Quick shout out to the filmmakers in the crowd. Are you a student or indie filmmaker? Looking for something to shoot? Look no further: let’s talk about the Sci-Fi Dollar Baby Program.
What’s a Dollar Baby? Stephen King came up with the idea back in 1977:
- “’77 was the year young film makers – college students, for the most part – started writing me about the stories I’d published, 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 [1996].”
I’m nowhere near Stephen King’s level of success but no one else is doing the Dollar Baby thing as a scifi author so I wanted to do my part. If you’re a scifi film maker and you want a story to shoot (I’ve got some cool low-fi scifi stories you can shoot for almost nothing in budget) then check out the Scifi Dollar Baby Program.
Also: Check out the Interactive Top Ten this week … you folks came up with some funny stuff!
