Rosemary Colandrea, a Twilight fan and retired middle school teacher, moved to Forks from Naples Florida last year, lured in great part by the town’s ties to the internationally-popular Stephenie Meyer vampire love story.
Colandrea is a member of the Stephenie Meyer-Bella’s Birthday Committee in Forks and is helping to plan the event, which is set for Forks in mid-September.
Her big hope is to launch a Twilight museum in Forks, and she invited local business people to become investors in the plan at the Wednesday, Feb. 15 meeting of the Forks Chamber of Commerce held at JT’s Sweet Stuffs.
A first step in gathering a collection for the museum is underway. Colandrea said an unnamed donor has supplied the funds to bring an arch used as a main prop in the filming of “Twilight,” the first film in Summit Entertainment’s five-film Twilight Saga series.
The arch is being brought from Oregon and will be placed in storage for now.
Plans for the three-day 2012 Stephenie Meyer Day event are already scheduled she said, and will include a Twilight-themed film festival this year. Its main event will be a nighttime reenactment of the wedding of Twilight lead characters Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, featuring costumed characters.
The extensive collection of Twilight film props owned by collector John Henson will also be on display, she said.
Henson plans to sell the prop collection following the release in November of the final scheduled Twilight film, Breaking Dawn Part 2, she said. Colandrea said her committee has first dibs on buying the collection, which she said could be a key part of a Twilight museum.
She said the target audience for attracting Twilight visitors to the West End is women 30-plus years of age. This demographic has expendable income and will spend more on gifts, accommodation and dining than teenage fans, Colandrea said. However, “they expect more of an experience” than teenagers. That’s where opening a Twilight museum would give them a reason to spend more time in Forks. “They need a reason to come to Forks.”
The key to continuing to draw the Twilight visitors is publicity and social networking, she said.
Colandrea said the publicist helping out the Stephenie Meyer Day committee has ties to Lionsgate – the Los Angeles-based film distribution company now working closely with Summit Entertainment. She said it is rumored that the company is trying to convince author Stephenie Meyer to write a new Twilight-themed book so more films could be made. Breaking Dawn, Part 1, released in 2011, has grossed over $700 million world-wide in movie theater receipts. The DVD version of the film was released last weekend and could bring the total to over $1 billion.
If no additional Twilight books are written by Meyer, there is a possibility that a Twilight television series could be in the works, to be produced following the scheduled November 2012 release of the final movie in Summit Entertainment’s five-film Twilight Saga series.
Forks could be the location for the TV series, she said. All five Twilight films were filmed far away from the West End, with major scenes replicating Forks, LaPush and Port Angeles filmed in Oregon and British Columbia. The locations were chosen due to cost considerations, including tax break incentives provided by state and provincial governments. During the filming of the first Twilight film, in 2008, “Twilight” director Catherine Hardwicke visited Forks and LaPush to scout locations. However, due to budget constraints she wasn’t able to film on the West End. During a morning scouting locations and filming videos of the locations at LaPush, Hardwicke told the Forks Forum the lack of funding support from the State of Washington kept the film’s producers from filming locally.
