Special Report: Secret Mall Apartment (2024)

The Projection Booth Podcast

The Projection Booth

Film Reviews, Film Interviews, Film History, Tv & Film

4.8 • 686 Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2025

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mike White engages in a captivating conversation with director Jeremy Workman and artist Michael Townsend about the 2024 documentary Secret Mall Apartment. The film chronicles the audacious endeavor of eight Rhode Island artists who, from 2003 to 2007, covertly built and inhabited a 750-square-foot apartment within the Providence Place Mall. This hidden residence, complete with furnishings and utilities, served as both a living space and a commentary on urban development and gentrification.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hold your ears, folks.
0:06.8	It's showtime.
0:08.6	People pay good money to see this movie.
0:10.9	When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth.
0:17.3	Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
0:20.2	Shut it off.
0:25.4	Turn it off.
0:26.6	This is an incredible tale.
0:41.7	Artists set up an apartment inside Providence Place Mall going undetected for years.
0:47.0	We all hated the mall when it went up, right?
0:49.9	Nobody wanted that to happen.
0:51.7	Shortly after, a developer comes in and says,
0:54.1	I'm going to knock down your home.
0:56.0	I just had this idea,
0:58.0	oh, we should live in the mall.
1:01.0	It seemed like a very absurd fantasy
1:05.0	and perhaps a great challenge.
1:10.0	When the mall was being built, I saw a space that I could not figure out what it would be used for.
1:16.6	We went looking for that anomaly in the architecture, and we snuck ourselves in there, and we took out our flashlight.
1:23.6	There it was. It started the conversation immediately.
1:30.3	We need to develop this underutilized space.
1:32.3	There was a real necessity to build a wall there.
	...

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