Oh ye is bot it shoot Died.
People say good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater.
They want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the protection booth.
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Got it off.
This is an incredible tale. Hard to set up an apartment inside.
Providence Place, Margo and undetected for years.
We all hated them all.
When it went up right, nobody wanted that to happen.
Shortly after a developer comes in and says, I'm going to knock.
Down your home.
I just had this idea, Oh, we should in the mall.
It seemed like a very absurd fantasy and perhaps a great challenge. When the mall was being built, I saw a space that I could not figure out what it would.
Be used for.
We were looking forward that anominally in the architecture, and we knuck ourselves in there and we took out our flash lives.
There was.
It started the conversation immediately, we need to develop this under utilized space. There was a real necessity to build a wall there.
It was like five pounds of center box.
It's important to emphasize there's this underlying sense of dread that we're going to get caught at any time.
Flash.
So what is it? Is it a prank? Is it a work of art? Is it a social experiment?
It was like this alternate universe is within the real world.
It talks about gentrification, capitalism, everything being commodified.
The apartment was the side project to the others back.
We were like a little elite strikeforced team of.
Empathetic artists.
Such a magic thing to take a space from them all.
Holy note, Hey folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth.
I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking Withjeremy Workman and Michael Townsend. Jeremy is the director and Michael Townsend is one of the subjects of the new film Secret Mall Apartment. It is about a group of eight people that discover a hidden space inside of a mall in Providence, Rhode Island and kind of create an art project out of it. The irony that I didn't bring up during this interview is I've only been to Rhode Island one time, and I think I went to
that mall. I think I saw X men first class there, so kind of strange to see it again and see it in this context. I had a great time talking with these guys, had a great time watching the movie. Definitely check it out when it comes to your town. It is actually playing theatrically right now, so check those local listings, as I say, and if it has already gone, or if you don't have a theater around you playing it,
keep looking. Check it out. And I think you will really enjoy watching this film, and I hope you enjoy listening to this interview. Jeremy, tell me, how did you even first hear about this secret apartment.
I didn't know anything about this story. It was like urban legend in Providence. I'm not from Providence. I've been making documentaries in New York for the last like decade, and I didn't really know anything. I was out in Athens, Greece. I was filming for another documentary of mine called Lily Topples the World, which has nothing to do with any of this, and it was about this young woman who
it becomes the world's greatest Domino toppler. She was out there, I was filming her and the building that she was in was.
Covered in incredible tape.
Art, masking tape art which for your listeners and the people that will see the movie. Michael Townsend is the world's foremost tape artist, so this is putting tape art on the walls and facades of buildings in spectacular ways. I saw that tape art, I instantly was intrigued.
I've done a number of films.
About artists and people that are doing sort of quirky, unique things. I wanted to meet Michael, and we met, and I didn't know anything about this secret apartment in the mall, and somewhere along the line he told me. I couldn't believe it. I thought he was punking me. I thought he was totally full of it. And he then at one point whipped out. This was in Greece, like late at night. He whips out an iPad that was like with a crack screen.
We're showing you.
Your listeners can't see it, but it's like cracked and crappy, and he like connects to the cloud and he shows me footage of them pushing up the couches, up the ladders, and I was instantly blown away.
What I didn't know at the time is that.
This was a pretty famous story in Providence and for nearly twenty years filmmakers had wanted to make this documentary.
I feel fortunate that I was the one that got to.
Michael. Why Jeremy, Why was he the one that was allowed to do this?
As Jeremy mentioned, there was a persistent interest in turning this narrative into a larger project, a lot of directors coming out of the wood work, and we were not interested in the story being told as prank, or the focus being solely on it as a stunt or folklore, or the focus being entirely on me. Those are things I'm just not interested in. When I met Jeremy, I actually got to see him at work, so he's out in the field.
I get to see him with his subject matter.
I get to see how he approaches eccentric artist folks, and that went a long way towards trusting him. On top of that, I'd seen one of his movies before and really liked it.
The World Before a Feed.
Yeah that's the one about the guy walking every street of New York City.
Yeah, we really like that film.
So it was interesting to actually meet a filmmaker that I already liked, to see his process, and I trusted him when we had conversations about it as a film, I said, hey, look, here's the reason I've turned everyone else down. The story of the mall is informed by all the other art work that was happening around that project. So this team of eight artists were involved in a lot of very serious and intense artwork, of which the
mall is one piece. And if you're able to capture all those things, even my personal opinion, I think he got a good story. And in order to tell that, you're go need to have interviews with all the artists. They're all out in their field, live in their own art lives. So he's gonna have to convince eight people, and then he's gonna have to go to Providence and find some talking heads to give us context. There's a
lot of work, so we just trusted that Jeremy. Jeremy seemed up for it, and luckily, when I handed him a hard drive of all of the footage we had shot, he was and fairly immediately that there was some good bones there.
Yeah. An underrated part of documentary filmmaking is convincing people to let you make a movie on them. It's a real part of being able to make documentaries and It's not easy because you're not offering money, you're not offering fame. It's a difficult process. You're going into their lives, you're asking them challenging questions, you're demanding time from them.
So it's a part of the process of being.
A documentary filmmaker is earning the respect of your subjects.
So you had one person with Michael, how do you get the other seven?
It was very much about what Michael alluded to. I really went into it looking at this as yet. First of all, the whole thing with living in the Secret Apartment, it's amazing, it's spectacular. It's like a heist movie. You can't even imagine how fun and ridiculous and entertaining and stupid and just bonkers fun it all is. Behind that, they were also doing these really incredible things on the side. They were making memorials for nine to eleven that they
were doing anonymously. They were going into children's hospitals and working with children that were extremely sick, and they were doing that for essentially no money, and they were doing it every week. So there was all these other things that this group was doing, and I was fascinated by that, and I think that just that simple act of just being really interested in those aspects and how it connected to the secret apartment and how there was all these
cross currents between the two. I think that's what made the group feel Okay, yeah.
Yeah, that's fantastic. Was everybody else spread out? Did you have to do a lot of traveling for this? Obviously you're talking about Greece at the beginning of this story. Do you have to then travel the whole state?
Sir?
Most of the art these are all living, all what we call the Mall eight. These are the eight people that were with Michael and lived in the Providence Place Mall from two thousand and three to two thousand and seven, on and off.
But there were eight of them. They all several of them.
They're all still working artists, every single one of them, which I also found fascinating in some aspect it either art education or as working artists. So most of them are on the East Coast, they're in New England, they're in Providence, they're in New York. So that made it a little easier just to be able to like corral them all.
You use a.
Couple I don't want to say props, but you do a few things in the movie that I found really very clever. The idea of the recreation of the apartment was wonderful, and then also the model of the whole mall. How does that come to be? How's that model brought into the four.
First of all, your listeners should realize, like the secret mall apartment like shape shifts. And that's what I think is so neat for a viewer and was really neat for me as a filmmaker. On one hand, it's this like stance against gentrification. On the other hand, it's this ridiculous prank. It's also this like really deep data artwork. So it's all these things. And what it told me while making it was that I could just do anything, and I could bring any idea to the table.
And Michael, he said a lot of a point.
He said, I've always wanted to have a model. In one of my movies, in the World Beneath the Feet, there's a scene where there's a big model of the city and he's but I would like to have one for me.
Yeah, you know what, yes, one of one of the mall.
Hey, Colin can totally make you model. You want a mall, He'll give you a.
Mall, so hels and he builds this gigant model out of wood of the mall. But what we did that was really interesting is that becomes part of the movie where you watch him make it, and it's not just a prop. It becomes a way to involve the character the subjects to participate. Well.
It's a nice reminder that, like we're artists, given five or six hours to tell the story, you can dive into all the different artists and what they make and all that. But there's a nice sort of view into the other art worlds that are happening and a perfect.
The other thing that we did, of course, is Michael participated in the recreation, so he was actively building the recreation set with our production designer, and these are scenes that you watch.
In the movie.
So the movie's doing this kind of very meta. It's it's like a ridiculous mc escher where you're just seeing all these different sides to this prism. You're seeing the making of it, you're seeing the recreation, you're seeing Michael involved in it, you're seeing the footage that they shot, and it's all heppered in this different prism. And it was also a way to bring Michael into the participation of the story as well. Where he's acts, he acts in the recreation.
Yeah, how was that was that your first acting gig or had you been on screen before?
No, it's acting.
I can play myself rush place, no one else that acting. It's just man, I'm pretty good at that.
The whole idea that you're talking about with all of these like the nine to eleven project in Oklahoma City and all these I'm like, where's it going with this? And then if it really comes together at the end, and I'm just like, Okay, this makes so much sense and like you said, paints that larger world rather than it just being here's these eight people that had this apartment in them.
All as a long time. Just even listener to the Projection book.
I'm a cinophile and I'm a fan of I think my entry into making documentaries is with scripted films and with fiction films. One of the things that scripted films
do is they throw you in the deep end. They don't explain everything, where documentaries often they fill in the blanks and they explain a lot, and there's they make sure the audience knows where they are all time and One of the things that we were trying to do in this movie is just throw you into these scenes into the deep end, and you, a viewer, would have to figure out where they were and figure out how it all made sense, and then it hopefully all adds up in the end.
So that was something that we tried to do from the get go.
Jeremy and Michael, I'm so sorry that we have to cut this short. I just said the little window of time. But I hope we can talk again one of these days. Jeremy, definitely keep me in the loop. I would love to talk to you about more of your work.
Yeah, I should come on and talk about some absurd noir seventies obscurio or whatever.
I would absolutely love it. Nice to meet you. You guys, have a good rest of your day.
All right, Thanks so much, And.
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