Megamall: Directors To Screen Movie About Palisades Center

A documentary made about the Palisades Center mall in West Nyack by three local filmmakers is finally coming home.

"Megamall" was produced and directed by Nyack's Vera Aronow and Roger Grange and Suffern's Sarah Mondale about the controversy and public outcry over the development of the massive Palisades Center by Pyramid Companies in Rockland County.

While the film was shown at Riverspace in Nyack, more recently it has screened in areas like California and Washington, DC. The film will screen on Thursday night at 7:30 p.m. at the Jacob Burns Film Center at 364 Manville Road in Pleasantville. After the showing, there will be a question-and-answer session with the three directors. Tickets are $6 for members and $11 for non-members.

Aronow said the film has been positively received in other parts of the country, and even made the 2009 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

"They understood it very very well even though they don't know Nyack or the individuals in this story," Aronow said about the California screening. "They made connections to their own community. They've had some issues with bad forest fires in recent years, so they have many decisions to make about how to rebuild. They want to preserve the character of their community. A lot of the same issues have come up, and they were interested to see all the twists and turns that happened when building the mall."

The three filmmakers started the project back in 1996 while the development was still going on.

"We did see this as a really interesting story," Aronow said. "We saw it as a case study for similar disputes that were happening around the country."

Aronow said the three first thought there was potential for a feature-length film after watching the "emotionally charged" meetings where residents were arguing for and against the mall. Mondale was following the story and said she knew she had to go check out one the meetings, so she went to one at Clarkstown High School South.

"After that, I told Roger about them and he came with me because he's a cameraman," Mondale said. "So Roger and I started going out to meetings and taping them. All three of us were hooked. It went on and the story got more and more interesting."

Aronow said two of the major lines of thought on opposite sides were that the mall was going to make taxes go down and be a luxury mall, while those against it thought it was going to ruin life in Rockland.

One such person is now-Councilwoman Shirley Lasker, who is one of many people interviewed in the film from both sides of the issue. Lasker was living in West Nyack in 1995 when she first started paying attention to the proposed mall, and then teamed up with groups already opposed to it. One thing Lasker told the groups, though, was that they should create a new organization specifically to oppose the mall so no other agendas interfere with that goal. Their organization was the Rockland Civic Association, and Lasker was elected president.

"We had demonstrations and events where we'd get thousands of people," she said. "We thought it was going to affect the county negatively, and it was going to hurt stores in all of the towns."

Lasker said some of their fears of the mall have come true, citing many movie theaters have gone out of business since the mall opened up and the Nanuet Mall has been hurt quite a bit by the Palisades as well.

While she also said her opinion on the mall hasn't changed since its opening, some good has come from it, mainly the residents' reaction. Lasker said that because of the mall, residents of many towns have demanded their downtowns be revitalized and improved, which is something Mondale agreed was a direct reaction to the mall.

How so many like Lasker voiced their opinion became a theme for the film, Mondale said.

"Citizens became involved," she said. "They showed people that if you have a problem with something, you go the meetings, speak your mind and get involved."

Mondale also said the three filmmakers originally didn't want the movie to have an opinion of its own about the controversy, but over time they noticed a shift in how they were shaping the material.

"We started out wanting to make an impartial, objective film. We wanted the audience to make up their minds about which side they thought was right," she said. "Little by little we started forming our opinions about it. We decided to get a little point of view. Roger narrates it, and he is supposed to sound like Joe Q. Citizen. The film kind of took on a point of view for the everyday person."

Another thing happened over time that helped out the filmmakers, according to Aronow.

"We were following the story. We didn't know how it was going to turn out," she said. "One of the most surprising things to happen gave us an ending."

Because of the controversy and the mall was granted three local streets it needed to take over to build, a stipulation was agreed to in development that said the mall couldn't lease out the space in a section of the mall that was referred to as the "empty attic," Aronow said. That section of the mall is the ghost town-like area between Dave & Busters and the ice skating rink on the fourth floor. If the owners of the mall wanted to lease out that section, it would have to be agreed to by the residents in a vote.

The expansion was shot down in the vote.

"We won overwhelmingly," Lasker said, although she didn't remember the exact count of the vote.

Mondale said the filmmakers are working out some potential future screenings for the film in the area, including one at the Suffern Free Library Nov. 4 at 7 p.m. She said they are trying to work out screenings at other libraries, as well as getting the film shown on public TV.

The mall includes Macy's, Lord and Taylor's, Best Buy, Target, JC Penny, as 21-theater movie complex, an IMAX theater, a BJ's Wharehouse Club store, Home Depot, Cheesecake Factory as well as an assortment of other restaurants, and a food court with a carousel and a full-size ferris wheel. The mall is located at the Exit 12 interchange of the New York State Thruway in West Nyack and sits at the crossroads of two major local state highways, Route 303 and Route 59.