The Dollar Baby: Reviews & Interviews (2020)

By Steve Hutchison

Discover Stephen King stories adapted by students and aspiring filmmakers you've never even heard of. I review over 70, in this book, and interview some of their creators. Dollar Baby refers to a society of creators and their films. It can also refer to an arrangement between King and them. For a dollar, they were granted permission to adapt one of his short stories, novellas, and poems.

These cannot be shown publicly outside of festivals. They're secret films. In this book, I describe my experience in screening them, how I felt, what I saw, and the differences between each version of a given adaptation. I got to know several screenwriters, directors, and producers. I heard their stories, their opinion of the Dollar Deal, and I documented it all in here.

Long days and pleasant nights!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Hutchison
• Release date: Feb 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781998881925

Steve Hutchison

Artist, developer and entrepreneur in film, video games and communications Steve Hutchison co-founded Shade.ca Art and Code in 1999, then Terror.ca and its French equivalent Terreur.ca in 2000. With his background as an artist and integrator, Steve worked on such games as Capcom's Street Fighter, PopCap's Bejeweled, Tetris, Bandai/Namco's Pac-Man and Mattel's Skip-Bo & Phase 10 as a localization manager, 2-D artist and usability expert. Having acquired skills in gamification, he invented a unique horror movie review system that is filterable, searchable and sortable by moods, genres, subgenres and antagonists. Horror movie fans love it, and so do horror authors and filmmakers, as it is a great source of inspiration. In March 2013, Steve launched Tales of Terror, with the same goals in mind but with a much finer technology and a complex engine, something that wasn’t possible initially. He has since published countless horror-themed books.

Book preview

DollarBaby2020_Cover.jpg

Tales of Terror’s

The Dollar Baby

Reviews & Interviews

2020

PREFACE

I had heard of Stephen King’s Dollar Deal years ago and imagined there were ten of them at most. As a critic, I had never reviewed a short film. But then, one day, from one thing to another, I ended up covering Edgar Allan Poe shorts, hoping to write his filmography. I’m still working on it. There’s more than a few.

Sometime in August 2020, I received a screener for Corey Mayne and Barbara Szeman’s WILLA, which I reviewed right away. I thought I’d seen every Stephen King movie in existence. I was dead wrong. I jumped into the Dollar Baby rabbit hole on that day, and here I am.

So, what is a Dollar Baby? Dollar Babies are usually short films and usually based on short stories by Stephen King. The first ones were 1982’s The BOOGEYMAN, by Jeffrey C. Shiro, 1983’s DISCIPLES OF THE CROW by John Woodward, and 1983’s THE WOMAN IN THE ROOM by Frank Darabont. Dollar Babies are

arrangements where Mr. King grants permission to students and aspiring filmmakers to adapt one of his stories for $1. The filmmakers themselves are also called Dollar Babies. By their nature, those are low-budget films, but there are exceptions. Also, a few of those are feature films.

The deeper I ventured into these, the more I realized very few people had gone through this journey, and that I was one of the few privileged being able to watch all these. But this also meant that I’d be reviewing hundreds of movies no one can watch, seeing that one of Stephen King’s contract terms prohibits public screenings outside festivals.

I chose not to spoil the movies in the reviews, even considering that most of these films would probably never be publicly shown, in hopes that they one day would.

Some of my favorite stories include A VERY TIGHT PLACE, SURVIVOR TYPE, GRAY MATTER, and THE ROAD VIRUS HEADS

NORTH. One of the best things about bingeing Dollar Babies is witnessing what was added or taken away from the original material, and how the creators made them their own.

Some are great portfolio pieces, some masterpieces, and most are good enough to be seen by as many people as possible. Most would be excellent candidates for anthology films. And some, well, are considered lost films. They were either canceled, unfinished, or some hard drive crashed.

Included in this book are over 70 reviews of Dollar Babies, each rated on five factors, with a synopsis, a release year, and my analysis. You’ll also find over 20 interviews of screenwriters, directors, and producers.

Long days and pleasant nights.

A Very Tight Place

A Very Tight Place

2019

A woman locks her neighbor in a mobile toilet and tips it over.

5/8

This rendition of Stephen King’s A Very Tight Place is extremely vulgar and tongue-in-cheek. How fitting! There’s coarse language every two sentences during the exposition phase, until Curtis, played by the rollicking and swaggering Danny Houk, ends up covered in crap and locked in a portable shitter under the summer sun. This is all kinds of nasty!

Like its protagonist, this film has attitude. It looks modern. It’s arrogant. The photography is neat, and, first and foremost, half of the running time is spent in a plastic toilet with shit and piss everywhere. We tend to forget a camera operator has to fit in there, and so does a part of the crew. Stephen Tramontana, writer and director, makes us forget all about that.

Good lighting and framing are crucial. Several elements must come together to make this look as authentic as it does. This is one of my favorite Dollar Deal King stories. It’s revolting and gross, rather than scary and gory, yet it makes a great horror film. It’s the perfect candidate for a 21-minute claustrocore short, and it was shot in a desolated neighborhood that makes everything shittier.

Stephen Tramontana, Director & Screenwriter

A Very Tight Place

2019

Why did you choose this story, or how did it choose you?

I remember reading this when it came out and it just instantly struck me as the perfect short film, or something to option if I was invited to make something for an anthology project, etc. It’s a crude story, to be certain, but it also has this Hitchcock vibe going on that makes it very appealing.

I knew from the beginning that I was going to change Vinton to Vinton’s widow, and I was also looking for something to do with Joette Waters, who I worked with on Killer Piñata, so this worked for a lot of reasons.

How did you learn about Stephen King’s Dollar Baby?

I first heard about it in film school. This was kind of at the height of the Stephen King/Frank Darabont adaptions. Shawshank had come out a few years before and now they were making The Green Mile, and almost every interview mentioned that Darabont had written to King as a film student to get permission to adapt his short story into a short film, essentially creating what would become the Dollar Baby program.

It wasn’t something I had ever really considered doing myself. Then, one day, I was talking to an actor I really wanted to work with about King, and thinking of my next project after Eyelash and this came up. I looked into it and was stunned to discover A Very Tight Place was an option. It just seemed like such a big project, relatively speaking.

What was the budget and how did you finance the film?

That’s tough to say. I think it was in the neighborhood of $1,500-$2,000. We bought a brand new porto potty off the rack, because we knew that we were going to cut it up to allow for lighting and cameras, etc. So that was $600 right out of the gate.

In terms of funding, we self-funded it. We’re lucky in that we own our equipment, so it makes everything a little easier and allows us to shoot for a longer period of time.

Did you run into obstacles while working on the film? What was the most difficult part of the project?

Plenty, haha. The biggest headache - by far - was finding the location for Durkin Village. For some reason, we could just not get anyone to give us permission to film. And we’re a professional group, we have production insurance, we’ve made movies, but for some reason, people were just very skittish.

It was really getting down to the wire, and I was getting nervous, because it was eating into my prep time to sort out the location, how we would film it, etc. Finally, we went to the city of Chicago to see if we could film at the Lathrop Housing project, the oldest housing project in Chicago. At the time, they were rehabbing the entire property to make it mixed-use housing, so it was completely abandoned and looked like a construction site. Lucky for us, they agreed and we secured the location about two weeks before filming.

If you could adapt any Stephen King story, which one would it be and why?

I think, for me, it would be Blaze. I really love that story of this dumb, insane guy who somehow managed to kidnap a baby. I love that time period - it speaks to my instincts as a storyteller in a very specific way.

What are you working on these days?

We’re about to release our next short - Grief Counseling. I think that should be out next month, we have a Killer Piñata short film coming soon. We just completed a remastered edit of Killer Piñata for a new 5th Anniversary DVD from Darkside releasing that I’m very excited about. That should be out at the end of October.

We’re currently prepping Bride of the Killer Piñata to shoot next year, as well as a couple of new non-piñata shorts that we think people will like. Additionally, I have a new all-ages comic book, GR-8 that went live over the summer. People can find that on Comixology. So, a lot of fun stuff coming together.

Do you have any advice for aspiring and student filmmakers?

Make your movie. It’s literally never been cheaper or easier to make a short (or even a feature). I would caution, though, with that, be hard on yourself. Make sure that script absolutely rips. Beat it up a million times before you start your prep.

Also, make sure what you’re making leans into your strengths. You can’t flaunt what you don’t have. If you want to make a werewolf movie, but don’t have an awesome werewolf or don’t have the money to pay someone to make one, then your movie is going to be terrible. Look around you and make the most of what you do have.

Don’t get discouraged. I know that seems trite, but I see it all the time. Something doesn’t hit like we hoped, and we get all fed up and want to quit. I started writing screenplays in high school. I didn’t get my manager until I was 29, I didn’t get my agent until I was 34, and I didn’t really get my first paying writing work until I was almost 40. Because I put up with a lot of rejection, a lot of projects falling apart, budgets collapsing, and I just kept soldiering on and they should, too.

Finally, figure out a way to gauge your talent. By that I mean, if you’re an aspiring screenwriter, you should be submitting to the major screenwriting competitions on the regular. I’m talking Austin Film Festival, BlueCat, Nicholls, those big 10 competitions. If you’re quarter-finaling, semi-finaling, or finaling in any of those, you now know you have the talent because you went up against 8,000-15,000 other writers and your material stood out.

Thank you for your time. Anything you’d like to add?

I just want to say thank you to all the King fans who showed love for A Very Tight Place. In means a lot to us that it’s had such a terrific reception, even with the changes we made for the adaptation. It was a lot of work, but all worth it when you hear from fans of the story that we did it right. It’s very humbling. So, I appreciate them and sites like Terror.ca that take the time to review it and get the word out.

Vinton’s Lot

2019

A woman’s neighbor locks her into a portable toilet and tips it over.

4/8

This adaptation of a Stephen King novella called A Very Tight Place is directed by Alison Cocks and Jamie Matthew Dearden, and written by Dearden. Cocks plays Caitlin, a