Secret Mall Apartment

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

[mr_rating_result]

I’ve always been fascinated by secret rooms. I loved those old movies like “The Old Dark House” or “The Black Cat” that featured spooky mansions with forbidden rooms or hidden passageways. Movies like “Panic Room” and “10 Cloverfield Lane” attract my interest. Bunkers and bomb shelters get my attention. I always envied Bruce Wayne’s Batcave.

Further, I’ve always enjoyed secret hideaways like the now-defunct Chelsea Place in New York, a nightclub you entered through a false armoire in a thrift shop, or Please Don’t Tell, the Manhattan bar you enter through a phone booth.

In one of my homes, I built a hidden room behind my bookcases. In another, I constructed a self-sufficient bomb shelter that you entered through a closet. Another had a secret space behind a wardrobe. And still another featured a photographic darkroom behind a false wall.

That’s why I wanted to see “Secret Mall Apartment,” a documentary about eight cohorts who back in 2003 secretly built a hidden apartment inside the vast Providence Place Shopping Mall in Providence, Rhode Island. They lived there undetected for four years – until security guards caught them and charged the intruders with trespassing.

For many years, this secret mall apartment was considered to be an urban legend.

But after 17 years of fending off Hollywood offers, the original group agreed to let filmmaker Jeremy Workman (“Deciding Vote,” “The World Before Your Feet”) tell their story.

“It’s sort of a roundabout way that I came upon this project,” says Workman. “I was filming for another film in Athens, Greece, inside a building located in a cultural center and it was covered in incredible tape art.”

This art was the result of a five-year project to memorialize the first responders – police and firefighters – who lost their lives to 9/11 by creating tape art of each person’s individual silhouette on the streets of New York City.

“I was blown away,” recalls Workman. “I just couldn’t believe it. I decided that I had to meet the artist who created it, and it turned out to be Michael Townsend.

“Me and Michael became very close very fast and saw eye to eye, like kindred spirits,” says Workman. “At one point, he told me about this crazy story, and I thought he was punking me. But as I dug deeper, I realized it was real. He pulled out his iPad and showed me shots of these people pushing their couches up the stairs, in this apartment they were building at the mall.”

The Mall Eight (as they came to be known) had “snuck in furniture, tapped into the mall’s electricity, and even constructed a wall, smuggling in over two tons of cinderblock.”

Why there? After Townsend and a community of several hundred artists were evicted from their homes at Fort Thunder – a complex of old mills being converted into upscale housing – he and seven fellow artists decided to take up residency in the Providence Place Shopping Mall.

Turns out, the illegal homesteaders recorded much of their stay using tiny $129 Pentax Optio cameras that they purchased at the mall’s Radio Shack and concealed in Altoid tins.

“The archival footage is just incredible,” says Workman. “On this crappy camera filming at 320 by 240, they filmed incredible footage of them bringing furniture in, building a wall, dodging security, conversations they were having about gentrification and around Michael’s marriage breaking up. I knew I wanted to balance these sugar rush scenes of them doing these crazy stunts with the deeper material the film is about.”

Workman calls it a Trojan Horse film – one with a hidden story inside the story. Some consider it a documentary about a documentary.

As Columbia University School of the Arts explains it, “Perhaps the most unique aspect of this documentary is its ability to shape shift. Just when you think you are watching a movie about a group of pranksters who pulled off this wild stunt to live at the mall, the narrative unravels and reveals something far more profound: a portrait of impassioned artists who have incredible ideals about art, and consider art a way of being, no different or separate from living life.

You can still catch “Secret Mall Apartment” at Tropic Cinema if you hurry.

Or else you can spend your time building your own secret hideaway. I won’t tell.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com