17 Blocks

Rothbart at the Mike & Mary Wallace House near campus. A Knight-Wallace
Fellowship brought the writer and filmmaker back to his hometown, and is cosponsoring the Ann Arbor premiere of his latest film on March 18. | Photo by Mark Bialek

A Community High and U-M grad, Rothbart has worked as a ticket scalper and pizza delivery driver, created a magazine, and won an Emmy. This year, a Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship brought his family—wife Margaret Box and their kids, Desi, six, and Birdie, three—to a rented house on the Old West Side. And this month, he’s reuniting with his second family—the one featured in his documentary 17 Blocks—in an event at the Michigan Theater.

It’s a film twenty years in the making. When he graduated from the U-M in 1996, Rothbart says, he didn’t know what he wanted to be or do. He told the Ann Arbor News in 2012 that he just knew he liked writing, was interested in filmmaking, and liked being “let into other people’s lives and hearing about what’s happening to them.”

He moved to Chicago and then to Washington, D.C. He was “basically living on a friend’s couch, doing some writing and stuff,” when he met half-brothers Emmanuel Durant Jr. and Akil “Smurf” Sanford playing basketball at a nearby elementary school. Then nine and fifteen years old, they lived in a poor, predominantly Black neighborhood in southeast D.C., just seventeen blocks from “where the limos are pulling up to the Capitol Building dropping off the congressmen and senators,” Rothbart says. “It’s a pretty stark juxtaposition.”

The boys “invited me over for dinner. I met their mom, Cheryl, and their sister, Denice,” he says. “We just had a really fun time. The way Cheryl likes to put it is the family adopted me.”

Rothbart had a small video camera and started filming the family, thinking he might write a fictional film featuring Emmanuel. He quickly realized that wasn’t going to work, but kept filming, and when he moved away, left the camera there for the kids to use. On visits, he’d film some more.

Ten years went by. Rothbart created Found Magazine to share fragments of text and images he picked up in his travels, published essays, and began contributing to the public radio program This American Life. But every New Year’s Eve, he’d come back to Bell’s Pizza in Ann Arbor—one of his favorite jobs through high school and college—to help deliver pizzas on their busiest night of the year.

Related: Found’s Lone Surfer Tour

That’s where he was in 2009 when he got the call telling him that Emmanuel had been shot and killed while trying to break up a neighborhood robbery. Rothbart was in D.C. early the next day. He says that Cheryl only had one question. “Where’s your camera?”

“I was taken aback. She said, ‘This happens to so many people in this neighborhood.’… She immediately recognized the value of all the footage we had and said, ‘This could really impact people because it’s not just a name, just another kid shot and killed in D.C. This is somebody whose whole life we have on camera. We need to keep filming.’”

So they did. “We ended up filming another ten years,” he says, creating the footage that would become 17 Blocks. IMDB calls it “the story of the Sanford family, whose struggles with addiction and gun violence eventually lead to a journey of love, loss, and acceptance.”

The family, Rothbart, and friends also put together a summer camping trip that took about thirty kids from Washington, D.C. to hike and camp on New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington. They called it Washington to Washington, and it’s become an annual tradition, taking kids from D.C., New Orleans, and Detroit to national parks each summer. Rothbart recruits the volunteer staff and raises money through appeals to his more than 4,000 Facebook friends and by selling copies of his books and of his documentary Medora, about a high school basketball team in small-town Indiana.

Related: The New Hoosiers

Medora follows a similar template to 17 Blocks, but it’s set in a White community. Rothbart says he and his friend Andrew Cohn made it for “pennies,” but it won an Emmy in 2015. That night, the company that funded Medora agreed to fund 17 Blocks.

“One thing the Sanfords said to me often—Cheryl in particular—[was] ‘I would love for people to get a sense of what it’s like to be me, to live in this neighborhood, and deal with the things we deal with on a daily basis,’” Rothbart says. “That’s what does come across. I think the film succeeds in transporting you to a place where many people might not otherwise spend much time.”

Knight-Wallace director Lynette Clemetson will host the March 18 premiere, and Sanford family members, including Cheryl and Smurf, will be there to discuss the film. Why “Smurf?” “I guess when he was a baby he had a bluish tint … and the name just stuck,” says Rothbart. “His real name is Akil. When he was fifteen and I met him, he introduced himself that way. Now he’s close to forty, and he still introduces himself as Smurf.

“A lot of the film is about parenthood. How to be a good mom. How to be a good dad. Because Smurf—you’ll see his trajectory. [As a young man] he really is not a great dad. He’s selling drugs and getting locked up while he’s in his early twenties. But the transformation he goes through is really profound. Now he’s an amazing dad, which he’s been for ten years or more.”

Rothbart appreciates that. “I have two little kids now and their health and safety is everything to me. Now when I watch the film I respond to it in new ways. I think I understand both the joys and the sorrows of parenthood in deeper ways.”

Smurf and Denice help run Washington to Washington. “My son, Desi, he’s come on the last three trips,” Rothbart says. “You have to picture this—Smurf and Denice’s kids—they were like family to me. I remember changing their diapers. Those were the first diapers I changed! Those kids are now fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. And they have special friendships with my kids.” He’s looking forward to bringing everyone together again in Ann Arbor.

“This is a place I love and that made me who I am. So for me to have the chance to introduce my other family, the Sanfords, to my family here—my parents, my friends, all the good people of Ann Arbor—that’s really an amazing opportunity, and I’m really looking forward to that.”