Twilightseries

Hi, EW.com readers,

I'm so excited about the August 2 release of Breaking Dawn — I can't wait to finally be able to discuss everything that happens! No more secrets! To help whet your appetite, Entertainment Weekly has an exclusive sneak peak of the first chapter of Breaking Dawn. The entire first chapter is available in the Eclipse Special Edition, out tomorrow, which will also reveal the cover of Breaking Dawn and have Team Edward and Team Jacob iron-on decals. Here it is, I hope you enjoy!

Stephenie Meyer

1. ENGAGED

NO ONE IS STARING AT YOU, I promised myself. No one is staring at you. No one is staring at you.

But, because I couldn't lie convincingly even to myself, I had to check.

As I sat waiting for one of the three traffic lights in town to turn green, I peeked to the right — in her minivan, Mrs. Weber had turned her whole torso in my direction. Her eyes bored into mine, and I flinched back, wondering why she didn't drop her gaze or look ashamed. It was still considered rude to stare at people, wasn't it? Didn't that apply to me anymore?

Then I remembered that these windows were so darkly tinted that she probably had no idea if it was even me in here, let alone that I'd caught her looking. I tried to take some comfort in the fact that she wasn't really staring at me, just the car.

My car. Sigh.

I glanced to the left and groaned. Two pedestrians were frozen on the sidewalk, missing their chance to cross as they stared. Behind them, Mr. Marshall was gawking through the plate glass window of his little souvenir shop. At least he didn't have his nose pressed up against the glass. Yet.

The light turned green and, in my hurry to escape, I stomped on the gas pedal without thinking — the normal way I would have punched it to get my ancient Chevy truck moving.

Engine snarling like a hunting panther, the car jolted forward so fast that my body slammed into the black leather seat and my stomach flattened against my spine.

''Arg!'' I gasped as I fumbled for the brake. Keeping my head, I merely tapped the pedal. The car lurched to an absolute standstill anyway.

I couldn't bear to look around at the reaction. If there had been any doubt as to who was driving this car before, it was gone now. With the toe of my shoe, I gently nudged the gas pedal down one half millimeter, and the car shot forward again.

I managed to reach my goal, the gas station. If I hadn't been running on vapors, I wouldn't have come into town at all. I was going without a lot of things these days, like Pop-Tarts and shoelaces, to avoid spending time in public.

Moving as if I were in a race, I got the hatch open, the cap off, the card scanned, and the nozzle in the tank within seconds. Of course, there was nothing I could do to make the numbers on the gauge pick up the pace. They ticked by sluggishly, almost as if they were doing it just to annoy me.

It wasn't bright out — a typically drizzly day in Forks, Washington — but I still felt like a spotlight was trained on me, drawing attention to the delicate ring on my left hand. At times like this, sensing the eyes on my back, it felt as if the ring were pulsing like a neon sign: Look at me, look at me.

It was stupid to be so self-conscious, and I knew that. Besides my dad and mom, did it really matter what people were saying about my engagement? About my new car? About my mysterious acceptance into an Ivy League college? About the shiny black credit card that felt red-hot in my back pocket right now?

''Yeah, who cares what they think,'' I muttered under my breath.

(c) 2008 by Stephenie Meyer, reprinted with permission from the Eclipse Special Edition published by Little, Brown and Company.

On a March day in Oregon, the sun's as bright as a California morning. That's great news for the locals, but it sucks if you're a vampire. For two weeks, Twilight, the $37 million film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's best-selling novel, has been shooting outside Portland — a location chosen, in part, because the skies are often overcast. Vampires, in Meyer's universe, can go out during the day but have to stay out of direct sunlight. Hence, today's problem. Director Catherine Hardwicke (Lords of Dogtown) has had to scrap an exterior shoot, and, because tomorrow's weather looks annoyingly cheery too, she's been forced to rush into an intense romantic scene between her two young stars. ''We were building a bedroom in 24 hours,'' Hardwicke says later. ''We were just sweating it.''

Fans have been sweating it too. Not since Harry Potter has a book-to-film journey inspired so much enthusiasm — or so much anxiety. The movie will follow the novel closely: Pretty but awkward 17-year-old Bella (Kristen Stewart) moves to a small town in the Pacific Northwest and falls in love with Edward (Robert Pattinson), a heartbreakingly beautiful vampire. Edward also falls for Bella, but his desire for her barely controls his instinct to devour her. It's this combination of passion and danger, of course, that surrounds this teen romance with a halo of epic, doomed love. The girls who have gone crazy for the book have been vivisecting the film's development online. Two girls from the Make-A-Wish Foundation even requested roles as extras. ''You can't make this up,'' Hardwicke says. With a fan base like that, all of Hollywood should have been jousting for the film rights. In fact, the movie almost didn't happen.

In April 2004, Paramount's MTV Films optioned Twilight, but then developed a script that bore little resemblance to it. (It featured night-vision goggles and transformed Bella into a hip track star.) ''They could have put that movie out, called it something else, and no one would have known it was Twilight,'' Meyer says. Fortunately for devout fans of the book, Paramount put the project into turnaround. Then, in 2006, Erik Feig, president of production at Summit Entertainment, tried to make a deal with Meyer. The author had been burned before and resisted. Feig drew up a contract, guaranteeing the writer that the film would be true to her vision, including a promise that ''no vampire character will be depicted with canine or incisor teeth longer or more pronounced than may be found in human beings.'' That did the trick.

Twilight, which will hit theaters on Dec. 12, is no garlic-and-fangs monster tale. It's more Buffy than Nosferatu. Hardwicke, who made her directorial debut with the raw indie hit Thirteen, seemed an ideal match for the material. ''When I read the book, I could almost feel Bella breathing,'' Hardwicke says. She hammered out a script with screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg (Step Up) in six weeks, then faced the daunting task of casting. The wrong choice would throw Twilighters into a tizzy. Hardwicke also wanted to cast an actual teenager to play Bella, which meant finding a teen who could convey Bella's emotional depth and carry an entire film.

As a child, Kristen Stewart had starred as Jodie Foster's daughter in Panic Room, but it wasn't until last year, with Sean Penn's Into the Wild, that she blossomed. ''Her mixture of innocence and longing just knocked me out,'' Hardwicke says. Hoping she'd found her Bella, she took a red-eye flight to Pittsburgh — where Stewart, then 17, was shooting Greg Mottola's Adventureland — and did an impromptu screen test with the actress. ''She'd been shooting all night, but she learned her lines on the spot,'' Hardwicke says. ''She danced on the bed and chased pigeons in the park. I was captivated.'' For Stewart, scoring the role was the easy part. She then needed to figure out how to play it. ''The only thing I could bring to Bella was to be myself,'' Stewart says now. ''She's an honest, up-front, seemingly logical girl. She's alone but not lonely.''

As for the character of Edward, Meyer describes him as ''devastatingly inhumanly beautiful.'' Not surprisingly, he has become a heartthrob to millions. ''Everybody has such an idealized vision of Edward,'' Hardwicke says. ''They were rabid [about who I was going to cast]. Like, old ladies saying, 'You better get it right.''' She almost didn't. Hardwicke had seen a picture of Robert Pattinson, a 22-year-old Brit best known as Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but had been underwhelmed. So Pattinson flew to meet with Hardwicke at her home in Venice, Calif. His audition consisted of a love scene with Stewart on Hardwicke's bed. ''It was electric,'' Hardwicke says. ''The room shorted out, the sky opened up, and I was like, 'This is going to be good.'''

Fans weren't so sure at first, and some of the blogs were brutal. ''I stopped reading after I saw the signatures saying 'Please, anyone else,''' Pattinson says, laughing. To prepare for the role, the actor did more than just stay out of the sun. He wrote journal entries as Edward and shut himself off from his friends and family. ''I wanted to feel his isolation,'' he says. Still, Pattinson didn't transform into Edward in all ways. ''I was supposed to get a six-pack,'' he says. ''But it didn't really work out.''

No worries. Fans are already gushing about Twilight's teaser trailer — surely a relief to Hardwicke. It was the fans who kept her motivated. On a single day, for instance, the filmmakers endured snow, rain, and hail. ''There were some days I cried,'' she says. ''But then I would see these girls and moms who loved the book standing in the rain [watching], and I'd think, 'I can't have a pity party. I better stand up and make this scene great. I don't care if it is hailing on me.''' Or, heaven forbid, the sun is shining.

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