A walk down Creative Street.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: Creative Street Inc.

When Steve Katzenberger and David Smith met Doc Hollywood, they never guessed how much it would boost their business.

The two are the principals of Creative Street, an Indianapolis corporate communications, video publishing and advertising company. Their relationship with Dr. Neil Shulman--a physician who wrote the book on which the hit Michael J. Fox movie "Doc Hollywood" was based--has helped Creative Street earn national acclaim in the field of video publishing, and may even lead Smith and Katzenberger to silver-screen work.

Shulman was one of the authors of the book "Three Medical Experts Tell You What You Want To Know About High Blood Pressure." Katzenberger and Smith met him in the late '80s, a few years after they left Kartes Video of Indianapolis and launched their own firm. "We said to him, 'Why don't we team up and make a video product?'" Smith recalls. Thus was born a video called "Living With High Blood Pressure"--and with it Creative Street's reputation for expertise in educational video publishing.

The video, which starred former tennis star Arthur Ashe, won rave reviews. "This is one program that everyone should see," Billboard magazine recommended. "May be the best health video on the market," the New York Daily News proclaimed.

Creative Street followed up that success with another health video, "Living With Arthritis," featuring then-Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Boomer Esiason. It met with equally favorable reviews. More acclaim came for a video called "How To Study," which Creative Street produced for World Book. Still more recognition resulted from the company's 12-part "Mother Nature" series of wildlife programs produced as Saturday-morning fare for The Discovery Channel. In addition to rave reviews--"We've never gotten a bad review," Katzenberger claims--the company's video-publishing works have earned a variety of national video awards.

It's more high-profile success than one might expect from a small, 10-employee company based in a couple of older homes on a mostly residential Indianapolis street. But Smith and Katzenberger say they don't always do business in the most conventional ways. "At Kartes, we found ourselves largely removed from hands-on dealing with production,"...