So how did this budding literary phenomenon practically drop in Summit's lap?
Long before "Twilight" hit the bookstores in 2005, MTV Films chief David Gale had read the novel in manuscript form and optioned the movie rights. MTV was always looking for teen-friendly film properties, and Gale felt the book had a great mix of genre elements -- notably the vampire angle -- and a surprisingly sweet take on teen romance.
"This is one of those projects we were especially passionate about," says Gale, who is now an executive vice president of new media at MTV. "We put a writer [Mark Lord] on the project who did a couple of drafts. We never got the script where we wanted it, but when it came time to renew the option, we needed Paramount's approval, and, for whatever reasons, we couldn't get a commitment, so the project went into turnaround. I'm disappointed that we didn't end up making the picture, but I'm thrilled that someone saw it through and that it's turned out to be such a big event."
As is often the case when a studio lets a hit slip through its hands, no one wants to take the blame. Gale would not say who at Paramount refused to renew the option. But I spoke to three ex-Paramount executives who all pointed the finger at Brad Weston, now the studio's production chief. Weston insists he never killed it, saying the project was the responsibility of Scott Aversano, who succeeded Gale as president of MTV Films and Nickelodeon Movies and is now an independent producer on the lot. However, by the studio's own timeline, the project was put in turnaround in early 2006. Aversano didn't take over MTV Films until late August 2006 and had no functional budget to buy projects until the year's end. MTV executives who were involved with the project say Weston questioned the genre's commercial prospects, telling them to watch "Cursed," a 2005 teen-oriented werewolf film that he'd made while an executive at Dimension Films that had failed at the box office.
Paramount may have let the project slip through its hands, but "Twilight" turned out to have a lot of former Paramount benefactors as it made its way into production. Karen Rosenfelt, a longtime Paramount production executive, became attached to the project as a producer in fall 2006. Since she has a producer deal at Fox, Rosenfelt first took the project to Fox Atomic. When that company passed, she quickly set up a meeting in October of that year with Erik Feig, who had joined Summit as its production chief. Feig took the project to his boss, Summit Chief Executive Friedman, who'd been a top Paramount executive for years before leaving the studio in the turmoil following studio chief Sherry Lansing's departure.
