Artists in Residence: Jeremy Workman on SECRET MALL APARTMENT

With his latest film, Secret Mall Apartment, documentarian Jeremy Workman delves into a piece of art that’s the stuff of urban legend: over the course of four years in the early-mid 2000s, Providence artist Michael Townsend and a group of collaborators created a secret apartment in the bowels of the Providence Place Mall, complete with a couch, a TV, a waffle maker, and a DIY cinder block wall with a front door only they could unlock. The so-called “mall project” was the group’s private response to the rapid gentrification that took place in the de-industrializing city over the course of the ‘90s and aughts, an economic shift that displaced many of the artists and musicians who lived there. By becoming “microdevelopers” of the “waste space” between the mall’s walls, this group was able to comment on what gets left behind during periods of urban revitalization, thriving in the literal cracks in the facade like prankster dandelions and satirizing consumerism in the process. 

Workman’s film is a lovely, stranger-than-fiction, shaggy dog tale comprised of the group’s contemporaneous video footage, historical archival to recount the city’s history, and broad-ranging present-day interviews. It leads with a zany curiosity, allowing the story to unfold organically and in unexpected directions so the viewer can settle in like a guest to the apartment. To mark the film’s premiere next week before a series of regional engagements, Workman sat down with Film Inquiry to talk about his process. 

source: Wheelhouse Media

Payton McCarty-Simas for Film Inquiry: Hello there! How are you doing? 

Jeremy Workman: Right this second I’m actually in the upstairs roof parking lot of the Providence Place Mall.

Oh my God! That’s amazing! 

Jeremy Workman: I know, I know, it’s amazing.

How do you feel about the mall now relative to when you started Secret Mall Apartment?

Jeremy Workman: I feel pretty great about the mall. You know, the journey of the mall and the movie has been a real ongoing process. I was very concerned about the mall when we started. I wasn’t sure of how they would take the film and what their thoughts would be. However, the mall has changed ownership multiple, multiple times–– I mean, we’re talking like five, six times–– since this happened from 2003 to 2007. And now the mall is really having a tough time. It’s under state ordered bankruptcy, so it’s under receivership. They’re desperate for foot traffic and desperate to come up with ideas to get people into the mall. So things have come really full circle in the ultimate weird, ironic, self reflexive, meta, way–– we’re now being embraced by the mall [after the mall banned Michael Townsend for life after the apartment became public knowledge]. We’re actually premiering the film at the Providence Place Mall movie theater on March 21st, and it’s going to be possibly one of the biggest hits in Providence.

Wow, that’s incredible. 

Jeremy Workman: Yeah, and I don’t even know what the status is with Michael Townsend and the ban, but I know that the mall is trying everything they can to stay in business, and there’s already been talk, which is in the film, of course, about them adding residential homes in the mall. So there’s a lot of subtext with the film’s release as well, a lot of irony. It’s just wild.

Completely. In terms of these kinds of complex relationships with the mall, Michael has a line about how the artists living in Providence Place were “no different than a barnacle on a whale.” They all talk a lot about gentrification in the film and the idea of “negative space” and the reappropriation of space with the mall presented as the bad actor, the gentrifier. Today, though, the mall has kind of fallen by the wayside as a third space in light of a new wave of economic change. People might look at the mall differently in that context. So do you feel like this relationship to space in the film can teach us lessons about today’s ongoing battles for urban space as we continue to radically reorient public space?

Jeremy Workman: Yeah, I mean, there’s so much to unpack with the idea of malls, and what those guys [Townsend and the other artists] were doing. This mall came in and changed the face of Providence and, in the process, rooted out all these people that were living in this one area. As you said, though, over the course of the movie, it’s almost like Michael and his team almost start embracing the mall. As you mentioned, there’s this incredible line in the movie that’s captured with their little handycams where he talks about how they’re like barnacles on the whale of the mall, and they kind of embrace it.

source: Wheelhouse Media

I think what’s also so interesting and ironic is that this movie is coming out in this era now when malls across the country are under threat and we all know more about dead malls than we do about living malls. This idea, as you said, about this third space and places for communities to gather and to be together has just gotten more and more reduced in our recent history, in our communities. I think a lot of people, when they watch this documentary, have a sense of real nostalgia for those days when malls were active in our communities and were a place to go. We’re asking ourselves today, “Is it better that we’re all in our homes and buying stuff on Amazon and not going to movie theaters and not going to mom and pop stores?” I think there is a real reminder here–– and I don’t know what the answer is, it’s complicated–– but I think there is a real reminder when you watch this documentary that there was a time not that many years ago when malls were a place for the community to come together. 

Totally, totally. Now on that note, in terms of going to the mall, at the end of the film, you go back to that space with Michael–– 

Jeremy Workman: Well, I mean, it’s a gray area. There’s some people that watch that scene and they feel that it must be a part of the recreation, and there are other people that watch that scene and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, are they sneaking back into the mall?” So I think that what I really like about that scene is that it sort of leaves it up to the viewer a little bit as to exactly what is happening.

And probably keeps you and Michael from a certain amount of legal liability too, if you keep that ambiguous. 

Jeremy Workman: Probably, yes, probably.

Since we’re on the subject of space, as I was looking at your filmography more broadly, there seems to be a real connective tissue in there around site-specific art and embodiment and impermanence and performativity in your films, from Matt Green’s walk in The World Before Your Feet, to Lily Hevesy’s dominoes in Lily Topples the World, to the tape art and the apartment in this film.

Jeremy Workman: Right.

So I was curious what it is about these site specific acts of quotidian art-making that speaks to you.

Jeremy Workman: There’s a number of buckets that I’m always super interested in. One is artists who are doing something not traditional. I tend to be interested in people who are following their passions to a degree that maybe it becomes an obsession, or it becomes beyond what some would deem healthy. I think there’s something about that that’s really inspiring. It’s about watching people who are so passionate about what they do, not for notoriety or fame or money. Matt Green is walking every street of New York City. He doesn’t care one bit about making a dime, he didn’t really want it to be a documentary. Lily discovered Dominoes because she was bullied in school, and that was her outlet. Her success was almost incidental. These guys in the secret apartment, they went twenty plus years and had no interest in doing a documentary.

source: Wheelhouse Media

But to your point specifically, I think there is something really neat about this idea of creating art that isn’t just about putting something up on a wall in a museum or in a gallery and selling it, and a lot of impermanence speaks to that. A lot of these things are really impermanent. Matt– his art is about being in the present and just walking. Lily‘s art is all about the act of toppling something, essentially destroying it. Certainly that’s so much going on with all these guys and tape art and the fact that they’re doing stuff on their own. I just find it so interesting that they all record stuff on their own, too. They record their art, but they do it for their own purposes. It’s not so much about putting it out there. They’re just doing it because that’s what they’re compelled to do.

Speaking of all of those recordings, the archival work on this film is super fabulous. Not just in terms of Michael and the other artists’ archives of their own projects, but in terms of the historical work you put in. I think there’s–– and correct me if I’m wrong–– but there’s a fabulous quasi-hero shot of [infamous former Providence Mayor and convicted felon] Buddy Cianci looking at the construction site??

Jeremy Workman: [Laughs] Yeah. 

And there are all these interviews at, like, The Silver Diner, and in the mall–– It’s just so beautifully sourced. I’d love to hear about that sourcing and research process and how you were able to sift through all of this.

Jeremy Workman: Okay, so yes. There’s incredible, incredible archive in this movie, and it starts obviously with all the archive that they shot. This incredible amount of footage that they shot with their cameras–– which were 320×240, and they bought them for $100. They filmed over 24 hours of footage over the course of three or four years. Some of the footage was, as you saw, incredible–– bringing in cinder blocks and all that–– and sometimes it would be, like, a camera sitting on a desk and they’d be playing Grand Theft Auto for four hours. They weren’t thinking, “Oh, let’s make a documentary,” they just were, like, recording. The amount of footage they got is just staggering, it’s incredible. Plus, the audio that they were able to capture is amazing from these crappy, crappy cameras. 

source: Wheelhouse Media

For me as a filmmaker, I just knew immediately that we could structure this whole movie around this incredible footage. But beyond the secret apartment, they also filmed this amazing stuff of their artwork, you know, Michael‘s “Body Tunnels” artwork, that crazy artwork that he did under the sewers, he filmed that. They filmed their 9/11 memorial, they filmed themselves going to hospitals, and they made all this footage available to me. It was incredible. It told such a rich story with so many details and subtext that I just knew like, wow… It was so much bigger than just the crazy heist story of the secret apartment.

And then the other side of this, as you pointed out, was this incredible archival that was just  living in Providence. I really made a big effort, maybe to the point where some people who were working with me were like, “Why are we chasing down so much footage about this mall and the gentrification?” I knew that it would really show the bigger context, so I found all this footage of the mall going up and people at City Hall celebrating. Meanwhile, there was this incredible footage that was going on in the Mills, particularly Fort Thunder [a former-mill-neighborhood-cum- artists-collective that was torn down during the same period of rapid urban revitalization/gentrification that spurred the mall]. People that were living there, including Raphael Lyon, had been filming. He had collected home movies about Fort Thunder for years and years, and nobody was doing anything with it, so he provided it to the film.

Another source was a documentary filmmaker, who maybe you’ve heard of, Sam Coleman. He went to Brown and he’s a friend of mine. And it was an incredible fortuitous coincidence: when Sam was in Brown in the ‘90s, his senior thesis film was on the Providence Place Mall.

No way!

Jeremy Workman: Yes! And the gentrification that was going on. He went in there when he was, like, a sophomore in college, and he filmed all these interviews with people at the mall, including the security guard and the parking garage guy and people talking about how the mall doesn’t really cater to them. He’d made a short documentary for school, and he provided it to me for the movie. So it wasn’t just [Michael and the collective’s] footage that was incredible, there were all these different streams of footage coming in, and each stream was more incredible than the next. I’d always be just amazed. 

When Michael and everybody gave me that footage, I just was like, “Oh, wow, this is going to be one of those movies where you watch it and you just can’t believe the footage.” I had never really made one of those movies before. My other documentaries are more like ride-alongs, shoulder to shoulder with the subject, so being able to have all that material was a new experience for me.

source: Wheelhouse Media

There are so many avenues to go down here next, but I want to turn to the editing. This movie is so deliciously edited. I really admired the pacing of this because it’s really brisk and you’re handing a lot of information to the viewer right out of the gate, but at the same time it feels really laid-back and nice, like you’re hanging out with them in this location. So, when you were cutting it, did you have any guiding principles? What was your approach to the style and the tone of the edit?

Jeremy Workman: I think it came out of the fact that I was collaborating with another editor, Paul Murphy, who I’ve worked with before and who’s great. I would say to Paul, “You’re in charge of these crazy scenes where they’re sneaking in and they’re doing all the crazy heist stuff using the old footage.” Anything that feels kind of like heisty Ocean’s Eleven, Paul was doing. Then I would be siloed in New York cutting all these other scenes that were like, totally, totally different. Scenes in hospitals or scenes about 9/11 or scenes about art. We purposely didn’t look at each other’s stuff for a while, either. We stuck to our guns and said, we’re gonna make it work, we’re gonna balance these two styles, and we’re gonna bring them together so that the scenes can work in tandem.

Having edited other features and having edited a lot of movie trailers, I kind of knew that in principle this was going to work. We were basically each just editing the best scenes that we could one by one, and we were going to put them together into like a quote-unquote “supercut” and then figure out how to build the structure out of that supercut, and that’s what we did. In some ways it was a little unconventional, it was different from how I’ve done other longform. In a weird way, it was more like cutting a trailer than it was cutting a feature because it was also non-linear. 

Wow, that’s really impressive. It’s so seamless.

Jeremy Workman: It took a long time to make it work. I remember looking at the first cut and just being like,”Oh shit, this is weird,” how it went from this sad stuff about 9/11 and back into them, you know, building a wall, but we found ways to make it work. 

I wanted to circle back to what you were saying about all of these people in the community being really open to helping you with this project, giving you their footage. Watching the film, all of your subjects, not just the artists, but every talking head, give it the sense that there’s a whole community right outside of the frame. It feels very enmeshed that way. So I was curious about your relationship to Providence and New England in general. You’re not from Providence are you?

Jeremy Workman: No, I’m not from Providence. I’d been to Providence, I’d even filmed some of Lily Topple’s the World in Warwick––

 ––That’s another great mall town––

Jeremy Workman: –– so I had filmed a big scene in Warwick and I had been to Providence, but I’m not from Providence. I think it came out of this six month period where I was trying to convince everybody to let me make the movie. They were very divided. People would be like, “Jeremy seems pretty good,” but then others would be like, “Nope, I don’t want to do a documentary.” So over that period, I was like, “Well, I’m just going to keep trying to convince everybody that I’m the right person for this.” 

source: Wheelhouse Media

During that period, I spent an inordinate amount of time researching. More than I had in previous documentaries. It entailed coming up to Providence and meeting people that didn’t even make the movie. Learning about Water Fire and going to the Athenaeum, which is this Providence library, and going to the Historical center and meeting Jay Hogue, who has a website about the gentrification in Providence, and just learning a lot about the last thirty, forty years of Providence. I felt like, okay, well, maybe that’ll help me if I could ever get these guys to let me make this movie. Then they said yes, and I was already armed with all this knowledge and interest in that story. I decided that we’re going to get into all these things, these artists’ culture and counterculture in Providence and how a lot of artists had really stood up and made a stand for art and Providence against corporate maneuvers. It was just something that I was really interested in, and I continue to be. I think it really informed this story in a way that, maybe another filmmaker wouldn’t have had that approach.

That’s so interesting in terms of what we were talking about earlier, of art and life blending together for these subjects. It’s like, your process of not making the movie became making the movie even before you’d gotten the green light to start making anything at all.

Jeremy Workman: Yeah, exactly. Those interviews and that research informed the approach. I was really interested in the context, and I think that a lot of filmmakers that had approached them in the past, that had made overtures to do a documentary about the secret apartment, that maybe they were not equipped in that way with that kind of backstory.

Totally. Sounds like you have a whole other movie in there!

Jeremy Workman: [Laughing] Yeah, totally. Like I said, somebody should be making a Fort Thunder documentary. I don’t think it’s going to be me, but somebody should.

In terms of projects you might want to make, or kinds of stories you like to tell, are there stories of this nature that feel like movies you might want to make? Or do you feel like you’re shifting in another direction right now?

Jeremy Workman: I mean, I’m shifting in another direction, like, currently, this second, but I do think that I’m very interested in stories that are like Secret Mall Apartment. This one really spoke to me in terms of being mischievous, but also playful and kind of silly, but also meaning something deeper. And, yeah, I love urban myths. I love urban folklore. So I’m wondering if there’s another story like that that might be right for me.

source: Wheelhouse Media

Interestingly enough, though, I’m doing something so different right now. Last year I was in Korea, and I’m making a documentary in South Korea about a tiny school in Busan that has twenty students, and all twenty are North Korean defectors. I’ve been embedded at the school, and I’m making a documentary about these kids and about what it means to be a North Korean defector and trying to figure out life. It’s about community, it’s inspirational, it’s about being a teenager, and it’s very different from what most of the stories about North Korea defectors have been. It’s not a harrowing story. It’s a story about possibility. It’s called School for Defectors, and I should be done with it next year.

That sounds super interesting, I’ll look forward to it! Do you have time for one more question before we go?

Jeremy Workman: Yeah!

So on what you were saying about these stories interesting you for their combination of play and meaning. At the end of Secret Mall Apartment, you’re asking people whether this project counts as art, and they have a bunch of great lines about, like, play and snark or performance and installation or, you know, all of these things coming together. What’s your answer?

Jeremy Workman: I think for me, it kind of comes out in the film. I feel like it’s always shapeshifted on me. Every time I was like, “Oh, no, it’s this,” it would always kind of spin out of control and out of my hands. That’s why I thought it was so neat to represent it with all those different voices trying to figure out what it is, because it was very reflective of my experience. Sometimes I would look at the secret apartment and I’d be like, “Okay, I get it, it’s this weird, funny fuck you to corporate America.” Then I’d be like, “but wait a second–– they’re in there for four years, and they’re manicuring it, and they’re staging it in a certain way. It’s some weird form of art.” But then I’d be like, “But how is it art? It’s not for anybody. It’s just a big dada inside joke.” So I don’t really have a good answer, and that’s what I think is so cool about it. It leaves this feeling for audiences where you don’t know how to define it.

Secret Mall Apartment opens 3/21 in Providence, 3/26 in NYC and 4/4 in LA, San Francisco, Austin and more. Find screenings and tickets at secretmallapartment.com.