TWILIGHT MAGAZINES GALORE!!
TA fan hugz sent in the links to numerous magazines that feature Twilight.
Cinemania November 2008 and Premiere November 2008. see the images HERE
Below is the transcription from the CSW Interview:
Twilight Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg CSW InterviewCan a pair of matched chromosomes make a difference in Hollywood? All we know is that at last, women are becoming more visible in the ranks of screen and television writers, and we aim to do our part.
BY AMY DAWESThe Vampire Slayer Melissa Rosenberg flexes her own powers to adapt cult favorite Twilight for the screen
EVERY SO OFTEN, in observing pop culture, the sense of something major coming down the pike stirs the breeze and raises the hairs on your arms. When a genuine pop culture phenomenon is in the wind, you might look around and see people everywhere reading the same book or come across odd stories in the news of hordes of people traveling to some out-of-the-way hamlet where a fictional story takes place, just to be closer to the world an author created. Such is the case with the upcoming movie Twilight, which by all indications could become the biggest young-female driven pop-cultural event since Leo and Kate broke box-office records with Titanic.
In suburban bedrooms everywhere, calendars are being crossed off to mark the days until the movie’s Nov. 21 unveiling. As most everyone knows by now, it’s based on author Stephenie Meyer’s series of bestselling books, two of which are currently occupying slots in the top 10 of the New York Times bestseller list.
Maybe it’s the imbalance of male teen fantasies at movie theaters that has stoked this level of anticipation; for Twilight is inarguably a female version. It’s about Bella, an ordinary, ungainly new girl in town who captures the attention of Edward Cullen, the most enigmatic, tormented and gorgeous guy at school, only to uncover his deep secret – that he just happens to be a vampire.
Add that Edward is immortal arid has enormous powers of strength and speed, and that he’s mad for Bella but terrified he’ll hurt her, and you set off a Romeo-and-Juliet-Ievel melodrama propelled by risky declarations, noble self-sacrifice and dangerous, heroically restrained lust.
This stuff is like crack to teenage girls: just go online and take a look at the level of anticipation the movie is generating.
With such a high degree of visibility at stake, you might assume that getting the screenplay assignment involved a Machiavellian struggle, but that wasn’t the case. Writer Melissa Rosenberg says she was going about her business as a writer-producer on the Showtime series Dexter when she got a call from Eric Feig, president of production at Summit Entertainment. “He asked me what I thought of teens and vampires, and I said, ‘I love teens and vampires.’ I really do,” Rosenberg says. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the best shows ever on television, in my opinion.”
Rosenberg had worked for Summit before – she co-wrote the 2006 teen dance movie Step Up. After she had to pass on a chance to write its sequel, she was concerned she might not hear from Summit again. She was wrong, but the new opportunity came with a hitch – the pending writers’ strike meant there was no time to lose.
She began work in August 2007 and delivered a detailed, singled-spaced 25-page outline in a couple of weeks. “For me, the real work is in the outline – that’s the true blank page,” says Rosenberg, whose talent for a quick turnaround comes from years as a writer and producer on shows like Dexter, The G.c. and Party of Five. “When you work collaboratively with people like you do in TV, you want to make sure that everybody knows what you’re going to do and signs off on it.”
They did – and told her she had five weeks to deliver a script.
“I said, ‘Five weeks? It can’t be done!’” Rosenberg recalls. But the looming labor action left no choice, so after enlisting an understanding colleague to take over on her Dexter episode, she plunged into the job. That meant full immersion in the world of the story – the rain-soaked Northwest town of Forks, Wash., where Bella has come to live with her divorced dad, and the enigma of her moody, pale-skinned classmate Edward, who seems to loathe her even as they’re magnetically drawn together.
It was a race to write the first draft. “I worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day,” she says. Meanwhile, director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown) was casting the movie and giving her immediate feedback on each act as she finished it. “She’d respond within an hour or so,” Rosenberg says. “We were running on adrenaline, and she wanted to get the movie made every bit as much as I did.” In the end, Rosenberg says, she turned in a first draft that was green-lit with time to spare and completed a rewrite two hours before the strike bell tolled.
No slender volume, the first book, called Twilight, is 498 pages. “It’s very internal, from Bella’s point of view, and detailed,” Rosenberg says. “The biggest challenge was externalizing it.”
She also added more doses of menace and action. In the book, there’s a scene where Bella plays a game of baseball with Edward’s vampire family, and a pack of unfriendly, human-hunting vampires shows up to threaten her. “They just pop up,” Rosenberg says. “In the movie, I wanted more suspense, more imminent doom. I decided to weave them all through it. What were they doing before they showed up on that baseball field? What were they up to?” She invented a series of mysteriOUS, grisly attacks and their discovery by local law enforcement. Together with Hardwicke, who creates a kind of rock ‘n’ roll outsider style for the evil vampires, she also amped up tpe action for high-flying scenes like the one where Edward races through the treetops with Bella clinging to him, or the climactic fight scene between the evil and good vampires after they chase Bella back to her Arizona hometown. “There aren’t a lot of women writing action films, not because we don’t want to, but because they don’t really let us in,” she says. “But I’ve written on a number of shows that are action-oriented and on dark shows like Dexter.”
Rosenberg’s favorite scripted scene is the one she set in a dramatic old-growth forest, where Bella first confronts Edward with her certainty that he must be a vampire. “That was my midpoint,” she says. “In the book, it happens when they’re driving in a car, but I really wanted it to be that she confronts him and drives the action as a strong protagonist. She has to say, ‘Here’s what I know.”’
Born and bred in liberal Marin County, Calif., the daughter of a psychologist father who co-wrote the 1973 book “The Total Orgasm,” Rosenberg acknowledges that her background probably couldn’t be more different than that of Meyer, a Mormon housewife and mother of three who lives in Arizona. “But I think we meet in the middle of storytelling,” she says. After Bennington College in Vermont, where she majored in dance, Rosenberg enrolled in the Peter Stark producing program in the film school at USc. “I was interested in theater, psychology and politics, and I realized dance was just never going to do it for me,” she says. “Writing, I thought, could marry all of my interests.” In the Stark program, she was the only writer in her graduating class, a distinction that proved fortuitous. “It was a fellow Starkie who hooked me up with my first agent, who then got me my first feature-writing gig at Paramount.” That film, also a dance movie, never got made, but the job earned her a WGA card and led to IS years of writing and producing episodic television.
Her background in dance sometimes surfaces when she talks about craft. “To allow for a scene to be about what’s not said, you have to craft it in a way that allows for those spaces,” she says. “People think screenwriting is dialogue, but there are scenes with no dialogue that have real power, and other scenes in which the dialogue is almost contrary to what’s actually happening. The way you choreograph it on the page has everything to do with the dialogue, or lack thereof. If you write a really blatant scene then there is nothing for the actors to play.”
As for the kind of notoriety that Twilight would take on, she says she wasn’t aware of it until word of her screenplay began to leak out to her friends who have children. “I didn’t have a clue,” she says laughing. “And now to anyone who has a daughter, I’m this goddess.”
The gig has already brought new opportunities, and she’s relishing the sixmonths-on, six-months-off schedule that a cable show like Dexter allows. “Just when I get tired of being around all those writers, I get to go and be alone in my feature world,” she says. “And just when it’s getting really lonely, I’m back in TV.”
Rosenberg says mentoring and encouraging newer women writers is important to her. “It’s still a man’s game, but I see the generation coming up behind me, and I think they have a shot,” she says. Her advice: “Be bold. And don’t count on good work to do it for you. In television, it’s all about who you know, who you trust to be loyal and who you want to be in a room with. So I’d say to young women, be that person.”
SOURCE
(thanks Just-Cullen.com and Lion Lamb live journal)
Cinemania November 2008 Source
I loved Party of Five and had no idea Melissa Rosenberg had anything to do with it. I also have a sick addiction to Dexter.
I hope Melissa is asked to write the script for New Moon. She is so talented and I like what she did with Twilight (so far).
What do you think? Should Summit ask someone new to write the script for New Moon or go with Melissa Roseberg? Why?
