Entertainment Weekly Heads would have exploded. That’s the only reaction you can have after hearing Twilight producer Mark Morgan describe what almost became of Stephenie Meyer’s books. Morgan recalled the struggle to get the first film made. When the project was set up at Paramount — back before the books became a phenomenon and the fans were as vocal, in the studio’s defense — it was going to be an action movie. “I mean, one of their drafts literally had a Korean FBI agent who was hunting and tracking vampires across the coast. There was SWAT in the trees and literally it was like, ‘Red leader, red leader 1′ and the vampires were picking them out of the woods. It would have been a different movie,” Gordon said, one that likely never would have fallen into the hands of director Catherine Hardwicke. Other changes: “They had Bella 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.” Can you imagine?
Dailyfill Wait, what?! That's right. Twilight Producer Mark Morgan gave the low down on what almost happened to your favorite vampires. In his own words, "[The fans] would have killed us."
Even if you haven't seen the Twilight flicks or read the series, you probably still know that the plot revolves around the love story between Edward Cullen and Bella Swan. But before Summit bought the rights to the books, the original script swapped the brooding romance for non-stop action. At the time, studios didn't think Bella's endless lovesickness would interest anyone. Instead, the studio wanted to turn Bella into a vampire in the first movie and kill off her father.
"We went shopping to every studio around, but everyone passed," Morgan said. "Finally Summit said 'let's do it.' It was a total blessing."
Before long, Twilight became an international bestseller and Summit realized they had a blockbuster on their hands. A new script was written to appeal to the rabid fan base.
Just imagine if the original script had gone into production! The world might never have seen Taylor Lautner's abs, and Robert Pattinson would just be that guy who played Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter.
Many 'WHAT IF...' scenarios playing around here. lol. I'm posting this old 2008 article that mentions this Paramount connection and yeah, it gave me major goosebumps. Read on.
BUFFY the vampire slayer has a new rival. A low-budget horror film, rejected by major Hollywood studios, is set to become the box-office blockbuster of the winter. Twilight, based on the first of American writer Stephenie Meyer's hugely popular teenage vampire novels, premieres in London on December 3 and is expected to propel virtually-unknown British actor Robert Pattinson, to cult status.
Ticket sales for the movie's opening weekend in the US are expected to approach $60m (£40m), box office analysts said, driven by Meyer's devoted fans and marketing pyrotechnics by Summit Entertainment. Not bad for a film that cost just $37m to produce.
Thanks to classic Hollywood bungling, the fledgling company, normally ignored by major studios and agents, finds itself sitting atop one of the biggest pop-culture phenomena of recent years.
When Twilight opened in the US on Friday, audiences were greeted by Summit's logo: an abstract squiggle evoking a mountain ridge and not the more realistic mountain peak of Paramount Pictures, the studio that, at one time, controlled the rights to Twilight. Someone at the studio decided, in 2006, that the series was a dud. The current game at Paramount is to find out who deserves the blame.
When Paramount rejected Twilight, Friedman heard about it. Erik Feig, Summit's production chief, did some research and noticed an intense following online even though the book had not yet reached stratospheric status. Summit pounced, seeing a potential franchise.
"We saw a great Romeo and Juliet story that has a very interesting modern sensibility," Friedman said.
And the rest is TwiHistory...
