Documentary “Secret Mall Apartment” Has a Secret Portland Connection

In 2003, eight young Rhode Island artists created a secret apartment in a hidden space inside the Providence Place Mall. They snuck furniture and building materials into their 750-square-foot hidey-hole above the retail stores, accessed via a steep ladder from the megamall’s back corridors. They tapped into the mall’s electricity, ate a lot of food court meals and, fortunately for documentarian Jeremy Workman, filmed the whole thing.

The group lived in their secret mall apartment for four years. The ordeal is now the documentary Secret Mall Apartment, which opens at Cinema 21 on Friday, May 9, followed by a May 23 screening at PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater. Secret Mall Apartment is like a souped-up, real-life version of the best of our culture’s overnight mall fantasy stories, an oeuvre that includes the children’s book Corduroy by Don Freeman and the 1991 Jennifer Connelly film Career Opportunities.

Secret Mall Apartment also happens to have a secret Portland connection. While actor Jesse Eisenberg is given top billing as the film’s executive producer in promotional materials, Portland Community College math teacher Pete Haberman also executive produced the film.

Haberman is a longtime friend of director Jeremy Workman, whom he met in high school in Los Angeles. During the production of Workman’s previous film Lily Topples the World, a documentary about acclaimed domino artist Lily Hevesh, Haberman weighed in on drafts and got a “special thanks” credit. When Workman started on Secret Mall Apartment, Haberman helped fund the project. After the film didn’t sell after premiering at South by Southwest in March, the filmmakers went ahead and self-released the doc. Since it’s been all hands on deck for the theatrical release, Haberman has been helping out with graphic design and promotions.

“I’m so green to this stuff,” he says, but he likes showbiz enough to be involved already in Workman’s next film.

Secret Mall Apartment follows the group of renegade mall squatters as they make their nonhouse a home, putting their exploits into the political and economic context of late ’90s–early ’00s Providence, R.I. Artist Michael Townsend is captivating as the ringleader of sorts, treating the apartment as a living art project and a fuck-you to the corporate forces that led to the construction of Providence Place Mall in the first place. (Townsend and others lost their homes to condemnation as a result of the development.) Without his innovation of tucking a tiny video camera into an Altoids tin to secretly film their adventure, this film would not exist.

Living in the mall “seemed like a very absurd fantasy and perhaps a great challenge,” Townsend says in the film.

WW: What’s the sneakiest thing you’ve ever done?

Pete Haberman: Snuck through a gate and climbed the cables to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge with Secret Mall Apartment director Jeremy Workman during college, circa 1992.

SEE IT: Secret Mall Apartment at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave. 503-223-4515, cinema21.com/movie/secret-mall-apartment. Opens Friday, May 9. $8–$11.