What Twilight Could Have Been

One of the producers of Twilight, Mark Morgan, (seen left at the New Moon premiere. Photo credit: Sue Schneider_MGp Agency) spoke to Hollywood Life about what the original draft of Twilight was like back when MTV/Parmount had it and Stephenie Meyer was a relatively unknown author. Twilight was purchased before it was even published as is fairly common in Hollywood. Many scripts are optioned, but something like only 20% ever get made. Despite flaws, I think we can all agree that the Melissa Rosenberg version is way better. The MTV/Paramount version represents typical big studio think where they repackage everything rather than taking the best from the original.

At the Eclipse Prom in 2008, Laura talked with Stephenie a bit about the project where Stephenie mentioned some details like Bella and Edward being pursued by the FBI/CIA, bullets harming vampires, and Bella being a track star at BYU. The conversation was relatively late at night and Laura actually thought she imagined most of it the next day. At the end of the discussion, Stephenie mentioned that the rights to the movie were now going to an independent studio and she’d have more control over the script, and she was hopeful for it looking like something the fans would like.

Here’s what producer Mark Morgan told Hollywood Life:

“I actually found the material originally and then [sold it to MTV] and then sold it to Paramount,” he confided. “Lo and behold, six months later, after we chose a writer [Melissa Rosenberg], we did a draft and [Paramount] put the project in turnaround.”

Mark noted that it was hard finding a buyer for the script — believe it or not, nobody wanted it! “We went shopping to every studio around, but everyone passed,” he told us. “Every studio passed! Finally [Summit] said ‘let’s do it.’ It was a total blessing that Summit [chose to do the movie], because frankly, Paramount would have chosen a different director [over Catherine Hardwicke]. Their rewrite wasn’t exactly like the book.”

So what WOULD you have seen in this parallel Twilight universe? “They wanted to go more with an action movie,” Mark explained. “They had Bella [Kristen Stewart] fighting back. They had her father dying in one of the scripts, actually, and her becoming a vampire in the first movie. There were a lot of weird things that I don’t think they understood at the time, because the books were just becoming popular. By the time [the script] got to Summit, they were smart enough to say ‘You know what? Let’s throw out all the old scripts and let’s start from scratch.”

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