“This Bandit Art Collective”: Jeremy Workman Strikes Gold With ‘Secret Mall Apartment’

In 2003, a group of eight artists covertly built a living space in an unused part of the parking structure for Providence, Rhode Island’s gargantuan Providence Place shopping mall. They transported cinder blocks to erect walls and smuggled a complete living furnishing set—a couch, bed, kitchen table and chairs, television, and more—into this secret apartment. For the next four years, it was a spot to hang out and crash for the group and their friends. Upon the apartment’s discovery in 2007, it became a brief local news sensation, before the story was largely forgotten. 

Jeremy Workman has brought the group back together to tell the tale in his documentary Secret Mall Apartment. The 2024 SXSW selection is being independently distributed and opened last weekend to an eye-popping US$40K+ box office haul at a single theater—in the very Providence mall where the film takes place. It will expand to NY and LA this week. We sat down with Workman for a call to discuss the unusual art project, the footage his subjects captured, and how he gained their trust to make the documentary after they’d denied other filmmakers for years. This interview has been edited and condensed for time and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: How did you meet Michael Townsend and learn about this story?

JEREMY WORKMAN: It was really random. I was in Athens filming Lily Topples the World (2021). Lily Hevesh, the world’s most acclaimed domino artist, was in Greece to collaborate with Ernő Rubik, the creator of the Rubik’s Cube. We were at this cultural center, and the building was covered in Michael’s masking tape art. I approached him because I was so amazed by it, and we quickly became friends. We were drinking and hanging out, and it wasn’t until maybe the fifth or sixth day that he told me this crazy story about the secret apartment. I was drunk and at first, I thought he was punking me, that he was totally full of shit. Then he showed me a video of his group pushing a couch up a ladder into the apartment.

I started thinking about how this could be a documentary. At the time, I didn’t know that filmmakers had been coming to Michael for nearly 20 years about this story. But over the next year, I convinced him and everybody involved that I was the right guy to do it.

D: What was different about your pitch that convinced him to participate after all those years?

JW: A lot of this I learned in retrospect, as Michael and I have been promoting the film. I think it comes down to the fact I wasn’t looking at the secret apartment as some kind of prank. So many people had pitched Michael over the years with this sensationalist New York Post lens on the story. But I had made a number of films about artists and people living in unconventional ways, following their passion. That was my interest in it. I knew Michael as an artist first and as the “secret mall apartment guy” second, which affected my approach.

Obviously, I love the prank stuff, but I was also intrigued by how their art practices informed this, and how they were doing all these other things at the same time—contributing to 9/11 memorials or decorating hospitals. 

D: What was the timeline of production and getting Townsend’s cohort to take part?

JW: We made it over the course of about two years. I wanted to get everybody involved to participate—and not just to appear in the film, but to actually contribute to it. For example, Colin [Bliss] made the model of the apartment we used. And the process wasn’t just bringing in all eight of these people, but also understanding the context of the story and what motivated them. It’s not just that they built an apartment in a mall. I was fascinated to learn about gentrification in Providence and the city’s art scene. We had this bandit art collective doing a weird project to stand up against gentrification.

D: What did this collaborative process look like? For instance, did you ask Colin to make that model, or was it his idea?

JW: When I pitched them, it was that they’d be involved in the making. Michael would be the main character, the throughline, since he was the ringleader, if you will. But I wanted all of them in on the process; they all saw early cuts. I went to Colin with the idea for the model. I had wanted to make a model for a documentary for so long. I’d see other documentaries use them and think, “Oh my god, I had that idea in 2000.” And that’s Colin’s sweet spot as an artist.

D: How much footage did you obtain from the group?

JW: When I started to make the movie, all of them went into their basements and found their old cameras. At least two of the cameras still had their cards, microSD or compact flash, whatever it was, still in them. It was all in storage and nobody was looking at it. They shot about 25 hours over the course of four years, a gold mine, and in some cases, I was the first person to see it since they filmed it 20 years ago. 

They captured so much—they were filming conversations, hangout sessions. Some of it was really boring; there’d be two hours of them playing Grand Theft Auto, or four hours of the camera sitting on a dresser as they were just hanging out. And they were running around with these tiny cameras they bought at Radio Shack for $100 that fit in Altoids tins—they’re very low-res, we’re talking 320x240 frame size and 10 frames per second. Sometimes they had it set at eight frames per second. When I first got it, I wondered if we could even release a movie with this kind of low-quality footage.

The coverage was incredible. Whether they were building the concrete wall or sneaking through the garage, they’d have it from multiple angles. With my home movies, sometimes I’ll shoot something that it’s only for me, but I’m still curating the shots. I think they were doing that. They also filmed all their other activities on the side. They weren’t thinking about turning it into a documentary. It was like their artist instinct led them to document things.

D: For moments for which they didn’t have coverage, like the discovery of the apartment, you employ techniques like recreation. What guided when you would use recreation versus having subjects recount what happened in interviews?

JW: I wanted the movie to have different textures, different styles. The secret apartment was this weird shape-shifting thing. On one hand, it represents this political protest, and on the other hand, it’s this private art space. They’re living here, but it’s also almost like a presentation. They talked a lot about how it was a stage for them. It’s a playhouse, it’s a headquarters, it’s a middle finger. Every time I thought I had a handle on what it meant, I found it meant something else. That dictated to me that the movie should embrace different looks and embody the way the apartment could change. 

There was a practical dimension as well, which is that they stopped filming about three and a half years in. Not only was there no footage of them getting caught; they didn’t get any footage of the final several months. So we needed a way to explore that and be playful about it. Let’s face it, they’re living in a mall, it’s ridiculous. As much as it has social issue textures, it’s not a social issue film. We could play with the form in a way that’s a little cheeky, the way the secret apartment is. One scene could be just interviews, another could be a multimedia montage, another could be about recreation, imagination. The story informed the style.

Dan Schindel is a freelance critic and full-time copy editor living in Brooklyn. He has previously worked as the associate editor for documentary at Hyperallergic.