SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT ANNOUNCES THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN TO BE RELEASED AS TWO SEPARATE FILMS

New Moon News

Whoa! Check this out! A NEW Bella & Edward Promotional Image! Soo cantik!!

The picture was revealed in a 5 page TIME Magazine article by Lev Grossman titled, Its Twilight In America. This article pretty much chronicles Twilight’s history and how it became a phenomenon of modern pop culture of our time. MUST KEEP Magazine!

The woman who would publish meyer, Megan Tingley, was handed the manuscript in November 2003, right before she got on a cross-country flight to California. She wasn’t expecting great things. She’d never heard of Meyer. Nobody had. She wasn’t a vampire fan either.

But she spent the entire flight riveted by that 600-page bundle of paper. “I kept thinking, Well, she can’t possibly sustain this,” Tingley remembers. “The whole book is going to fall apart. She’s a first-time writer. I was with a colleague, and he was trying to sleep, and I kept pulling him awake and reading passages to him.”

Even though it was an early draft — back then Bella and her undead boyfriend Edward actually got married at the end — by the time she got off the plane, Tingley was desperate to buy it. But it was a Friday, and everyone was gone for the day. “So I just left a bunch of insane messages back at Little, Brown and with the agent and said, ‘Call me Monday. We have to talk!’” she says. “I pre-empted it on Monday from a street in San Francisco on my cell phone.”

… Little, Brown published Twilight on Oct. 5, 2005. It printed 75,000 copies, a generous but not stupendous number. “All the signs were there, but at the beginning they were modest,” Tingley says. “The sales kept getting a little higher each week. It wasn’t a gigantic phenomenon overnight — I think people think that now, but it wasn’t.” Lori Joffs, a stay-at-home mom in Nashville, read it three months later. Like Meyer, she’s a Mormon, but she’d put off starting the book because she didn’t think a Mormon writer could do vampires. “I read all night, closed the book, took a deep breath and opened it back up to reread several chapters,” she says. Joffs went looking online for other people who felt the same way, but she didn’t find many. So she put up her own website, the Twilight Lexicon, which now attracts more than 50,000 visitors a day.

New Moon was published on Sept. 6, 2006, less than a year after Twilight. Little, Brown printed 100,000 copies, a modest increase, but the company quickly realized something had changed. Advance copies were popping up on eBay for hundreds of dollars. Meyer’s readings were turning into mob scenes. “We were outside Philly at a suburban Barnes & Noble,” Tingley says. “The kids had been cutting school to get these tickets and waiting in line forever. When Stephenie came out, these girls next to me started trembling and crying and grabbing each other. It was crazy … it was like the newsreels of the Beatles or Elvis.” When Eclipse came out a year later, the publisher printed a million copies.

…But Hardwicke saw something there, and she wanted in. She read the Twilight books. Then she threw the Paramount script away and called Rosenberg, who worked with Summit before, and they started over. She also began the hunt for her leading couple.

Hardwicke spotted Kristen Stewart in Into the Wild, in which Stewart makes a brief but indelible appearance as a roller-skate-skinny underage seductress. Hardwicke flew to Pittsburgh, Pa., where Stewart was making Adventureland. “We spent four hours working on scenes and running after birds in the park and playing. The next day when I saw the film, I knew, yes, it has to be. She is Bella.” It was a good match for Stewart too. “It was like, wow!” the actress remembers. “I want to play like this all the time!”

… Selling Pattinson to Summit was tougher. He wasn’t a star — his biggest role was Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire — and he didn’t look like a star. “He was disheveled,” Hardwicke says. “He was a different weight. His hair was different and dyed black [he had just played Salvador Dalí in Little Ashes]. He was all sloppy. The studio head said, ‘You want to cast this guy as Edward Cullen?’ I said yeah. And he said, ‘Do you think you can make him look good?’ I said yes, I do.”

By all accounts, the chemistry between the two leads was intense, maybe too intense. “After I cast him, I told Rob, Don’t even think about having a romance with her,” Hardwicke says. “She’s under 18. You will be arrested.” It was the beginning of the real-life are-they-aren’t-they, did-they-didn’t-they speculation that is now an ongoing subplot of the Twilight story. “I didn’t have a camera in the hotel room. I cannot say,” Hardwicke says. “But in terms of what Kristen told me directly, it didn’t happen on the first movie. Nothing crossed the line while on the first film. I think it took a long time for Kristen to realize, O.K., I’ve got to give this a go and really try to be with this person.”

November 13, 2009 | Categories: Stephenie Meyer, Twilight Movie | Tags: Catherine Hardwicke, Time Magazine | 1 Comment »