Trejo are Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Robert Rodriguez, Steve Buscemi, and Antonio Banderas. Screened two years ago at RIIFF as a work-in-progress, the Catholic Church abuse documentary Holy Water Gate, directed by Mary Healey-Conlon, will be shown on August 13 at noon. It will be followed by a panel discussion that includes a priest featured in the film. All box office proceeds will go to a fund for sexual abuse survivors. Technically not a premiere, but not seen for nearly a century is the newly re- discovered silent film My Lady of the Lilacs, made by Rhode Island filmmaker Beta Breuil in 1916. It will be shown on August 14 as a part of festival programming that focuses on women in film. Diverse NIIFF "Sidebars" that occur at other times of the year include the Providence Gay & Lesbian Film Festival; the Providence Film Festival, with a focus on local filmmakers; Jubile Franco Americain, with films from France and Canada; the Providence Jewish Film Festival; East West Crosswinds: Exploring Asian Culture Thru Cinema; World Panorama; the New England Student Film Festival; KidsEye, a summer filmmaking camp for children; and ScriptBIZ, a weekend screenwriting workshop. A bonus this year: soundtracks from RIIFF films will play during the festival at WaterFire Providence on Saturday, August 13. Advance ticket sales for films and special events are available at the festival web site (www.film-festival.org) and by calling 401.861.4445. _B.R.

Finally. One year after an hour-long excerpt from a three-hour rough cut was screened at the Newport International Film Festival, Buddy, an 86-minute documentary on disgraced Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci, will be shown at the Rhode Island International Film Festival. (Screenings of the world premiere will be on August 11 at 7 pm and on August 13 and 14 at 10 pm at the Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence.)

It’s not just that Inquiring Minds Want to Know. Purely tabloid interest was exhausted around water coolers years ago. We are now in the Mythic Dimension stage of journalistic and creative Cianci studies. Hubris and compulsive self-destruction have been examined in a stage play and a comic novel, and ProJo reporter Mike Stanton’s 2003 downfall chronology, The Prince of Providence, is being turned into a screenplay by David Mamet, to be filmed by Rhode Island director Michael Corrente.

Filmmaker Cherry Arnold has been working on Buddy since January 2002, when the indictment-threatened mayor finally agreed to let her film him during meetings and gladhanding activities, through his trial, and up to his imprisonment. As the final film shows, Buddy Cianci’s accomplishments were truly impressive. It took political savvy and breathtaking charisma for an Italian-American Republican to boot Irish Democrats out of City Hall in 1974, where they’d been entrenched for 30 years. For that first election victory, the crusading chief prosecutor’s posters bragged he was "The Anti-Corruption Candidate."

Narrated by actor James Woods, a Rhode Island native, the tightly edited film colorfully conveys how Cianci’s suspended sentence for assaulting the lover of his ex-wife left him a macho folk hero. After that, hosting the most popular radio talk show in the state didn’t hurt his sense of political invulnerability. Personal vulnerability was a different thing — the camera shows one person and then another ask after his strung-along girlfriend Wendy as he has to tell them she is getting married that very day. But although the film has a developer give examples of the mayor’s vindictiveness, it makes the point — several times — that of 27 Plunder Dome charges against him, the only one that stuck, for conspiracy, wasn’t accompanied by any testimony against him.

There was a lot to cover. The filmmaker isn’t as frustrated as she might be at having to boil down nearly 100 hours of her digital video and borrowed footage into an hour and a half. Outtakes and trimmed scenes and much of two lengthy interviews with Cianci that couldn’t fit will eventually be seen.

"The DVD is going to rock," Arnold says.

Arnold has an unlisted number these days, because a lot of people have contacted her "to try and influence the editorial content of the film" or ask for advance copies. The Providence native has come a long way from her major in English and minor in political science and art history. She got her BA from URI (she won't say when) after stops at two prior colleges. In the late 1990s, she earned a nest egg in Internet and venture capital enterprises, which gave her time to pursue other interests. One of them was to study documentary film writing and film production at the Maine International Film Workshop. A longtime yoga practitioner, she also got training to teach the discipline, which she also does today.

Arnold spoke in the Providence office of her Big Orange Film Productions, whose location she keeps as close to her vest as her phone number.

When did you first say to yourself that this would be a great film to make?

The first time that it appeared on my radar as even an idea for a film was when Dan Barry’s article came out in the New York Times Magazine in December of 2000. I thought: "Wow!" It was a great film, right there. I had my own personal knowledge of him and his story and thought this could be a great movie. But I couldn’t take on doing that movie until the winter of 2002, so I thought someone else was going to do it — it just seemed very obvious. What I found out was that HBO, PBS, Discovery were all [being] pitched by seasoned producers who wanted these networks to back them financially . . . So I naïvely jumped in, not realizing what a huge story it was.

I took the idea of this film being a window into city politics very seriously. And so I spend time studying city politics, going to a couple of classes that James Morone teaches at Brown, interviewed him for the film, read a couple of books that he recommended. So I really wrapped my head around Buddy Cianci’s world, and it made much more sense to me, the backdrop for his story.

Your working title was Buddy: An American Story. Does that mean we are to see his progression as typical?

To me, I think he and his story are universal. I’ve always thought that his story was like a Shakespeare tragedy. In all those stories you have these people whose virtues and strengths are also their vices and flaws, and they self-destruct in different ways. The more we got into the editing and shaping of the film, the less it was about politics, the more it was about this guy’s character.

This guy is incredibly complex. You can’t really classify him as good or bad — he’s got everything in between. He’s brilliant, visionary. He can be very generous, kind, incredibly funny, but at the same time really insecure. He can be really mean; he can be really vindictive. The same things that made him be so successful — the big ego and the drive to make Providence like the best city ever — also were the ingredients that gave him a lot of hubris, basically brought him down in the end.

How did you convince him to let you film after he was indicted? Did he believe he would come across in a favorable light?

It wasn’t easy to convince him at all. I sent many proposals and pitch letters and he finally took a meeting with me. That was two hours of trying to convince him. He wanted some editorial control over the film, and I told him that wouldn’t be possible. He wanted to know what I was up to — understandably.

What feedback have you gotten when you screened the rough cut, and how has that affected the final version?

In general, when you’re doing a documentary as opposed to a scripted narrative film, the feedback process and revision process is so vital. And so we did about 12 cuts of the film, and each one of those cuts we got feedback on, from my advisers, from friends, family, filmmakers. I sent it to people in California who didn’t know anything about Buddy Cianci, just to try and get a feeling for what are we missing, to benchmark against the goals we are trying to achieve and [determine] how people are really seeing the film.

People want to know who Buddy Cianci is, and that’s really hard to answer. And so we worked hard — without getting into psychological analysis, what we were trying to do was show people where this guy came from, you know?

What did you learn about Cianci that you didn’t know before you began this project?

As far as Cianci goes, I really learned that it was the perfect job for him, because he’s so smart and could keep so many plates spinning at once, and knew how to put this person with that person or pit this person against that person. He had that bird’s eye view at all times and knew the whole city so well that he was actually really an effective mayor.