It’s Twilight in America

The story begins with a dream. It wasn’t the Great American Dream — Stephenie Meyer, then a 29-year-old Mormon housewife living in Arizona, wasn’t sitting at home trying to figure out how to be the next mega-best-selling author. It was a different kind of dream.

On the morning of June 2, 2003, Meyer woke up with the fading afterimage of a vision in her head, of a young woman and a vampire, talking, in a meadow. She didn’t want to forget it, so she wrote it down. Then she kept on writing. Sometimes you have the dream, and sometimes the dream has you. Everybody knows where the story ends up. Meyer has sold 45 million books in the U.S. and 40 million more worldwide. Altogether her books have spent 235 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, 136 of them at No. 1. The movie version of Twilight, which came out a year ago, made $350 million. New Moon opens on Nov. 20; the third installment, Eclipse, arrives in theaters next June.

But what happened between the beginning and the end? How did the dream become the Global Franchise Megabrand? That’s the part that not everybody knows.

Twilight Falls
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.”

Once Tingley bought the book, she had to figure out what to do with it. For example, she had to give it a cover. “Should it be horror?” she asked herself. “Or should we play up the romance? But if we play up the romance, we lose the boys. A lot of the female readers found it very erotic, but it’s a YA book, and it’s very chaste. It’s about yearning. How do you capture that?” One day the art director suggested hands. Just hands — you could show the veins, which would be nice and vampy — and they could be holding something. Something that would suggest yearning. Temptation. An apple. Bingo.

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.

Beatlemania is the comparison that everybody makes, but Twilight is more like the Beatles in reverse. Beatlemania was a reaction to the buttoned-down, sexually repressed pop culture of the 1950s. Twilight is a reaction to the reaction — it’s a retreat from the hedonistic hookup culture that the sexual revolution begot. Nobody hooks up in Twilight.

Meyer put sex back underground, transmuted it back into yearning, where it became, paradoxically, exponentially more powerful. “For me, the appeal of the vampire is safe sexuality,” says Melissa Rosenberg, who has written the screenplays for all the Twilight movies. “It’s the ultimate romantic ideal. You have the allure of the danger. And yet there’s only so far you can go.”

Idols of the Twilight
In retrospect, it’s surprising how long it took the sound of hundreds of thousands of teenage girls hysterically keening to reach Hollywood. The first glimpse that director Catherine Hardwicke had of Twilight came at Sundance in 2007, where the founders of the newly independent Summit Entertainment showed her a script. It had been worked over so thoroughly at Paramount that it was practically unrecognizable. “It had Bella as a track star,” Hardwicke remembers. “Then there were FBI agents — the vampires would migrate south into Mexico every year, and FBI agents in Utah were tracking them. They ended up on an island chasing everyone around in jet skis.”
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!”

Edward wasn’t that easy. “The bar is so high,” Hardwicke says. “Every two pages there’s a comment about how gorgeous he is … I met all of these guys I felt were quite good, but they didn’t have that special other quality that they were alive for 105 years.” She took Robert Pattinson and three other actors to her house in Venice, Calif., to run lines with Kristen.

They played the biology-class scene in the dining room. They moved the cars out of the garage and did the “How long have you been 17?” scene there. Then they did the kissing scene on Hardwicke’s bed. “I played it like a guy who is beating himself up a lot about everything,” Pattinson says. “I don’t think anyone else did it like that. I guess I tried to ignore every aspect of the confident hero of the story.” It worked. Stewart and Hardwicke were sold.

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.”

Summit gave Hardwicke 48 days and $37 million to make Twilight. That’s not a lot, especially in retrospect, but nobody knew whether the book’s popularity would translate into box-office success. “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, that was successful,” Hardwicke says, “but it made $30 million with this kind of fan base.” That led to some improvising. In the book, the crucial scene between Bella and Edward in the school parking lot happens on a snow day, but snow is expensive. “So the snow became the rain. And then I had to cut the rain out and show that it had rained with some fake patches of plastic ice.”

As it turned out, she could have sprung for the snow. Twilight opened at $69 million — the biggest opening ever for a movie directed by a woman.

New Moon Rising

But when it came time to film the sequel, Hardwicke balked. Summit was pushing hard to get the new movie done fast, to keep up the momentum, and she was burned out. Enter Chris Weitz, who was not, by his own admission, the obvious choice. “There was a reasonable amount of skepticism when I took over the second movie,” he says. “I understand that. I directed American Pie. I would be worried too.” But after a 2½-hour phone conversation with Meyer — a fan of Weitz’s About a Boy — she gave him her blessing.

For New Moon Weitz had more money to play with, about $50 million, but in some ways he had a more difficult assignment. Not only did he have to stay true to Meyer’s books, but he also had to follow the tone of Hardwicke’s Twilight. Up to a point. “I wanted it to look more old-fashioned than the first movie,” he says. “Hardwicke’s film was very contemporary, very stylish. Very immediate. That was great. But not me. I’m a bit of an old fogy. What I wanted was wide-screen epic.”

Another challenge: Edward is AWOL for most of New Moon. Instead the movie focuses on Bella’s relationship with Jacob, the Quileute Indian werewolf played by Taylor Lautner. It helps that Lautner has transformed his abdominal muscles into something resembling armor plate for the role. “I wonder if I might have gone one shirtless scene too many,” Weitz says. “Of course, once they turn to wolves, any clothes they’re wearing split apart. It’s an economic incentive for the disadvantaged Quileutes that they not have to keep going to Target to buy new T-shirts.”
While shooting New Moon, the cast and crew began to realize that like Jacob, Twilight had transformed. It’s a different beast now: not a fast, maneuverable indie franchise but a global juggernaut. The books have hit No. 1 in 15 countries. Pattinson just got back from Japan, where for the first time he heard the same shrieking that he gets in the U.S. “No one could really speak English, but they reacted in the same way as they have around the world,” he says. “Even the distributor was saying, Japanese audiences don’t react like this.”

It’s Twilight not just in America. The shadow has fallen over the entire globe. “It didn’t really get out of hand until Italy,” Weitz says — he filmed scenes in the Tuscan hill town of Montepulciano. “The streets were filled with fans. The nice thing was that they weren’t interested in hampering the filming at all. When you asked the crowd of 1,000 people to be quiet, they were absolutely silent. But then when you finished a take, there would be a round of applause, which doesn’t happen on a film set.”

At the heart of all this are Stewart and Pattinson, who have gone from obscurity straight to superstardom. People wait for them outside buildings. People try to follow them home. “In Vancouver shooting New Moon, I tried something,” Pattinson says. “It’s the only city in the world where hoods are not fashionable. If you’re wearing a hood, you’re going to mug people. So I wore a hood, and then I’d sort of spit on the ground a little bit and do a little bit of shaking around as you’re walking. Everyone moved to the other side of the street.”

If there’s an irony to the success of Twilight, it’s this: life as the idol at the white-hot center of the hottest entertainment franchise in the world isn’t that much different from being a vampire. Pattinson has become the immortal object of global fandom’s hopeless yearnings. What began deep in Meyer’s unconscious mind has become Pattinson and Stewart’s reality. They’re living the dream.

Source: Time