Krakov Corporate Concepts was located two blocks south of Colfax Avenue in a sad little brick building that came complete with a half-destroyed dumpster in the back parking lot. The location was advantageous, according to Krakov, because it kept his employees in touch with reality. This ugly stretch of pavement was our poor American version of a dacha, he liked to say - our second home. It was bombed-out and played-out. The bums scavenged in the alleys and the more enterprising vagrants caught the RTD out to the Mission for a real meal once a day. And when Krakov spoke the word dacha across his Russian tongue, he laid a unique emphasis on it. He seemed to say to all of us: if we failed in our jobs, the gutter was just a few steps away.
Corporate Concepts was one of many lookalike companies that Krakov owned. Our humble office produced corporate training films on bland topics, such as workplace safety, product training, and sexual harassment. It was just a job, as people say. Yet after three years of checking in at 8:30 and slinking home at 5:00, I was astonished at how my grand plans to become a film editor at some Hollywood production company had slipped away.
The open secret among the employees was that our boss, Krakov, ran a barely legal business. "Anything for a buck," summed up his ethic, and his secret to success was diversion and confusion. All of Krakov's companies had names that sounded like bigger, better known companies and his guiding strategy was to mislead executives into buying his services by mistake.
The reason I stayed, I told myself, was that underneath it all Corporate Concepts was still a good company with a lot of heart. That was only partly true – mostly it was the lovely girls, or rather one particular lovely girl - that kept me plugging along. Her desk was in the front of the office, near the creaky elevator that somehow smelled exactly like I imagined it did when it was installed in 1955. She was a ridiculously busty and pleasantly plump red head that spelled disaster every time I walked by. A work romance was a bridge too far, and yet I couldn't help daydream over the possibility. Or more accurately, I wallowed in the idea of nothing more than spending hours with my mouth latched onto her breasts. I had tits on my mind, and hers drove me crazy.
Krakov himself had boundless energy, but a misdirected sense of artistic mission that filtered through everything we did. Simply put, we produced films that ranked near amateur grade - I often imagined that our training films were viewed once by managers and then locked away in a vault, never to be mentioned again. I did console myself with the idea that we also produce passionate films. He wanted it all to "seem real" as he would always intone, and with our cheap production values and so-so lighting, we did capture a documentary style that was sometimes unnervingly up close and personal.
Another of Krakov's businesses was a call center that worked in the top floor of our brick building. And then there was a collection agency on the second floor, which harassed people to make payments on their wide screen TV's, and which employed a half-dozen Spanish speakers, none who seemed to know a word of English.
And finally there was an adult film company, by the name of Stella by Starlight, which appropriately enough occupied the entire basement, just like the unruly stepchild it was. It surprised new employees to learn that in the dusty rooms downstairs were offices for an X-rated film company, but after meeting Krakov and sensing his sketchy background, the astonishment faded. What else would someone expect? Following this somewhat shocking revelation, there followed shrugged shoulders from myself and other long-time employees of the Krakov 'family' and the topic was suddenly blasé.
When business was slow at Corporate Concepts, I took the stairs down to the basement and planted myself behind a desk and wrote adult scripts for Stella. It was a nice change from my usual corporate script work, which usually included product safety instructions and other material that was simply as boring as watching the RTD busses creep up and down the street.
Krakov was a nutcase for a good porn script. His dream in life was to emulate the success of Deep Throat, which earned the producers an enormous amount of money with little effort. In his mind, this was the ultimate get rich quick scam. He was convinced the movie did killer business because of three factors: a great title, a good script, and a believable cast. All of this fit his flawed-yet-passionate character. Every week or two I'd drop him off a copy of one of my new porn scripts, which he variably compared –poorly - to Deep Throat, the gold standard by his estimation. He urged me further along when my efforts showed promise, always repeating his mantra about what made for a great porn film.
It's got to be real, he told me. Well - he then always corrected himself – not real, but believable. And then he surmised in a gruff manner: If it's good, it'll make millions, no matter... He would then appear to be lost in deep thought over Deep Throat, and wander away, the carpet emitting static electricity jolts from his scuffing shoes.
But most of my time was spent scripting bland corporate material. The one saving grace of our training films was their strict adherence to 'reality', which in Krakov's view dictated a large amount of surly behavior from the characters on screen. Our films always suggested that polite society was nothing more than a fraud. This meant that when we filmed a sexual harassment scene, it seemed disturbingly real. The guys were lecherous and loathsome. They were always deserving of that lawsuit - or at least a stinging memo from HR – and it seemed like Cro-Magnon man was not in the museum downtown, but just around the corner making photocopies and leering at customer service girls.
The women were enticing, believable, and overtly sexual. Krakov was a casting genius. The girls were tempting in a way that suggested the entire 1970's porn-world had somehow been transferred into a modern business of cubicles and email. A man watching the film and ogling the women on screen might be tempted to think: I want to work at that office! And then later, after our cautionary story unfolded and the men got sent away in handcuffs, he might think: maybe it's better if I just stay away from women altogether.
Krakov liked my scripts because he thought I wrote good dialogue. His favorite line was spoken by a gorgeous woman – who in a reversal – was harassing a male associate. In the scene, she was accidentally rubbing against a reluctant man in the coffee break room while reaching for a container of non dairy creamer. With no provocation she simply says, "Baby, do I make it bigger than ever?"
This had nothing to do with the on-screen action at that point and was a complete goof, but Krakov loved it because it was just the right amount of awkwardness and libidinal aggressiveness. For weeks afterward, whenever there was a lull in the conversation he simply smiled and apropos of nothing said, "make it bigger than ever," and then laughed to himself.
It took eight full-time employees to produce our usual run of both corporate communiqués and porn, which was one film a week. Most of us were liberal arts majors who once dreamed of exotic jobs like running art galleries, building wineries in France, or in one case - publishing our own communist inspired newspaper. Reality turned out to be somewhat different, but we still managed to inhabit our old beliefs by inserting them into our work in the present day. I edited the finished movies to a fine point, and edited and rewrote scripts to avoid miniscule continuity errors. It was a small compensation, but many days I just felt happy to have a job in the industry when I thought about my friends and their unhappy compromises. Sometimes, too, I looked out the window at the dumpster in our parking lot and wondered just how many unlucky turns of fate I was away from such an end.
Krakov saved money by getting his employees to play parts occasionally, and he did not shy away from the obvious limits of his expertise or budget. This made my job much easier. The blonde sitting across from me made extra money for car payments and remolding her condo by donning a wig and becoming Casey Adams, which meant if I had to write a scene in which she seduced a tow truck driver, or perhaps in another film, discussed the benefits of the corporate dental care plan, all I had to do was look ten feet to my left and imagine her in such a situation. Chances were we wouldn't even rent a tow truck for filming; we'd just grab Steve's pickup and have the camera guy attempt to overcome the obvious holes in the production.
