The real estate situation along Sunset Boulevard has been tight for years, but last month it took a turn toward the theatrical, when a house appeared 30 feet above the street — with a man apparently trapped inside.
The structure was not, strictly speaking, real estate; it was a billboard, erected to promote the Netflix film "The Last House." But the execution was elaborate enough to attract helicopter coverage from local television stations, which is a measure of success that media planners have not traditionally been able to purchase.
The installation was built by Extra Credit, a Los Angeles production company founded in 2022 by Jett Gelber and Dave Horowitz, who first met about 13 years ago at an agency then called Mistress — now renamed The Many, perhaps to avoid explaining the original name to clients. The pair has since completed roughly 100 projects, many of them involving the construction of objects that initially appear structurally inadvisable.
Mr. Gelber describes the company's approach as a corrective to the traditional agency habit of selling ideas that no one has yet determined how to build. "We genuinely can't put anything in front of our clients that we don't already know we can make," he said. (This may sound like common sense, but on Madison Avenue it qualifies as a methodology.)
The house itself presented certain challenges. Billboard regulations permit structures to extend only 36 inches from the frame, which is not, by most definitions, a house. To solve this, the team employed a forced-perspective technique, rendering a photorealistic interior designed to be viewed from the precise angle of a driver stopped at the red light at Sunset and Selma.
The site was chosen for its traffic patterns; cars back up at the intersection long enough to give occupants 20 to 30 seconds of uninterrupted viewing time. In media planning terms, that is an eternity.
Netflix, which operates an in-house marketing arm structured much like a traditional agency, brought in Extra Credit at the point where strategy must become something a person can actually look at. According to the producers, the brief was unusually simple: they watched the film, noted its premise of a family sealed inside their home, and arrived collectively at the obvious conclusion. "Let's put a house on a billboard with someone stuck in it," Mr. Gelber recalled.
That the idea was approved without apparent difficulty is a function of entertainment marketing, which permits creative latitudes that other industries cannot. "We could create a billboard with a stake through it for a vampire drama," said Rory Forrest, a producer on the project. "Try selling the same idea to a knife manufacturer and the conversation becomes rather different."
The billboard has since been removed, and Sunset Boulevard has returned to its customary housing stock.
Original story published in The Drum: "How Netflix put a man in a house 30 feet above Sunset Boulevard | The Drum"