INTERVIEW: ‘Secret Mall Apartment’ focuses on the art, not the prank
Photo: Secret Mall Apartment features eight artists living in Providence Place Mall for four years. Two of the artists were Colin Bliss and Greta Scheing. Photo courtesy of Michael Townsend / Provided by official site.
Secret Mall Apartment, the new documentary from director Jeremy Workman, details one of the most amazing moments in the history of modern public art. In 2003, as the story goes, eight Rhode Island residents decided to protest local gentrification by secretly setting up an apartment in a hidden space of the Providence Place Mall. Their secret was well kept; they ended up living in the space for four years.
Now the story has been made into an engaging film, but not one that focuses simply on the “prank” or novelty of the experiment. Instead, Workman decides to dig deep on the lives and influences of these eight artists, which is an approach appreciated by one of the main subjects, Michael Townsend, the central purveyor of the Tape Art movement in the public art sphere.
“I mean I didn’t know anything about this,” Workman said in a recent phone interview. “This was Providence legend, Providence lore. It had been talked about all over Providence for 17 years, and I knew nothing. I’m not from Providence. I’m actually from Los Angeles, and I met Michael randomly. He told me about this, not for any reason about wanting to make a documentary, just because we became friends, and then I researched it and Googled it. I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is insanity.’ Then I spent a long time trying to convince him to let me make it. I didn’t know that so many people in the past had tried to make it, this documentary, and just right time, right place, right pitch, and here we are.”
Townsend and his colleagues were protective of the story because they could see filmmakers wanting to devalue the artistic side of the narrative and instead simply focus on the “cool” factor. No doubt that Secret Mall Apartment displays the unbelievable nature of this project, but the film is after something more profound, including understanding the issues that motivated these Rhode Island residents in the first place.
“The story broke to the news cycle in 2007 when we were discovered and I was arrested,” Townsend said. “It quickly became international news, and this is also right before a huge writers’ strike. And so there was a lot of interesting real-life stories, things that would maybe take a little less writing, to push out the door, so we got a lot of calls about movies and book deals and TV deals. So the artists decided, no, we’re not participating in any of this, but that didn’t stop the persistence of interest in the story.”
Townsend said that every year since 2007, there had been directors hounding him and proposing ideas to tell the story of this secret apartment, but he found that the majority of them weren’t serious about the hard work that would be needed to pull off such a documentary.
“The hard work is trying to get all eight artists represented in the movie, trying to tell the story, including the context of how a mall of this size would impact a city,” the artist said. “And beyond the mall, those eight artists were working on a bunch of other projects that inform what we were doing in the secret apartment, and Jeremy, I had seen one of his films that I absolutely adored. When I met him, he was filming Lily Topples the World, and so I got to watch him as a filmmaker with the subject. That goes a long way toward trusting somebody, so between those things, he was the right guy. He was the first person to ever see all of our footage. I handed him a hard drive and was like, ‘Do we have a movie here?’”
That footage is now on display in Secret Mall Apartment, which is playing in movie theaters around the nation, including at New York City’s IFC Center. The eight artists not only lived in the secret apartment; they also filmed their conversations, entrances, exits and day-to-day life.
“They had shot remarkable stuff when they were inside the secret apartment, and they had also shot incredible stuff beyond that, all this artwork they were doing and 9/11 memorials and Oklahoma City and Michael’s incredible art project in the tunnels of Providence,” Workman said. “So there was just so much footage, which was incredible. He handed me a hard drive, and I also got a bunch of footage from the others. And probably just of the secret apartment, there was probably 24-25 hours of footage, which is an incredible amount, just a gold mine.”
There was one problem though: The footage was low quality and more than 20 years old by the time Workman and his team started creating the documentary. Technically speaking, it was 320×240, with 10 frames a second, which Workman said is worse than VHS. The artists were essentially running around with a consumer camera, circa 2003, which cost roughly $89.
“Although it was this very impressive camera at the time, it wasn’t for video, so it was this amazing footage that we also then had to really wrap our head around,” the director said, adding that once the technical issues were overcome, the footage became the central thrust of the documentary. “They’re all artists. They’re all really talented, so they just had really incredible coverage. These guys could make a documentary themselves. They’re just so talented, so it made my life just so easy to hang the movie on it.”
Townsend said that Workman was the correct collaborator because he elevated the proceedings beyond pranks, folklore and legends.
“He sort of saw the entire body of work,” Townsend said. “Though he didn’t really necessarily understand it at the time, I think he sort of picked up on the idea that our Tape Art practice was informing our approach to how we saw empty spaces, how we approached things with an idea of stewardship, or with ideas of protest, or ideas about collaboration. Without those other pieces, the audience doesn’t really even have a chance to understand our motivations, and that’s what I’ve always been impressed with about Jeremy’s work as a storyteller and filmmaker is that he drills down and let’s people access the artists’ reasoning. You get close to it. That’s why he was the dude for the job.”
Workman added: “I love the prank, the fun, the sugar rush of this movie. It’s so fun. Oh my God, this is going to be such a blast. It’s going to be so entertaining. But that also put this really neat opportunity for me because I knew audiences and viewers would watch it and just have so much fun, which allows you to also smuggle in more interesting ideas and deeper ideas and get into places that maybe they wouldn’t be as receptive to go to if the movie was more of a chore to watch. It allowed that Trojan horse thing to really work.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Secret Mall Apartment, directed by Jeremy Workman and featuring Michael Townsend, is now playing in movie theaters from mtuckman media. Click here for more information.
