A Twilight Saga Fansite
No, we don’t mean the very popular Twilight site, even though they are really great people (*waves hi to Kimmy and crew*). We are talking about the UK marketing campaign to get people to buy the Twilight DVD…as if they needed encouragement!
I think we can safely say that the “real Cullen” version doesn’t come with the not so subtle hint at what to buy.
Catherine Hardwicke talked to ABC affiliate KTKA in Texas about her Twilight experience and upcoming projects. Catherine reiterates what has been said before, that she was offered New Moon but turned it down due to time frame.
What’s also clear again, is that fans owe Catherine a huge debt for insisting that the script was rewritten to be closer to the actual novel than the barely recognizable version that she was originally presented with. In our opinion, Catherine’s insistence on going back to the book is what is set this up as a viable mega-franchise and not just another teen flick flop.
According to the interview: “Since I loved the books in a way it made it easier because I knew what made me love it and got swept away by the cool romance,” explained Hardwicke. “I thought how we can put that to screen, because you just can’t do books on tape, because we already have that. We had to make it visual and bring it to life and that’s what I had to dream about everyday on how can I make this scene cool and capture the feeling of the book.”
Peter Facinelli is apparently interested in playing more than one doctor. Aside from Carlisle Cullen he has an upcoming show on Showtime called Nurse Jackie where he plays a doctor. Now it seems that at a recent convention that the UK fans told him about how popular the newest version of Dr. Who. According to The Sun, Peter said, ” I wish we had Doctor Who in America. Everyone in UK was raving about it when I came over for the conference. I’d love to watch it. Or even star as the Doctor in a film. I could even get a long stripy scarf!(a reference to Doctor Who from about 30 years ago)”. Next time someone sees Peter, let him know you can catch Dr. Who in America on the Sci-Fi Channel or BBC America.
Media Blvd has a picture of Taylor up from the Kids Choice Awards.
Kellan Lutz is going snowboarding, but doesn’t want people to know. Kellan, we recommend not telling that to the LA Times next time. Kellan also mentioned to the LA Times that, “This one is not about the vampires at all. It’s more about the werewolves. Taylor’s going to be great. He’s really stepped up to the role and he deserves it…Its(sic) kind of like a dream – to work on a movie like this that has been so well-received – it’s just awesome. It’s so great to have so many fans that love it.”
I know the title of this entry might seem awfully silly and obvious, but the characters in the Twilight Saga belong to Stephenie Meyer and to some extent, in regards to the movies, to Summit Entertainment.
So why are we bringing this up? Every now and then we get a teenager emails us wanting to know if we’d feature their Stephenie Meyer product that they are producing and they want to be paid for. They figure if Hot Topic has stuff why can’t they sell theirs. Once in a blue moon we get a teen who wants to publish their Twilight story. The short answer here is that you can’t do those things for profit because the characters belong to Stephenie Meyer and unless you have some type of specific licensing agreement or contract with her and Little Brown ( like Hot Topic, Summit, Borders, NCEA, Cafepress, etc. ) you can’t do this. She holds the intellectual property rights over her characters (copyright, trademark depending on what we are talking about) until such time as they go into the public domain. We then let the teen in a nice way know that despite their gusto, what they want to do is illegal.
So when do things hit public domain? According to US law (and other nations have highly similar laws) works created after January 1, 1978, are automatically protected from the moment of their creation and are given a term lasting for the author’s life, plus an additional 70 years after the author’s death. So folks, the earliest that anyone can profit from Stephenie Meyer’s work without her say so (assuming she met a sudden untimely end today) would be 2079. Suffice it to say, many of us will be long dead.
Let’s put this into simple terms: The loose ideas of vampires feasting on animal blood instead of human, vampires needing to stay out of the sun, the Quileute Tribe in La Push, shape shifting werewolves, etc. are not copyrightable until you lump enough together and make them uniquely yours. In other words a werewolf of the Quileute tribe whose name is Jacob Black and whose mortal enemy is a vampire named Edward Cullen who drinks animal blood, sparkles in the sun, and resides in Forks…(deep breath)…IS COPYRIGHT STEPHENIE MEYER. Think of it like TV series that try to imitate each other where they have similar types, but in the end, each series’ characters uniquely belong to that series and their creators.
The only thing you can legally do with these characters is something highly transformational like parody, such as what Saturday Night Live does in its spoofs, or a critique piece, and even then, you have to be careful on how much source material you quote. Writing a summary of facts (see the story of the Harry Potter Lexicon debacle) or writing a continuation is derivative and therefore illegal without permission.
As far as fanfiction goes. It absolutely infringes on copyright, but most authors are willing to look the other way on it as long as you are not trying to directly profit from it yourself. In other words you can’t self-publish your fanfic and sell it on Amazon or Ebay, at least not legally. Other authors, do not just look the other way, two such examples of vampire writers are Anne Rice and J.R. Ward.
Is fanfic helpful? Maybe, there are current authors who used to write fanfic, Meg Cabot and Cassandra Clare are two examples. However, merits of their work aside, these authors never tried to publish things that weren’t theirs for profit. They knew better. If publishing fanfic were legal you can bet that Cassandra Clare would have published both her Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fanfiction for huge profit, given the number of her followers, years ago.
Why are we bringing all this up now? Well this past month a 36-year-old fan fic writer who has her own publishing company (AV Paranormal) and given that fact, should know better, tried to publish her post-Breaking Dawn fanfic entitled “Russet Noon” on Ebay. She sent multiple press releases out on the matter; each one was more delusional than the next all containing gross misrepresentations of copyright law. Frankly we keep baffling at these conservations that she supposedly had with her publisher that she keeps mentioning in her press releases since she is her publisher. Does she do it via an out of body experience?
At one point she linked her site to the Lexicon as if to suggest that we approved of this fiasco. (You can see how we dealt with her in the comments section here.). You can see how other industry professionals categorized her folly:
Lee Goldberg, Hollywood screen writer and blogger
How Publishing Really Works, industry blog and resource site
Well, we thought, that the author of this had finally seen the light when she self-deleted her website, and removed her novel from Ebay. Honestly we weren’t going to give her any press other than to point out her lunacy to Jaden for his commentary until today when she issued yet another press release.
It seems that she still hasn’t figured out what she did was illegal and has a great woe is me interview going on over here. Before someone else gets suckered by this adult, college-educated woman’s, “The big bad powers that be are ganging up on poor little me” and “now I’ll just have to publish it online for free” routine (AKA: what every other fanfic writer gets to do minus the whine and delusion), we decided to speak up.
So, in the interest of having the other fanfic writers out there (currently 74,107 on fanfiction.net alone), if you have a recommendation for a fanfic that isn’t bombarding the Twilight sites with press releases, put it in the comments.
Twi-Crack has a collection of candid photos that she took yesterday on the set of Forks High School.
She managed to capture all of the humans and Stephenie Meyer. Ashley Greene was also spotted, but no sign of Rob or Kristen.
According to the Examiner, Peter Facinelli is about to become an Italian citizen. He is actually going to have dual citizenship. According to the Examiner:
“While Facinelli’s decision to become a dual citizen of the United States and Italy may not have been entirely based on his role as Lucciola in The Absinthe Drinkers, it most likely did play a part in motivating the timeliness of that decision. Financing for The Absinthe Drinkers requires adherence to a European Union Convention which requires that all principal cast members, such as Peter Facinelli, be European Union nationals.”
So, Peter may not get to go to sunny Italy as part of New Moon, but he will as part of The Absinthe Drinkers.
Two authentic and extremely rare Stephenie Meyer items are up for auction. It’s all part of project Book Babe.
The first is a Twilight Saga boxset with every book and the box signed. The box set didn’t come out until almost Christmas, and there are very, very few authentic autographed versions of this. So if you want a genuine autograph on all books plus the case, this is the way to go.
The next is a signed Japanese set of Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse. In Japan the novels are broken into three parts and have artwork. In other words Stephenie signed all nine books. Honestly we don’t thing this exists anywhere else in the world. To the best of our knowledge absolutely no one owns a legitimate Stephenie Meyer signed complete Japanese series.
According to the New York Times part to of why the Twilight Saga is such a success has to do with the economic climate. And here we thought the last three years were all about a dead sexy vampire vs. werewolf and imagining yourself….(maybe somethings are better left unsaid). According to the Times:
“In a recession, what people want is a happy ending. At a time when booksellers are struggling to lure readers, sales of romance novels are outstripping most other categories of books and giving some buoyancy to an otherwise sluggish market.”
The Times goes on to state that fantasy romance is particularly hot:
“Such escapist urges are also fueling sales of science fiction and fantasy, said Bob Wietrak, a vice president for merchandising at Barnes & Noble. Mr. Wietrak said sales of novels with vampires, shape shifters, werewolves and other paranormal creatures were “exploding,” whether they were found in the romance, fantasy or young-adult aisles, where Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series continues to dominate…”
They also mention fellow vampire authors PC and Kristen Cast and J. R. Ward as further examples of the genre. If you are into the YA genre check out the Casts, and if you are an adult who likes racy check out J.R. Ward (not that the entire admin team is plotting to attend a J.R. Ward signing or anything like that.)
When last I left all of you, I was in a deep funk over having lost Stephenie’s dress and had a bruised rear end from my cell phone. 🙂 Seriously though, it was a great time, and the best came next.
Be My Escape, Dano, Nena and I were in the platinum seating ( I was not flying to Phoenix for 24 hours and not having platinum seating plus Faith is way worth it.) so we got to attend a reception afterwords with the authors. We got this huge bag of books that the authors’ publishing companies had donated in a Twilight Saga messenger bag. (thank you Little Brown!) We also got a fabulous poster signed by the authors there.
Now next to Stephenie the person I most wanted to meet was Shannon Hale. One word: Austenland. Yes, folks, blame it on Alphie again. She’s the one who got me hooked on Shannon, and she’s probably a bigger fan than me, and she wasn’t there. So I waited to talk with Shannon and when I got up to the front of the line I said, “Hi, I’m one of the people who runs the Twilight Lexicon and my friend Lori who runs it with me got me hooked on your books. Could you sign this for her?” I then handed her a copy of Book of a Thousand Days. The next thing I know Shannon Hale gets out of her chair reaches over the table and says, “You run the Twilight Lexicon, can I have a hug?” I said sure, mumbled something really inarticulate from shock at being hugged by Shannon Hale, and smiled a lot.
Next I went over to J. S. Lewis’ table and asked him to sign a copy of his book. Seriously, this man is the nicest person in the world and has a great sense of humor. He totally rocked keeping the flow of the day going and was a genius during the auction. He also didn’t tease me too badly when he realized I was from New Jersey.
Last but not least we went over to Stephenie’s table where she personalized a copy of Breaking Dawn for me for a friend that lives in the UK. In our group people were asking about the filming. Stephenie couldn’t say too much, but she assured us that the wolf pack was very hot, and very up to the task. So no worries on the wolf pack, guys!
So finally the event was over and our very jet lagged and in my case stun gunned (AKA my phone) group headed out to the parking lot when what did we stumble on but a Twilight car.
It was totally decked out and even had purple under lights. The DVD player in it was of course loaded with Twilight and Paramore was playing on the radio.
For other excellent coverage please see Shannon’s blog! All the pictures but the car were from her site. Also see the Phoenix New Times.
Also check out the online auction.
According to the Vancouver Sun,
“Several dozen students and fans gathered at David Thompson secondary in Vancouver Tuesday hoping a for a glimpse of the stars on the set of Twilight: New Moon. They were not disappointed. A few lucky Twilighters saw series author Stephenie Meyer beyond the barricades set up outside the school cafeteria where filming is taking place.”
The filming at seemed to go off without a hitch. The crowd outside was orderly and didn’t cause any serious problem for the Vancouver police officer who was onsite. Unsurprisingly, given the plot, Robert Pattinson wasn’t on set.
Follow Us!