For over 40 years, Stephen King has had his “Dollar Baby” program in place, allowing filmmakers to acquire the rights to turn any of his short stories into a movie for the cost of just $1. Unfortunately, the Dollar Baby program has now been disbanded, with its end confirmed on King’s official website: “The Dollar Baby Program was disbanded in December 2023. Contracts issued before December 2023 will be honored and will remain approved for one year from their instantiation, as per the terms of their contract. There will be no Dollar Baby extensions after December 1st, 2023.“
On his X account, King explained that the Dollar Baby program is no more because “Margaret, the Mistress of Dollar Babies, is retiring.“
Here’s how King described the Dollar Baby program in the 1996 introduction he wrote for the published screenplay for Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption, which was based on his novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (via Wiki): “Around 1977 or so, when I started having some popular success, I saw a way to give back a little of the joy the movies had given me. ’77 was the year young film makers – college students, for the most part – started writing me about the stories I’d published (first in Night Shift, later in Skeleton Crew), wanting to make short films out of them. Over the objections of my accountant, who saw all sorts of possible legal problems, I established a policy which still holds today. 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. I ask them to sign a paper promising that no resulting film will be exhibited commercially without approval, and that they send me a videotape of the finished work. For this one-time right I ask a dollar. I have made the dollar-deal, as I call it, over my accountant’s moans and head-clutching protests sixteen or seventeen times as of this writing.“
The program was worth mentioning in that case because Darabont made one of the few Dollar Babies that actually got official distribution, The Woman in the Room. It was released alongside Dollar Baby adaptations of The Boogeyman and Children of the Corn on the Stephen King’s Night Shift Collection VHS.
It’s sad to see the Dollar Baby program go away, but of course this doesn’t mean filmmakers are going to stop making non-profit adaptations of King’s work. They just won’t be giving him a dollar to do it anymore.