Speaker 1: Oh ye is bot it shoot Died.
Speaker 2: People say good money to see this movie.
Speaker 3: When they go out to a theater.
Speaker 4: They want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in
Speaker 4: the protection booth.
Speaker 1: Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 5: Got it off.
Speaker 4: This is an incredible tale. Hard to set up an
Speaker 4: apartment inside.
Speaker 3: Providence Place, Margo and undetected for years.
Speaker 5: We all hated them all.
Speaker 3: When it went up right, nobody wanted that to happen.
Speaker 5: Shortly after a developer comes in and says, I'm going
Speaker 5: to knock.
Speaker 4: Down your home.
Speaker 2: I just had this idea, Oh, we should in the mall.
Speaker 5: It seemed like a very absurd fantasy and perhaps a
Speaker 5: great challenge. When the mall was being built, I saw
Speaker 5: a space that I could not figure out what it would.
Speaker 3: Be used for.
Speaker 5: We were looking forward that anominally in the architecture, and
Speaker 5: we knuck ourselves in there and we took out our
Speaker 5: flash lives.
Speaker 2: There was.
Speaker 5: It started the conversation immediately, we need to develop this
Speaker 5: under utilized space. There was a real necessity to build
Speaker 5: a wall there.
Speaker 1: It was like five pounds of center box.
Speaker 5: It's important to emphasize there's this underlying sense of dread
Speaker 5: that we're going to get caught at any time.
Speaker 3: Flash.
Speaker 5: So what is it? Is it a prank? Is it
Speaker 5: a work of art? Is it a social experiment?
Speaker 1: It was like this alternate universe is within the real world.
Speaker 4: It talks about gentrification, capitalism, everything being commodified.
Speaker 5: The apartment was the side project to the others back.
Speaker 3: We were like a little elite strikeforced team of.
Speaker 1: Empathetic artists.
Speaker 6: Such a magic thing to take a space from them all.
Speaker 2: Holy note, Hey folks, welcome to a special episode of
Speaker 2: The Projection Booth.
Speaker 4: I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking
Speaker 4: Withjeremy Workman and Michael Townsend. Jeremy is the director and
Speaker 4: Michael Townsend is one of the subjects of the new
Speaker 4: film Secret Mall Apartment. It is about a group of
Speaker 4: eight people that discover a hidden space inside of a
Speaker 4: mall in Providence, Rhode Island and kind of create an
Speaker 4: art project out of it. The irony that I didn't
Speaker 4: bring up during this interview is I've only been to
Speaker 4: Rhode Island one time, and I think I went to
Speaker 4: that mall. I think I saw X men first class there,
Speaker 4: so kind of strange to see it again and see
Speaker 4: it in this context. I had a great time talking
Speaker 4: with these guys, had a great time watching the movie.
Speaker 4: Definitely check it out when it comes to your town.
Speaker 4: It is actually playing theatrically right now, so check those
Speaker 4: local listings, as I say, and if it has already gone,
Speaker 4: or if you don't have a theater around you playing it,
Speaker 4: keep looking. Check it out. And I think you will
Speaker 4: really enjoy watching this film, and I hope you enjoy
Speaker 4: listening to this interview. Jeremy, tell me, how did you
Speaker 4: even first hear about this secret apartment.
Speaker 3: I didn't know anything about this story. It was like
Speaker 3: urban legend in Providence. I'm not from Providence. I've been
Speaker 3: making documentaries in New York for the last like decade,
Speaker 3: and I didn't really know anything. I was out in Athens, Greece.
Speaker 3: I was filming for another documentary of mine called Lily
Speaker 3: Topples the World, which has nothing to do with any
Speaker 3: of this, and it was about this young woman who
Speaker 3: it becomes the world's greatest Domino toppler. She was out there,
Speaker 3: I was filming her and the building that she was
Speaker 3: in was.
Speaker 1: Covered in incredible tape.
Speaker 3: Art, masking tape art which for your listeners and the
Speaker 3: people that will see the movie. Michael Townsend is the
Speaker 3: world's foremost tape artist, so this is putting tape art
Speaker 3: on the walls and facades of buildings in spectacular ways.
Speaker 3: I saw that tape art, I instantly was intrigued.
Speaker 1: I've done a number of films.
Speaker 3: About artists and people that are doing sort of quirky,
Speaker 3: unique things. I wanted to meet Michael, and we met,
Speaker 3: and I didn't know anything about this secret apartment in
Speaker 3: the mall, and somewhere along the line he told me.
Speaker 3: I couldn't believe it. I thought he was punking me.
Speaker 3: I thought he was totally full of it. And he
Speaker 3: then at one point whipped out. This was in Greece,
Speaker 3: like late at night. He whips out an iPad that
Speaker 3: was like with a crack screen.
Speaker 1: We're showing you.
Speaker 3: Your listeners can't see it, but it's like cracked and crappy,
Speaker 3: and he like connects to the cloud and he shows
Speaker 3: me footage of them pushing up the couches, up the ladders,
Speaker 3: and I was instantly blown away.
Speaker 1: What I didn't know at the time is that.
Speaker 3: This was a pretty famous story in Providence and for
Speaker 3: nearly twenty years filmmakers had wanted to make this documentary.
Speaker 1: I feel fortunate that I was the one that got to.
Speaker 4: Michael. Why Jeremy, Why was he the one that was
Speaker 4: allowed to do this?
Speaker 5: As Jeremy mentioned, there was a persistent interest in turning
Speaker 5: this narrative into a larger project, a lot of directors
Speaker 5: coming out of the wood work, and we were not
Speaker 5: interested in the story being told as prank, or the
Speaker 5: focus being solely on it as a stunt or folklore,
Speaker 5: or the focus being entirely on me. Those are things
Speaker 5: I'm just not interested in. When I met Jeremy, I
Speaker 5: actually got to see him at work, so he's out
Speaker 5: in the field.
Speaker 1: I get to see him with his subject matter.
Speaker 5: I get to see how he approaches eccentric artist folks,
Speaker 5: and that went a long way towards trusting him. On
Speaker 5: top of that, I'd seen one of his movies before
Speaker 5: and really liked it.
Speaker 1: The World Before a Feed.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's the one about the guy walking every street
Speaker 3: of New York City.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we really like that film.
Speaker 5: So it was interesting to actually meet a filmmaker that
Speaker 5: I already liked, to see his process, and I trusted
Speaker 5: him when we had conversations about it as a film,
Speaker 5: I said, hey, look, here's the reason I've turned everyone
Speaker 5: else down. The story of the mall is informed by
Speaker 5: all the other art work that was happening around that project.
Speaker 5: So this team of eight artists were involved in a
Speaker 5: lot of very serious and intense artwork, of which the
Speaker 5: mall is one piece. And if you're able to capture
Speaker 5: all those things, even my personal opinion, I think he
Speaker 5: got a good story. And in order to tell that,
Speaker 5: you're go need to have interviews with all the artists.
Speaker 5: They're all out in their field, live in their own
Speaker 5: art lives. So he's gonna have to convince eight people,
Speaker 5: and then he's gonna have to go to Providence and
Speaker 5: find some talking heads to give us context. There's a
Speaker 5: lot of work, so we just trusted that Jeremy. Jeremy
Speaker 5: seemed up for it, and luckily, when I handed him
Speaker 5: a hard drive of all of the footage we had shot,
Speaker 5: he was and fairly immediately that there was some good
Speaker 5: bones there.
Speaker 3: Yeah. An underrated part of documentary filmmaking is convincing people
Speaker 3: to let you make a movie on them. It's a
Speaker 3: real part of being able to make documentaries and It's
Speaker 3: not easy because you're not offering money, you're not offering fame.
Speaker 3: It's a difficult process. You're going into their lives, you're
Speaker 3: asking them challenging questions, you're demanding time from them.
Speaker 1: So it's a part of the process of being.
Speaker 3: A documentary filmmaker is earning the respect of your subjects.
Speaker 4: So you had one person with Michael, how do you
Speaker 4: get the other seven?
Speaker 3: It was very much about what Michael alluded to. I
Speaker 3: really went into it looking at this as yet. First
Speaker 3: of all, the whole thing with living in the Secret Apartment,
Speaker 3: it's amazing, it's spectacular. It's like a heist movie. You
Speaker 3: can't even imagine how fun and ridiculous and entertaining and
Speaker 3: stupid and just bonkers fun it all is. Behind that,
Speaker 3: they were also doing these really incredible things on the side.
Speaker 3: They were making memorials for nine to eleven that they
Speaker 3: were doing anonymously. They were going into children's hospitals and
Speaker 3: working with children that were extremely sick, and they were
Speaker 3: doing that for essentially no money, and they were doing
Speaker 3: it every week. So there was all these other things
Speaker 3: that this group was doing, and I was fascinated by that,
Speaker 3: and I think that just that simple act of just
Speaker 3: being really interested in those aspects and how it connected
Speaker 3: to the secret apartment and how there was all these
Speaker 3: cross currents between the two. I think that's what made
Speaker 3: the group feel Okay, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's fantastic. Was everybody else spread out? Did you
Speaker 4: have to do a lot of traveling for this? Obviously
Speaker 4: you're talking about Greece at the beginning of this story.
Speaker 4: Do you have to then travel the whole state?
Speaker 1: Sir?
Speaker 3: Most of the art these are all living, all what
Speaker 3: we call the Mall eight. These are the eight people
Speaker 3: that were with Michael and lived in the Providence Place
Speaker 3: Mall from two thousand and three to two thousand and seven,
Speaker 3: on and off.
Speaker 1: But there were eight of them. They all several of them.
Speaker 3: They're all still working artists, every single one of them,
Speaker 3: which I also found fascinating in some aspect it either
Speaker 3: art education or as working artists. So most of them
Speaker 3: are on the East Coast, they're in New England, they're
Speaker 3: in Providence, they're in New York. So that made it
Speaker 3: a little easier just to be able to like corral
Speaker 3: them all.
Speaker 1: You use a.
Speaker 4: Couple I don't want to say props, but you do
Speaker 4: a few things in the movie that I found really
Speaker 4: very clever. The idea of the recreation of the apartment
Speaker 4: was wonderful, and then also the model of the whole mall.
Speaker 4: How does that come to be? How's that model brought
Speaker 4: into the four.
Speaker 3: First of all, your listeners should realize, like the secret
Speaker 3: mall apartment like shape shifts. And that's what I think
Speaker 3: is so neat for a viewer and was really neat
Speaker 3: for me as a filmmaker. On one hand, it's this
Speaker 3: like stance against gentrification. On the other hand, it's this
Speaker 3: ridiculous prank. It's also this like really deep data artwork.
Speaker 3: So it's all these things. And what it told me
Speaker 3: while making it was that I could just do anything,
Speaker 3: and I could bring any idea to the table.
Speaker 1: And Michael, he said a lot of a point.
Speaker 5: He said, I've always wanted to have a model. In
Speaker 5: one of my movies, in the World Beneath the Feet,
Speaker 5: there's a scene where there's a big model of the
Speaker 5: city and he's but I would like to have one
Speaker 5: for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know what, yes, one of one of the mall.
Speaker 5: Hey, Colin can totally make you model. You want a mall,
Speaker 5: He'll give you a.
Speaker 3: Mall, so hels and he builds this gigant model out
Speaker 3: of wood of the mall. But what we did that
Speaker 3: was really interesting is that becomes part of the movie
Speaker 3: where you watch him make it, and it's not just
Speaker 3: a prop. It becomes a way to involve the character
Speaker 3: the subjects to participate. Well.
Speaker 5: It's a nice reminder that, like we're artists, given five
Speaker 5: or six hours to tell the story, you can dive
Speaker 5: into all the different artists and what they make and
Speaker 5: all that. But there's a nice sort of view into
Speaker 5: the other art worlds that are happening and a perfect.
Speaker 3: The other thing that we did, of course, is Michael
Speaker 3: participated in the recreation, so he was actively building the
Speaker 3: recreation set with our production designer, and these are scenes
Speaker 3: that you watch.
Speaker 1: In the movie.
Speaker 3: So the movie's doing this kind of very meta. It's
Speaker 3: it's like a ridiculous mc escher where you're just seeing
Speaker 3: all these different sides to this prism. You're seeing the
Speaker 3: making of it, you're seeing the recreation, you're seeing Michael
Speaker 3: involved in it, you're seeing the footage that they shot,
Speaker 3: and it's all heppered in this different prism. And it
Speaker 3: was also a way to bring Michael into the participation
Speaker 3: of the story as well. Where he's acts, he acts
Speaker 3: in the recreation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, how was that was that your first acting gig
Speaker 4: or had you been on screen before?
Speaker 1: No, it's acting.
Speaker 5: I can play myself rush place, no one else that acting.
Speaker 5: It's just man, I'm pretty good at that.
Speaker 4: The whole idea that you're talking about with all of
Speaker 4: these like the nine to eleven project in Oklahoma City
Speaker 4: and all these I'm like, where's it going with this?
Speaker 4: And then if it really comes together at the end,
Speaker 4: and I'm just like, Okay, this makes so much sense
Speaker 4: and like you said, paints that larger world rather than
Speaker 4: it just being here's these eight people that had this
Speaker 4: apartment in them.
Speaker 1: All as a long time. Just even listener to the
Speaker 1: Projection book.
Speaker 3: I'm a cinophile and I'm a fan of I think
Speaker 3: my entry into making documentaries is with scripted films and
Speaker 3: with fiction films. One of the things that scripted films
Speaker 3: do is they throw you in the deep end. They
Speaker 3: don't explain everything, where documentaries often they fill in the
Speaker 3: blanks and they explain a lot, and there's they make
Speaker 3: sure the audience knows where they are all time and
Speaker 3: One of the things that we were trying to do
Speaker 3: in this movie is just throw you into these scenes
Speaker 3: into the deep end, and you, a viewer, would have
Speaker 3: to figure out where they were and figure out how
Speaker 3: it all made sense, and then it hopefully all adds
Speaker 3: up in the end.
Speaker 1: So that was something that we tried to do from
Speaker 1: the get go.
Speaker 4: Jeremy and Michael, I'm so sorry that we have to
Speaker 4: cut this short. I just said the little window of time.
Speaker 4: But I hope we can talk again one of these days. Jeremy,
Speaker 4: definitely keep me in the loop. I would love to
Speaker 4: talk to you about more of your work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I should come on and talk about some absurd
Speaker 3: noir seventies obscurio or whatever.
Speaker 4: I would absolutely love it. Nice to meet you. You guys,
Speaker 4: have a good rest of your day.
Speaker 1: All right, Thanks so much, And.
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