Buddy
(2005) documentary
Cherry Arnold spent almost a year following Providence Mayor Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci, Jr. around with a camera. Just about any year in Buddy's thirty-year political career would have made a fine documentary, but Arnold happened to capture the one (2002-'03) in which Cianci was tried and convicted for running a criminal enterprise out of City Hall, and sentenced to more than five years in prison.
Arnold doesn't only cover that year, though. Through interviews, news footage, and photographs, and even materials from Cianci's own archives, tied together with narration by Warwick native James Woods, the film outlines Buddy's whole life, including a glimpse of his childhood. And as much as the piece is about Buddy, it's also about Providence, the city he promoted, bullied, sweet-talked, threatened, and charisma'ed from "armpit of New England" to "Renaissance City."
We'd argue that the film is also, at least nominally, about hairstyles. See Channel 10 news anchor Doug White's coif go from brown to white, without ever changing shape. Can you spot the point at which Buddy went from au natural to folically enhanced? Which toupee is he wearing in this clip, in this photograph? Is that the tousled salt and pepper piece used for fires and crime scenes, the distinguished silver-gray model for when he wants to appear statesmanlike, or the longer one he wears to cover up the fact that his real hair is in need of a trim?
The eighty-six-minute film premiered on the evening of August 11, 2005, at the Columbus Theatre in Providence, as part of the Rhode Island International Film Festival. Interest in the film was huge, with hundreds more people showing up than the theater had seats for. Among the crowd were Sheila Bentley, Buddy Cianci's ex-wife; FBI agent W. Dennis Aiken; and various ex-Cianci staffers.
Providence Journal film reviewer Elizabeth Gudrais noted the irony of the fact that Cianci had tried to have the Columbus shut down in the early 1990s. "At the time, the theater showed X-rated films; Cianci proposed taking it through eminent domain and making it into a high school for the performing arts."
With less than two percent of available footage being used in the documentary, Cherry Arnold promised that the DVD would be "a total collectible," incorporating tons of anecdotes and outtakes from the cutting room floor. And indeed, when it was released on October 26, 2007, the DVD did include all that plus Cianci's first post-prison interview and the twenty-three-minute mini-documentary, "A Promise for Change," which Cianci had made in 1976 to commemorate his first run for mayor in 1974.
