Big Deal: Selling Park Avenue Condos at $250,000 a Minute

For years now, developers seeking to sell their condominiums have produced videos, typically featuring interviews with architects and designers, and rarely costing more than $100,000. But to make the movie for 432 Park Avenue — the luxury condominium that will reign as the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere when completed in 2015 — Mr. Macklowe spent more than $1 million. The price tag, which comes to $250,000 a minute, or more than $4,000 a second, raises eyebrows even in a city where the average condo costs $2 million.

“This film is a story, a trip, an experience — it isn’t about showing P. Diddy in a yacht,” said Danny Forster, one of the architects who wrote and directed the movie in partnership with DBOX, a marketing and branding agency that won an Emmy Award last year for its six-part miniseries “Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero.”

The movie consists of a series of dreamlike sequences, rife with images of wealth and privilege, and loosely plotted around a stunning brunette as she travels to her home at 432 Park Avenue from her country estate in England. She is shown leaving the manor in the backseat of a 1957 Rolls-Royce and then flying across the Atlantic in her Learjet.

Mr. Petit, who is famous for having walked a tightrope between the original towers of the World Trade Center, is then seen dancing gingerly down an unraveling tightrope as a helicopter (presumably carrying the same woman on her final leg of the journey home) flits like a tiny insect?across?the?New York skyline hundreds of feet?beneath him.

“It was Harry’s idea to have Philippe welcoming buyers to their homes in the sky,” said Matthew Bannister, the chief executive and founder of DBOX. “He is like a virtual doorman in a trippy way.” Mr. Bannister, Mr. Forster, who is the?host of ’Build It Bigger’ on the Discovery Channel, and Keith Bomely, a partner at DBOX and its chief creative officer, wrote and directed the movie. (They are all trained architects, although only Mr. Forster continues to practice.)

“We never wanted to look at real estate marketing in any way to describe this project,” Mr. Bannister said. “There is no butler making beds or doorman opening the doors for you; that wasn’t of interest to us.” There is not even dialog, just the throaty contralto of Mama Cass singing, “Stars shining bright above you/Night breezes seem to whisper ‘I love you,’?” as the images on-screen come and go.

Achievement is a recurring theme, with references to the Wright Brothers, silent movie stars and even Spiderman. A ballerina stretches and bends inside a window frame, in an allusion to the building’s 10-by-10-foot windows. “Ballet is a cultural nod to New York,” Mr. Forster said, “but we also put her in the window because what better way to see how truly large they are?”

There are also references to minimalist and grand architecture, as Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion morphs into a vision of the building’s lap pool, and the ceiling of the Pantheon evokes 432 Park Avenue’s geometric facade. And there is humor: King Kong makes two appearances, as a giant ape peering into the living room, and at a fantastical party, briefly removing his mask to reveal the face of Mr. Macklowe. It is the only sighting of the developer, who met weekly with DBOX and Mr. Forster while creating the movie, and is also credited as a writer.

Just as the movie takes pains to paint a picture of exclusivity, so too do its producers treat the film as a precious commodity. They bristle at any labeling of their effort with so pedestrian a term as “video” — “we prefer film,” Mr. Bannister said — and whereas most marketing videos are readily available online, this movie can be seen only at the building’s sales center. “This isn’t a film for everyone,” said Jarrett White, the vice president for marketing of Macklowe Properties. “It needs to be seen here.”

The process of making the movie took six months, with few expenses spared. There was the trip to Britain, for an on-screen snippet of at most two seconds. “It wasn’t hard to convince Harry that we needed to make the trip,” Mr. Bannister said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 21, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the building whose ceiling evokes 432 Park Avenue’s facade. It is the Pantheon, not the Parthenon.

View the original article here