Inside America's dead shopping malls | Dan Bell

In the last couple of years,

I have produced what I call "The Dead Mall Series,"

32 short films and counting about dead malls.

Now, for those of you who are not familiar with what a dead mall is,

it's basically a shopping mall

that has fallen into hard times.

So it either has few shops and fewer shoppers,

or it's abandoned and crumbling into ruin.

No sale at Penny's.

(Laughter)

I started producing this series

in early 2015

after going through kind of a dark period in my life

where I just didn't want to create films anymore.

I put my camera away

and I just stopped.

So in 2015, I decided to make a short film about the Owings Mills Mall.

Owings Mills Mall opened in 1986.

I should know because I was there on opening day.

I was there with my family,

along with every other family in Baltimore,

and you had to drive around

for 45 minutes

just to find a parking spot.

So if you can imagine,

that's not happening at the malls today.

My first mall job that I had as a teenager

was at a sporting goods store called Herman's World of Sports.

Maybe you remember.

(Singing) Herman's World of Sports.

You guys remember that?

(Laughter)

Yeah, so I worked in a lady's shoe store.

I worked in a leather goods store,

and I also worked in a video store,

and not being one who was very fond of the retail arts --

(Laughter)

I got fired from every single job.

(Laughter)

In between these low-paying retail jobs,

I did what any normal teenager did

in the 1990s.

I shoplifted.

I'm just kidding.

I hung out with my friends at the mall.

(Laughter)

Everyone's like, "Oh my God, what kind of talk is this?"

(Laughter)

Hanging out at the mall could be fun, but it could be really lame, too,

like sharing a cigarette with a 40-year-old unemployed mall rat

who has put on black lipstick for the night

while you're on your break from your crappy minimum wage job.

As I stand here today,

Owings Mills has been gutted

and it's ready for the wrecking ball.

The last time I was there, it was in the evening,

and it was about three days before they closed the mall for good.

And you kind of felt --

they never announced the mall was closing,

but you had this sort of feeling, this ominous feeling,

that something big was going to happen,

like it was the end of the road.

It was a very creepy walk through the mall.

Let me show you.

(Music)

So when I started producing "The Dead Mall Series,"

I put the videos up onto YouTube,

and while I thought they were interesting,

frankly I didn't think others would share the enthusiasm

for such a drab and depressing topic.

But apparently I was wrong,

because a lot of people started to comment.

And at first the comments were like --

basically like, "Oh my God, that's the mall from my childhood.

What happened?"

And then I would get comments from people who were like,

"There's a dead mall in my town. You should come and film it."

So I started to travel around the mid-Atlantic region

filming these dead malls.

Some were open.

Some were abandoned.

It was kind of always hard to get into the ones that were abandoned,

but I somehow always found a way in.

(Laughter)

The malls that are still open,

they always do this weird thing -- like the dead malls.

They'll have three stores left,

but they try to spruce it up

to make it appear like things are on the up-and-up.

For example,

you'll have an empty store

and they bring the gate down.

So at Owings Mills, for example, they put this tarp over the gate.

Right?

And it's got a stock photo

of a woman who is so happy

and she's holding a blouse,

and she's like --

(Laughter)

And then there's a guy standing next to her, with, like,

an espresso cup, and he's like --

(Laughter)

And it says, "What brings you today?"

(Laughter)

I wanted to be scared and depressed.

Thank you.

So the comments just kept pouring in

on the videos,

from all over the country, and then all over the world.

And I started to think, this could really be something,

but I had to get creative, because I'm like,

how long are people going to sit and watch me waddling through an empty mall?

(Laughter)

So the original episodes I filmed with an iPhone.

So I'd walk through the mall with an iPhone, and, you know.

Like that.

(Laughter)

And security -- because malls, they don't like photography --

so the security would come up and be like, "Put that away," and I'm like, "OK."

So I had to get creative and sneaky,

so I started using a hidden camera and different techniques

to get the footage that I needed,

and basically what I wanted to do

was make the video

like it was a first-person experience,

like you are sitting --

put your headphones on watching the screen --

it's like, you're there in the video,

like a video game, basically.

I also started to use music,

collaborating with artists who create music called vaporwave.

And vaporwave is a music genre

that emerged in the early 2010s among internet communities.

Here's an example.

(Music)

That's by an artist named Disconscious

from an album he did called "Hologram Plaza."

So if you look that up, you can hear more of those tunes.

Vaporwave is more than an art form. It's like a movement.

It's nihilistic, it's angsty,

but it's somehow comforting.

The whole aesthetic is a way of dealing with things you can't do anything about,

like no jobs, or sitting in your parents' basement eating ramen noodles.

Vaporwave came out of this generation's desire to express their hopelessness,

the same way that the pre-internet generation did

sitting around in the food court.

One of my favorite malls

I've been to

is in Corpus Christi, and it's called the Sunrise Mall.

When I was a kid,

my favorite thing to do was watch movies,

and I used to watch movies over and over and over again.

And one of my favorite films was "The Legend of Billie Jean."

Now, for those of you who have seen "The Legend of Billie Jean,"

you'll know that it's a great film.

I love it.

And Helen Slater and Christian Slater --

and if you didn't know, they are not related.

Many people thought that they were brother and sister. They're not.

But anyway, Sunrise Mall was used in the film as a filming location.

The mall is exactly the same as it was in 1984.

We're talking 32 years later. Let me show you.

(Video) Dan Bell: And here's Billie Jean running across the fountain,

being chased by Hubie Pyatt's friends.

And she jumps over here.

And you can see the shot right here is what it looks like today.

It's pretty incredible.

I mean, honestly, it's exactly the same.

And there they are falling in the fountain,

and she runs up the stairs.

This is a nice shot of the whole thing here.

Dan Bell: I love that so much.

(Laughter)

I always think in my head, if I owned a dead mall --

why don't they embrace their vintage look?

Put in a bar,

like, put vegan food in the food court

and invite millennials and hipsters

to come and drink and eat,

and I guarantee you within three weeks

H&M and Levi's will be banging on the door trying to get space.

I don't know why they don't do this,

but apparently,

it's only in my mind, it goes all day.

(Laughter)

Anyway, in closing --

(Laughter)

When they first asked me to do this talk,

I said,

"Do you have the right person?"

(Laughter)

These talks are supposed to be kind of inspiring and --

(Laughter)

I remembered something, though.

I put my camera down three or four years ago,

and it took going to these malls

for me to be inspired again.

And to see my audience

and people from all over the world writing me and saying,

"God, I love your videos,"

is incredible.

I don't know how to even explain it,

as an artist,

how fulfilling that is.

If you would have told me a year ago

that I would be standing on this stage

talking to all of you wonderful people,

I would have never believed it.

I am humbled

and so appreciative.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)