21 Balloons Productions

I GOT THE IDEA to start a production company from a student of mine at Cotton Correctional Facility in Jackson, Michigan named Shorty Smooth Dawson. One day Shorty Smooth showed me a huge chart he’d been working on, laid out over four pieces of notebook paper taped together. “This is Shorty Smooth Productions,” he explained to me, and he led me through the diagram. His company was broken up into several divisions–music, literature, event entertainment, auto detailing. He’d appointed friends from Cotton to head each department; for example, another student of mine, Omar Leavells-Els, was included on the chart as Director of Casino Operations. As he showed off his handiwork, Shorty Smooth kept bursting with new ideas and scribbling notes down. “Baked goods!” he said, “That’s gonna be one of our primary sources of lucrative revenues. I need just the right man to oversee things.” He fixed me with a look. I though he was about to offer me the Director of Baked Goods post, but he went another direction. “Davy, you know what,” he said, “you should start your own production company. Get you a piece of paper and a pen.”Over the next hour, 21 Balloons Productions was born. I took the name from my favorite book in the world, The 21 Balloons, by William Pène du Bois. The 21 Balloons, published in 1947, tells the story of Professor William Waterman Sherman, a retired schoolteacher in San Francisco who sets out for a full year’s journey in a hot-air balloon. On his second day of flight, though, he crash-lands on a remote volcanic island; the book follows his adventures, ending with the noisiest day in the life of any man in history.Here’s how the book begins: “There are two kinds of travel. The usual way is to take the fastest imaginable conveyance along the shortest road. The other way is not to care particularly where you are going or how long it will take you, or whether you will get there or not.” Du Bois compares the second way of travel to going up in a hot-air balloon–you don’t really know where you’re headed, but the voyage is bound to be beautiful and amazing. A pretty good way to live, as far as I’m concerned.One afternoon a few years ago, my own travels took me to a city in Colombia called Cali, and in that way that being far from home and smoking weed makes you start reflecting on shit, I started to, well, reflect on shit. And I decided that in my life I want to build twenty-one balloons–one might be a novel, another might be a film, FOUND Magazine, that could be another. All right, say I’ve got, like, two or three little kids running around someday, well that’d be two or three more balloons right there. I don’t know what all of these balloons will be exactly, but I’m excited to find out. And I am so thrilled that you are taking interest and riding along with me–we’ll see where the winds carry us. Thank you, thank you, thank you for joining me on the voyage.Oh yeah, so when Shorty Smooth was first telling me about his production company, he stressed how important it was to have more than one office, more than one base of operations. Successful production companies, he said, always had headquarters in both, you know, New York and L.A. Shorty Smooth Productions, he told me, was based in Detroit, Memphis, and Istanbul. Well, for the record, 21 Balloons Productions is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but we’ve got satellite offices in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, D.C., Chicago, Oakland, San Diego, and Valdez, New Mexico. Yup, big-time, baby!Our products include: FOUND Magazine, the "How We Survive" documentary (Geffen/Sony), "The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas" stories by Davy Rothbart (Simon & Schuster), "My Heart is an Idiot" a film by David Meikeljon, The Poem Adept's album "Songs for the Long Lonely Drive" and his new album "The Sight Of Any Bird," Davy Rothbart's "This American Life" double disc CD w/ Ire Glass, "The Booty Don't Stop" mixtape by The Ypsilanti All-Stars, Anvil's "New Music for Virtuosos," and much more. Checkout www.21balloons.com for more info OR email: [email protected].