No we’re not going to the opening tonight, but she did insist I drive by the theater to see her comrades camped outside. They’ve been there all day (some probably all night). They must be the first in the seats to see it. She wanted to be with them—wearing her New Moon shirt, gushing over a guy who, only a few years ago, she didn’t even notice when he was in movies. Amazing to watch as new stars are born.

I want to write something that big so bad. I want to have teens and their parents and grown people who should know better camped outside the theater talking about which is their favorite character. As one now successful actor I interviewed in my book said, “I remember, years ago, I was in Gelson’s Market with only a couple bucks in my pocket when in walked this big movie star. I said to myself, ‘That’ll be me one day.’”

There’s something much deeper about this movie phenomenon we are experiencing.  Stephanie Meyer took the traditional characters of vampires and werewolves and turned them into the Capulets and the Montagues. She then took a pale, blood-sucking, night crawling, serial killer and turned him into a diamond-skinned, superhero with a powerful love Jones for the only girl in high school whose mind he can’t read.

High school? What’s Count Dracula doing in high school? Seriously, this guy is a couple hundred years old. So what if he’s young looking? What kind of perv is that? I mean, when I was 17 I thought I was too mature to date 16 year-olds. This is a guy whose obviously never heard the words to Steely Dan’s Hey Nineteen—“We got nothing in common. No we can’t talk at all.” And that guy was only 15 years older than the young girl he was considering.

But alas… love.

But since when do werewolves actually turn into giant Wolfwolves?  What is this? Do silver bullets even work anymore? Vampires have superhero powers? They can come out in the sun? They don’t drink human blood? They don’t turn into creepy bats? They can’t be killed with crosses, holy water and garlic? They don’t have fangs? What the hell? Are they trying to put Blade out of business?

I think I understand why my daughter is on Team Jacob. I think Jacob represents, for girls, the best of both worlds. On one hand, you’ve got this cute boyfriend with a great body that everyone thinks is hot. On the other, you’ve got this big shaggy dog to protect you. Girls and their fantasies.

The point of this blog is for writers and film makers. The Twilight Saga represents the best of all worlds for the Hollywood movie machine and at the same time manages to be fresh, new and young.  Vampires are among the most produced characters in Hollywood. From the dawn of moving pictures, vampires have creeped across the walls of theaters. From Nosferatu to Dracula to Blade, the basic makeup and character of vampires has remained unchanged.

What Meyer’s did so brilliantly—and if she is to be believed from her interview on Oprah, so accidentally and luckily—is figure out how to combine genres in a commercially viable way. Romance/Horror/Fantasy/Adventure.

BUT…  Good thing she wrote it as a book. If she’d pitched it as a movie or screenplay before it was a successful book, no one in Hollywood would have touched it. How do I know? Because Nosferatu came out in 1921 and no one touched it since—not successfully anyway. I should say not seriously. There may have been comedic takes on vampires or werewolves that did pretty good, but they didn’t change the nature of those archetypes.  This is a prime example of a movie that only got made because of the book.

Hollywood will happily film a successful book, video game, TV show, stage play, fairy tale or an endless number of sequels, prequels and remakes; but when it comes to putting millions of dollars into original stories movie studios, more often than not, pass.

What’s that say to you about your new, original story that no one’s ever seen before? If no one’s ever seen it before, don’t expect Hollywood to make it.

But sell it as a book first or turn it into a successful stage play, and if you’re sales figures back it up, Hollywood will come to you.

Please tell me what you think. Do you agree? Disagree? Did I miss something? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Thanks for reading.

Good Luck,

T.R. Locke

“Yeah.”

“Oh, it’s in 3D… They already did Toy Story 2, but they’re just putting it back in theaters in 3D?”

“Yeah, that’s how they do it here.” I responded. “They resell the same movie over and over to new audiences as soon as they figure there’s a new market.”

I can’t say that I blame studios. If we’re stupid enough to go to theaters to re-view the same movie we could view at home, then they should keep releasing the same movies. Milk us for all they can get from us. Why not?

As I mention in my book, a few years ago I was in negotiations with Fox to write the sequel to the Omen. Fox wanted my take on how to keep the franchise moving along. They suggested that they wanted to begin to remarket movies they already had in their vault along the lines of what Universal had been doing with the Beethoven series. “You don’t have to buy ads for those movies. You just put it out on the shelf and it rents because everyone already knows the series. The series is the star.”

That is the highest goal of any studio—to own a series that never fails to draw an audience. Fox wanted to do that with The Omen. At the time, I hadn’t realized they’d already done four Omen movies. I was only familiar with three. At the end of the third, Damien, the Antichrist, was killed.

Apparently, Fox tried to resurrect this franchise once before. They decided a little girl would be born this time and would have the same evil in her. You didn’t see The Omen 4 because it sucked. It took me more than a week to find a video store that even carried it. By the rules in play at the time, I told the executives at Fox that the franchise was dead. That, even though Omen 4 left a definite opening for a sequel, no one would ever want to see it because the series now officially sucked. It had “jumped the Shark” as they say. The original Omen had birthed the soundtrack of operatic Latin that would go on to haunt nearly every film concerned with the devil or demons since. Omen 4 turned the greatest evil on earth into a hop-scotching joke.

So how did Fox solve this dilemma? The same way so many other studios have been quietly resolving it. They simply released the same movie they released in the seventies. Really? Yeah. Why not? The 18-34 demographic Hollywood aims at never saw the original, so all it takes is a little updating and a small budget and voila! What used to be reserved for Miracle on 34^th Street every 30 years or so gets applied to everything. But now it’s no longer called “an updated classic,” it’s simply released as if it’s never been released before.

Halloween gets redone and re-released, then Halloween 2. I believe they took that franchise to seven films—ending with “Halloween H20—Twenty Years Later.” Next? Halloween 3D. It’s in the works—just like The Final Destination—the latest incarnation of that series that sits atop the weekend box-office. Toy Story 2 comes out in 3D too. I’m waiting on Jaws 3D… Oh, wait… they did that one. I guess we see where this is going. Or maybe we don’t.

How many times will people pay money to see the same film over and over again? That’s the question studios want to answer. So far it seems the answer is endless numbers of times for the right film franchise. What’s great for studios now is that it longer takes the passage of years to re-release films. It seems they can re-release them within a year or two and still draw a crowd. It is, after all, what Hollywood does—sell us what we want—or at least what we’re willing to pay for.

T.R. Locke