After more than 40 years and more than 300 known short films, Stephen King’s Dollar Baby program officially shut down this month.
The reason, King said, is that the manager of the program, Margaret Morehouse, is retiring. King confirmed that on Twitter last week. Current Dollar Baby projects may continue work on filming and editing, per the terms of their contracts, but no more contracts are being granted.
Dollar Babies, a longstanding project in which King licensed the rights to one of a selection of his short stories to an amateur filmmaker in order to make a short film of it, came out of letters King received early in his career from aspiring directors.
“Over the objections of my accountant, who saw all sorts of possible legal problems, I established a policy which still holds today,” King told director Frank Darabont in 1996. “I will grant any student filmmaker the right to make a movie out of any short story I have written (not the novels, that would be ridiculous), so long as the film rights are still mine to assign.”
The resulting films cannot be released commercially, cannot be more than 45 minutes long, and can only be shown at film festivals and at schools and private presentations. The cost for the rights? One dollar.
The first-ever Dollar Baby was directed by Bangor native Jeff Schiro, who filmed a version of “The Boogeyman” in 1982. That short story has since been adapted into a feature film, released this year in theaters and on streaming.
The most famous Dollar Baby director, however, is Darabont, who in 1983 directed a short film adapted from King’s story “The Woman in the Room.” Darabont would later go on to direct “The Shawshank Redemption,” among the most beloved adaptations of a King work, as well as “The Green Mile” and “The Mist.”
Students at the New England School of Communications at Husson University have made a number of Dollar Baby films as part of their film classes, including in 2021, when students filmed a version of “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French.” More recently, a Dollar Baby film of the story “One for the Road” was shot in Ellsworth, at Finn’s Irish Pub.
Most Dollar Baby films are not allowed to be put on platforms like YouTube, but King has made exceptions.
