THE BIG HIT SHOW
“I Love Him, I’m So Sorry”
Season One, Episode Three - Twilight
Western Sound / Higher Ground Productions / Spotify
January 2022
Alex Pappademas: So I’m going to tell you a story about my extremely brief career as a subject of gossip-blog curiosity.
Robert Pattinson: I'll probably be really boring. I've literally slept a measly three hours... the other person just doesn't speak.
Alex Pappademas: Yeah.
Alex Pappademas: It was 2008, right before Christmas. The first Twilight movie had been out for just a month, Robert Pattinson was suddenly a big movie star, and I was writing a cover story about him for GQ magazine.
We were supposed to take a walk in the world-famous Hollywood Forever Cemetery because, get it, vampires, cemetery– but it rained all day. So, I went with Pattinson to a little bakery on Doheny and watched him eat soup.
Robert Pattinson: What’s your soup? [Chicken and vegetable]
Alex Pappademas: I apologize for the sound quality here. Back then I was a full-time print journalist and knew very little about capturing broadcast-quality audio.
Robert Pattinson: The only way to establish any kind of mystique is to completely shut up. Never ever talk to anyone.
Alex Pappademas: Yeah.
Robert Pattinson: It's the only way you can manipulate anything, and I'm contractually not allowed to shut up, at the moment.
Alex Pappademas: He kept saying he had nothing to say, which was pretty much true. So we talked a lot about how weird it was to be famous all of a sudden, and how weird it was to be not just connected but synonymous in a lot of people’s minds with Edward Cullen from Twilight, a fictional vampire.
Pattinson talked a lot that day about being hounded all over town by paparazzi, because that was what he had to talk about. That was his life.
We wrapped up, and Pattinson offered me a lift back to my hotel. As we paid the check and got ready to leave the restaurant, he looked out the window and said something like, “Ah, you’ll be encountering the other end of it now,” meaning his life as a paparazzi magnet.
Outside on the sidewalk there was a kid blasting away at us with a giant camera. Like a kid kid.
I asked the paparazzo his age. He said sixteen. He looked twelve. His name turned out to be Austin Visschedyk. I ended up doing a story about him a few months later. We got into a high-speed chase with Lindsay Lohan. Sorry, Lindsay.
Anyway, a few days later several gossip blogs ran Austin’s photos of me and Robert Pattinson crossing the street, with captions about the quote Twilight hottie dining with a quote “mystery male.” We’re both wearing black hoodies. Pattinson looks like Robert Pattinson and I’m making a face like a weird frog, because nothing prepares you for how bright those flashbulbs actually are.
Alex Pappademas: That's a strange experience.
Robert Pattinson: It's freaking bizarre, right?
Alex Pappademas: It was bizarre. It’s still the most Felliniesque thing that’s ever happened to me. But for Robert Pattinson it was just another Wednesday in the whirlwind.
The soup of the day is invasion of privacy! From Higher Ground... it’s The Big Hit Show, I’m Alex Pappademas.
In this episode: Two actors who will turn out to really hate being famous get cast in a movie that will make them famous! The franchise charges boldly forward, minus the director who arguably made Twilight Twilight! And then: Kristen Stewart is caught making out in a Mini Cooper with a guy who is not her famous boyfriend Rob Pattinson and for some reason the person who takes this the hardest is Donald Trump.
Chapter Three: I Love Him, I Love Him, I’m So Sorry.
Catherine Hardwicke: We do a quick tour. This part of my yard is literally where Rob and Kristen first met. He came right out here to this courtyard and we looked at him, "Hey, what's up?"
Alex Pappademas: This is Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke, and she’s giving us a tour of her home.
Catherine Hardwicke: This house was built in 1907. So it's a funky Venice beach house. And so I like to do auditions here because it's more comfortable and very casual. And then this room, this is the bed, actually that Rob... This is my bedroom, still my bedroom, still the same bed. And Rob and Kristen did the audition right here on the bed. They did the kissing scene and he fell off and landed right there on this floor.
Alex Pappademas: Somewhere between the backyard and the bedroom floor, Rob Pattinson had successfully booked the job. But getting to that point took kind of a while.
Let’s flash back. It’s 2007-ish. After trying and failing to figure out how to adapt it, Paramount Pictures and MTV Films have let go of Stephenie Meyer’s novel Twilight. An executive named Erik Feig has secured the rights on behalf of an upstart studio, Summit Entertainment, and Catherine Hardwicke has found her Bella Swan in the raw and brilliant Kristen Stewart.
But they don’t have an Edward Cullen yet.
They’ve auditioned all the young dudes, and they’ve narrowed it down to a few guys but Erik Feig and Catherine Hardwicke just do not see that leading-vampire sparkle on any of them. This is a hard one. You’re casting the most beautiful boy who has ever lived or, I guess, died.
Here’s Catherine.
Catherine Hardwicke: Tons of good looking guys came in. I met them in the Hollywood casting office, and they're super good looking, but they look like the boy next door. Like the hottest guy in your high school, or the captain of the football team. They looked like you could believe they were real people. And I wanted somebody that didn't seem like a real person. Who is that going to be? This vampire has lived for 90 something years. He's ethereal, he's special, he's unique, he's internal, he's brooding, he's everything. Iconic.
Alex Pappademas: And here’s Erik Feig.
Erik Feig: I remember saying, "It's someone Byronic. It's someone British, I'm telling you, it's someone who's on a bluff staring off into the distance, looking romantic.”
Alex Pappademas: Which is how Feig and Summit creative executive Gillian Bohrer found themselves looking at head shots of the all-British cast of the Harry Potter films and at one face in particular.
Erik Feig: I said, "What's up with him?" And she said, "Cedric Diggory." And I said, "Yeah, who's that?" And she said, "Rob Pattinson." And I said, "Did he read for us?" And she said, "No." And I said, "Why?" And she said, "I don't know." I said, "Well, let's see if he can read." And so we said, "Okay," to everyone. "Hold tight. We know we need to make a decision. There's one more person we want to have read."
Alex Pappademas: Robert Pattinson agrees to read for the part on tape and sends that tape to Summit.
Erik Feig: I remember I was watching it at home...And my wife walked by [...] And I said, "Watch this for a second." ...I said, "I really like him. Watch him. What do you think?"
And she watches, and she's like, "Yeah, really good." And I said, "Good looking?" And she said, "Uh, yeah." And I said, "Yeah, but do you think the average girl in America is going to think he's good looking?" And she said, "Yeah. Yeah, totally." And she said, "I mean, you got to maybe clean him up a little bit," because his hair was all scraggly and all over the place. And I said "Like what?" And she said, "I mean, maybe eyebrow grooming?"
Alex Pappademas: So Pattinson gets on a plane—Feig remembers his reps asking for a round trip ticket, which implies that even they did not expect their client to book this thing. He lands in LA and crashes on his agent’s couch.
And this is how Edward met Bella.
Catherine Hardwicke: He came over to my house, right here where we are talking right now.
Alex Pappademas: Director Catherine Hardwicke.
Catherine Hardwicke: He walked in and he had his hair was died black for some play, with these wacky bangs. He was a bit out of shape. His shirt was just all messy, and I'm like, "Ooh, okay. Okay, let's see how this goes."...Rob and Kristen auditioned on my bed, the kissing scene, Rob was so into it he fell off the bed. I'm like, "Dude, calm down." And I'm in there filming with my little video camera, whatever.
And at the end, Kristen was like, it has to be Rob...But I could tell they had a lot of chemistry, and I'm like, "Oh my God." I thought, Kristen was 17. I don't want to get in some illegal things. So I remember I told Rob, "By the way, Kristen is 17. In our country, it's illegal to have a sexual..." And he's like, "Oh, okay, whatever."
Alex Pappademas: Here again, Erik Feig.
Erik Feig: And he came in for a meeting and we met with him and I said, "Would you ever consider eyebrow grooming?"
Catherine Hardwicke: I said, "We're going to... work a little bit on the eyebrows, we're going to work a little bit on the teeth. We're going to do a different thing with your hair. You're going to start working out. You can't just be drinking beer all day and have a little beer belly. No."
Alex Pappademas: Pattinson then passes what may be the most important test: Stephenie Meyer, whose arrangement with Summit includes veto power concerning casting decisions like this one, has always pictured future Man of Steel star Henry Cavil as Edward Cullen, but by 2007 Cavil is 24 and thus a little long in the tooth to play a ageless 17-year-old.
So Meyer signs off on Kristen Stewart for Bella and Pattinson for Edward.
In casting Robert and Kristen to play these parts, Hardwicke has, it will turn out, plucked two genuinely rising stars from relative obscurity.
Hardwicke has also chosen two actors who probably would not have signed up for this experience if they knew what they were in for.
But that comes later.
Even with its soon-to-be-iconic leads in place, Twilight is still not a sure thing.
It turns out the MTV Films execs who stumbled by trying to create an adaptation of Twilight that would appeal to dudes and the Paramount Pictures execs who didn’t want to bother trying are not uniquely benighted when it comes to imagining a movie with a predominantly female audience becoming a giant blockbuster. That’s just Hollywood thinking.
Catherine Hardwicke: Summit told me, they said, "Look, there was this very popular book called Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. And the most this movie will ever make will be 29 million dollars. That's how much that movie made. So that's the audience. That's the limit of the audience for something like this." That's what people thought at the time. A girl's book could not make a lot of money.
Alex Pappademas: So The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants actually made $39 million dollars domestically and $42 million globally but, still.
The point is, the Summit execs see that movie’s box-office performance as the absolute ceiling. No way Twilight beats the pants movie.
And that skepticism on Summit’s part will persist pretty much up until the moment people start lining up to see Twilight opening night.
Nancy Richardson: I just remember when we first started the film, the studio wanted all of the action scenes to be loaded up front and shot first, because they wanted to put out a trailer and they wanted the action scenes in the trailer to attract the boys to come see the movie.
Alex Pappademas: This is Nancy Richardson. She edited the original Twilight and Eclipse, the third movie in the series.
Nancy Richardson: And then, of course, no boys ever went to the movie. LAUGH
Alex Pappademas: Throughout production, Summit prevailed on Catherine to keep costs down.
Catherine Hardwicke: They called me into a meeting and said, "We have to cut $4 million out of the budget in the next four days or we're pulling the plug on this movie and we're not going to make it”
And I'm like, "$4 million?" Now I'm used to budgets because I'm a production designer before I was a director, so I have to manage a lot of budgets. So I got all the budgets out, I'm like, "Where are the big ticket numbers and where can I cut $4 million?"
And so one of the things was just for an example in the book, when ...the car almost skids into her and hits her, in the book it's snowing. Snowing cost a lot of money, to dress snow, to have snow falling. I'm like, "Okay, that's a big ticket item. I can't have it snow.
Nancy Richardson: That was an incredible amount of pressure, again, also on Catherine...It was tough. It was tough. I do remember Catherine struggling with that part of it.
Alex Pappademas: Regarding that four million dollar budget cut– Gillian Bohrer, who was close to this production, says that story is a little bit misleading. She says Summit actually increased Twilight’s budget several times, and that the last-minute four million dollar cut only became necessary after Summit indicated to Catherine that they couldn’t raise it any further.
Either way, despite these complications– Twilight was moving forward.
And something was about to happen that would ultimately help the film become a cultural phenomenon.
Love was in the air.
Snow or no snow, Catherine Hardwicke’s movie version of Twilight is deeply faithful to Stephenie Meyer’s novel. But it also works surprisingly well on its own merits as a movie.
It is alive from the moment Bella first lays eyes on Edward in the Forks High School cafeteria— a moment, by the way, that Hardwicke stages as a brilliant, and I think ironic, reversal of that shot in every teen movie where some male protagonist you’re meant to root for watches the hot girl cross a room in slow motion. In Twilight when Edward enters the lunchroom we are very much female-gazing at him through Bella’s eyes.
TWILIGHT SCENE:
Bella: Who's he?
Jessica: "That's Edward Cullen. Totally gorgeous obviously. But apparently no one here's good enough for him. Like I care. You know. So, yeah. Seriously. Don't waste your time."
Bella: "Wasn't planning on it."
Alex Pappademas: But we are also looking at actor Kristen Stewart looking at actor Robert Pattinson. Watch the famous biology-class scene where Edward is acting weird around Bella because he can smell her tasty blood.
For more than one full minute, which is a long time in movie time, Hardwicke just cuts back and forth between Pattinson glowering hungrily at Stewart and Stewart looking at him like, What?, and obviously this is hindsight, but this moment seems to transcend itself and the movie that it’s in, and it’s like we’re watching two actual people carrying on a silent conversation using nothing but intense looks and lip-quivers while everyone around them is busy making a movie.
TWILIGHT CAFETERIA SCENE: Edward: Hello, I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself last week. I’m Edward Cullen. You’re Bella? [Um yes.]
Alex Pappademas: Something not wholly fictional is happening here. Twilight editor Nancy Richardson.
Nancy Richardson: I just remember seeing in daily scenes where they would do a take and he would throw a tree across the meadow and then stomp away. Then Catherine would say cut and Kristen would go up to Robert and say, so what was wrong with that? That was great! What was wrong with that? Kristen was kind of like his encouraging coach all the time when he seemed to feel as if his performance wasn't good enough.
Alex Pappademas: Wow. So they connected on that level right away.
Nancy Richardson: Yes, at that time they were not together. She had a boyfriend, but I believe they were falling in love.
Alex Pappademas: As the editor you probably stare at more footage of them then just about anybody on a movie. Do you develop as an editor the ability to tell when people are falling in love when you are watching?
Nancy Richardson: I do. I do. Yes. Actually, I've worked on a lot of films where this has happened...
It's fun. It's fun. And the chemistry comes through in the film for sure. In the case of Twilight, so much of the dynamics going on between them was real.
Alex Pappademas: And that dynamic will be as important a part of the phenomenon Twilight becomes as the script, the direction, the music, or the production design. A real life romance is blooming between Rob and Kristen. This is great news if you’re a movie studio, for whom tabloid interest in Robsten will translate into years of free publicity for the Twilight films.
But if you’re the real people Rob Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, things are about to get very, very complicated. And not in a good way.
MIDROLL
Alex Pappademas: Big movie premieres are traditionally held in one of a few theaters in the Westwood section of Los Angeles. When Twilight opens on the night of November 17, 2008 it screens simultaneously in two theaters across the street from each other.
Here’s Twilight editor Nancy Richardson.
Nancy Richardson: I remember going into Westwood the opening night and the lines were not just around the block. They were around every block in Westwood. People were walking up and down the street going, what is this? What are you waiting for? It was all girls waiting to get in to see Twilight.
And the premiere was mobbed. Just mobbed.
Alex Pappademas: Erik Feig remembers the moment Robert Pattinson’s Town Car pulled up to deposit Rob on the black carpet.
Erik Feig: The black sedan was right in front of where you're supposed to come out. And he was just sitting there and I went up to the door and I opened up and I said, "How you doing?" And he was like INHALE, you know a deep breath. And I said, "You got this." And he stood out and I hugged him. And he was literally trembling, just because it was like, "Oh my God. This is it. You're going to step on that carpet. And that's it."
It just was so clear. That was then. This is now and never, ever going back.
Alex Pappademas: That first premiere is not a crazy star-studded kind of night. People who were in the movie are there and so is Stephenie Meyer, but beyond that-- uh, Jamie Foxx and Kim Basinger both bring their kids. Seth Green is there. Perry Farrell, from Jane’s Addiction, because he’s on the soundtrack.
But the Twilight fans are out there in force going absolutely bonkers.
Kaleb Nation: fans knew that we need to show the industry that we are a force to be reckoned with, that we need to line up [...] for this movie that they think is going to be a flop because they don't know how big it is.
Alex Pappademas: This is Kaleb Nation, who was covering the premiere in his capacity as founder and editor of Twilightguy dot com, one of the first Twilight fan sites created by a dude.
Kaleb Nation: don't even think that the people who produced the first Twilight movie had any idea what they were getting themselves into.
Alex Pappademas: At this point internet-savvy Twilighters like Kaleb knew something the industry didn’t. Twilight fandom was becoming a massive community, particularly online, and the Westwood premiere was their real life coming-out party.
Kaleb Nation: The first Twilight premier changed everything you could not you couldn't hear someone speaking right next to you because there was so much screaming.
They did not set up the wall that was like kind of like barring off the red carpet from the fans that were lined up on each side of it. They did not secure it. And so there was a point where when Robert Pattinson, I think it was Robert Pattinson was walking by and the fans just like it almost fell over, like these security walls. They did not have enough security because they didn't realize this was going to be such a big deal.
Alex Pappademas: Of course by this point this should not have been that surprising— Robert Pattinson has spent the weeks leading up to the Twilight premiere doing personal appearances at various locations of the iconic mall-goth chain store Hot Topic, including a disastrous visit to the one in San Francisco.
ARCHIVE: FANS SCREAMING
News Anchor: Robert Pattinson, who co-starred in a Harry Potter movie, was at San Francisco’s Stonestown Mall. His publicity tour got to a rough start when about 3,000 fans stampeded this morning...
Twilight Fan #1: I ended up collapsing and people were running over me, like jumping on me, stepping on me. It, it just really sucked.
Alex Pappademas: People got trampled, one girl supposedly got her nose broken, and the event was cancelled.
Reporter: Was it worth it?
Twilight Fan #1: Yes! It was. I mean I may have only been there for like 4 seconds but I got to meet him and I was just oh my god. This is so cool!
Alex Pappademas: Three days after the Westwood premiere, Twilight opens in theaters nationwide, and by the end of the opening weekend, it’s not just a hit. It’s not just a big hit.
Catherine Hardwicke: It opened to $69 million opening weekend, more than any Bond had ever opened at that time. How could anyone have predicted it? No one could have predicted that. Opening weekend, some people saw the movie eight times. Opening weekend, who could predict that?
Alex Pappademas: Director Catherine Hardwicke.
Catherine Hardwicke: Cut to $400 million it made, that's unbelievable. Those numbers just exploded everybody's brain. And unknown actors, the actors weren't even heard of. People didn't know who Rob and Kristen were. So you had everything against you in a way. And I said, "But the book is so popular and there's so much chat online." And they said, "Catherine, that might just be 300 girls in Salt Lake City writing online about it." I go, "I think it's more than 300 girls in Salt Lake City."
Alex Pappademas: Twilight editor Nancy Richardson.
Nancy Richardson: I think that in a great way it created a new understanding in Hollywood that girls have money and will go to movies and they will actually go over and over and over more than boys will.
NBC NEWS ARCHIVE
Lester Holt: Well the slow economy isn’t keeping fans from flocking to the movies…the new vampire romance Twilight was the big winner. Opening this weekend with more than $70 million in ticket sales. Studio execs are so pleased with the movie’s popularity, they have just announced a sequel. . . . Didn’t see that coming.
Alex Pappademas: The minute the first movie pops there is pretty much no question that Summit, which owns the rights to all these books, will start making Twilight sequels as immediately as humanly possible. One way to read this decision is that the people at the studio still see this as a fad that will fade and want to run up their money while they can.
But as Erik Feig points out, this sense of urgency also stemmed from practical considerations.
Erik Feig: We have teenagers who smoke playing vampires who don't age, which is a terrible combination for a shooting schedule.
Alex Pappademas: Within days of its opening, the first Twilight is on track to be the biggest movie ever directed by a woman to that point— as of 2021 it was still the ninth-biggest movie on that list, by the way.
But that woman, Catherine Hardwicke— who is praised by critics in good reviews and bad for having turned Stephenie Meyer’s novel into a better, moodier film than anyone thought possible— does not come back to make part 2.
On November 22nd, 2008, just two days after Twilight hits theaters, Summit announces that they’ve green lit a movie based on the second Twilight novel, New Moon which will start shooting in early 2009.
Then, on December 7th, Summit and Catherine Hardwicke announced in a joint statement that Hardwicke will NOT be directing New Moon because the schedule quote does not work with Ms. Hardwicke’s required prep time to bring her vision of the film to the big screen.
The following week Summit announces that New Moon will start shooting in ten weeks and will be directed by Chris Weitz.
All told there will be four sequels to Twilight and each of them will be directed by men.
As will all the Hunger Games movies.
And all the Divergent movies.
And like 80 to 90 percent of all movies period to this day.
Nobody really disagrees that leaving Twilight was Catherine’s decision, but they disagree a little about what it meant.
Nancy Richardson: She was in Europe promoting the release of the film in Europe at the time when I guess the executives…were discussing who should direct the next one.
Alex Pappademas: Editor Nancy Richardson.
Nancy Richardson: They were discussing it back and forth, and she discovered they had already started developing a script which I think hurt her feelings a little.
Alex Pappademas: Erik Feig says the minute Twilight hit, they commissioned a New Moon script from Melissa Rosenberg.
Erik Feig: We got a draft that was great. And at that point we went to Catherine saying, "Let's get going. This is amazing." I forgot what our start date was, but whatever it was, this is when we need to make the movie.
Alex Pappademas: Production executive Gillian Bohrer.
Gillian Bohrer: We also were determined to keep the release date one year to the day after the first movie, which is not surprising that that's the decision that's made….And Catherine didn't want to go through the process we'd had on the first movie, of rushing through it, and wanted more time.
Erik Feig: Catherine, one, was really kind of overwhelmed at that moment just because Twilight was such a big experience.
Gillian Bohrer: There were a number of things like this. There were reasons that we needed to do the things that we were insisting we did.
Erik Feig: But it was her choice not to move on, which I also totally respect and understand. And it was our choice to move on with another filmmaker.
Gillian Bohrer: I can understand that the conditions were not things that she felt she could live with, but studios do what studios do. There's reasons that are hard on the individual, hard on the individual production, but work for the studio at large, and that's what happened. <BEAT>
Nancy Richardson: I think she was arguing with them about it and…they broke up basically.
Alex Pappademas: The thing is, Catherine's contract guaranteed her the right of first refusal on the sequel— if she had wanted to make New Moon when that train was leaving the station, Summit could not have gone with someone else. But Catherine says she didn’t want to make the movie.
Catherine Hardwicke: Well for me, I'm not really a sequel person... I really like the original idea first. And to be honest, even with Stephanie's books, I liked the first book the best...I did relate a lot more to the first book. That feeling of first love, than the second book. And I thought to make the second book, I would've wanted to have some of those light bulb moments, like rad inspiration to figure out a way to make it better than the first movie.
And so when they said, "Look, we've got to hit the same schedule." I wouldn’ have had time to like be inspired. And they didn't have time for that.
Alex Pappademas: But because Hollywood you know sucks, the day Catherine’s departure is announced, Deadline Hollywood columnist Nikki Finke writes a story quoting an unnamed Summit insider saying Catherine was quote “difficult and irrational” while making Twilight. Another unnamed source uses the phrase “shit canned.”
Nancy Richardson, again.
Nancy Richardson: I wasn't surprised. I wasn't surprised. I felt really bad for Catherine because I think that column put her in a really tough situation that she'd been fired. In fact, she created that cast. She created the costume. She created the look. She created the style. All of those things that were the stamp of Twilight.
It’s too bad. It's too bad. She should've gotten Executive Producer credit on all of them. These days she would have, I think.
Alex Pappademas: Right. Not to bring it back to this, but the man who set the tone for Twilight, had there been a man on that first movie, had it been a male director, probably would've gotten to come back and sort of supervise and be in charge again.
Nancy Richardson: Probably would've been treated differently. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Probably if it had of been a man they probably wouldn't have done an audit through the film the way they did. So.
Alex Pappademas: There was widespread fan concern about the future of the franchise when Hardwicke left. But those same fans were not about to jump ship because of one personnel change, no matter how significant. They were in. And a big part of that had to do with a rumored offscreen romance between the real life Bella and Edward.
They were supposedly for real dating from around the time of the first Twilight up through 2012, the year of the final Twilight movie Breaking Dawn Part II. But during that time neither Rob nor Kristen ever explicitly confirmed that they were anything more than costars. Kristen sort of rolling her eyes at the entire idea of Robert Pattinson became one of her trademarks.
ARCHIVE:
Interviewer: Do you think that he’s so beautiful it’s painful to look at him?
Kristen:No. [laughs] I can’t stroke his ego more than anybody else has.
Alex Pappademas: All this bred tension and mystery around their relationship which in turn created a very specific demand. Celebrity magazines like US Weekly and a relatively new ecosystem of gossip Web sites wanted pictures of Rob and Kristen together, and they wanted those pictures the way J. Jonah Jameson wanted pictures of Spider-Man.
But in July of 2012, one of the photographers chasing Stewart would capture something else. Which would make a lot of people very upset, even before Donald Trump got involved.
MIDROLL
Justin Ravitz: I just had a little trip down memory lane because 2012 was actually a huge year in retrospect. That was the year that TomKat got divorced.
Alex Pappademas: This is Justin Ravitz. And in 2012 he was a senior editor at US Weekly, working primarily on the US Weekly website.
Justin Ravitz: It was the year that Blue Ivy Carter, Beyonce and Jay Z's first child was born, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt finally got married or engaged maybe. I need to look that back up. [...] The Kardashians were doing their thing. They were kind of just being Kardashians. [...] And, of course, this became the biggest year in terms of celebrity scandal for the Twilight cast, particularly Rob and Kristen.
Alex Pappademas: By 2012, Rob and Kristen’s fame had transcended the Hot Topic demographic.
Justin Ravitz: So, it was kind of like this niche, fringy, nerdy, goth kind of immature fiction and movie phenomenon became a global thing, that it's like a household name that everyone could be invested in and became invested in.
Alex Pappademas: If you’re one of those household names in this era, you and your privacy are up against a whole industry of photographers and photo agencies who think about nothing all day except getting pictures of you that they can sell to the tabloids.
Director Catherine Hardwicke recalls the moment this reality dawned on Kristen Stewart.
Catherine Hardwicke: Oh my God. I remember the day that Kristen came to me and said, "Hey, I walked out of my house this morning to go eat breakfast. And there was paparazzi out there." This is before the movie came out, long before. And she's like, "I think my life is really going to change." And she's very much an…indie spirit person, likes indie music, likes to do her own thing. Rob also. So they really weren't the kind of people that wanted to be or planned to be superstar. So I was feeling guilty, oh my God, I didn't predict this either.
And I was like, wow these are vulnerable people in a way. Now every moment of their life is exposed, they're chased and everything.
Alex Pappademas: Also, by 2012, everybody has a camera in their Samsung Galaxy or their Blackberry BoldTouch or their iPhone 5, which means you can also get paparazzi’d by regular people, whether it’s opportunists up in the club or your own fans. Basically everyone in the world is about to become a part-time paparazzo.
At the end of July of 2012, in this climate of total celebrity information awareness, somebody delivered a massive scoop to US Weekly regarding Kristen Stewart.
Former US Weekly Editor, Justin Ravitz.
Justin Ravitz: I don't have the exact specifics about how they got their hands on these particular photos, but they acquired paparazzi photos of Kristen Stewart cheating on Rob.
Alex Pappademas: You can still read the story on US Weekly’s Website. Alongside abundant photographic evidence it describes Kristen driving her Mini Cooper around LA with her Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders, looking for and then finding a place to make out like quote “a pair of hormone-addled teens.”
In the pictures, they’re kissing in the car, then they’re hanging out in a park overlooking the Hollywood sign and embracing in an intimate way that seems to transcend mere creative collaboration.
A witness quoted in the story says, “They were kissing like crazy. This guy was kissing her entire body.”
Justin Ravitz: And we posted online and everything went nuts.
Alex Pappademas: For all these fans who’d invested emotionally in the idea of Rob and Kristen as a real-life Bella and Edward, this was a crushing, say-it-ain’t-so kind of moment.
ARCHIVE: “I don’t understand how she could do this. Why? Why would you cheat on Robert Pattinson? What’s the point of that? What do you stand to achieve by cheating on Robert Pattinson? With fucking Rupert...whatever his...fff...ugh. I’m so not okay with this.”
Alex Pappademas: But it was particularly hard to handle if you were all in on the book’s somewhat retrograde ideas about sex and relationships, as Vox pop-culture critic Constance Grady points out.
Constance Grady: I mean, this whole series is very obsessed with Bella's virginity and with this sense that she has to wait until marriage. And Kristen Stewart's fidelity kind of gets conflated with Bella's hymen in this very bizarre way, where just her sexual purity has to become of paramount importance for everyone.
Alex Pappademas: When this happens Kristen is 22 years old. Sanders is 41, married, and a father of two. But he is not the one who cheated on Edward Cullen.
Justin Ravitz: Kristen was slut-shamed, Twihards were extremely furious at her. They felt so bad for Rob. Rupert got a lot of hate sent his way for sort of taking advantage of a young girl, but I think Kristen probably got way more flak at the time than she should have. She was very, very young, but yeah, that was an enormous story.
Alex Pappademas: And part of the reason it’s such a seismic event within Twilight fandom is because many Twilight fans are already struggling to accept that when Breaking Dawn Part 2 opens in the fall of 2012, that is it. There are no more books to make into movies. As John Lennon said when the Beatles broke up, the dream is over.
Here’s podcast host and Twilight fan Melissa Duffy:
Melissa Duffy: I really truly think that the reason I was so sad was because the series was ending and I just didn't know what do I do now? What do I invest in? Because I didn't really have any other pop culture things that could even compare to my love for Twilight. It was part of my life.
Alex Pappademas: The day the photos surface, Rupert Sanders immediately issues a public apology, but so does Kristen Stewart. Her apology is ironically the first time Kristen acknowledges in public that she and Rob have been dating.
Kristen Stewart declined to be interviewed for this podcast; here’s her apology read by producer Lori Galaretta.
Lori Galaretta: “I’m deeply sorry for the hurt and embarrassment I’ve caused to those close to me and everyone this has affected. This momentary indiscretion has jeopardized the most important thing in my life, the person I love and respect the most, Rob. I love him, I love him, I’m so sorry.”
Alex Pappademas: The first half of Kristen’s apology reads like it was written by a crisis PR team.
But the second half reads like it was written by a young person who is genuinely remorseful but also genuinely SCARED of how the world is going to react to what has happened.
In this case quote “everyone this has affected” seems to include Twilight fans, as, like, a class of person.
What is happening in those pictures is none of anybody’s business except for Kristen and Rob and this other guy and his wife.
But it’s as if, on the day the photos come out, Kristen has already correctly predicted what’s going to happen, which is that people are going to blame her for ruining the fantasy that Bella and Edward’s love is so powerful as to transcend fiction.
Randi Flannagan: And when that illusion broke, it really broke hard.
Alex Pappademas: This is Randi Flanagan, a prolific writer of Twilight fan fiction.
Randi Flannagan: There were a lot of people that believed that that didn't actually happen, that it was a coverup, and that they were still together...And then there was just all this infighting of people that said they were together, they weren't together. And then you could actually see people just go through grief like somebody had died, like go through anger, and bargaining, and acceptance.
Alex Pappademas: Randi points out that there are people on the Internet who believe that Robert and Kristen are not only still secretly together, but secretly married, and secretly raising children whose names the Internet people claim to know.
Randi Flannagan: And then there were people that just got stuck in certain places that just led to a place of delusion, almost like QAnon. Like the people that believe there's like a whole secret world and Trump is really president. It actually existed sort of in the Twilight fandom.
It's cognitive dissonance, right? Like if you've created this world and this reality, when things happen that's counter to it, you have to either make a decision to believe in what's happening, or you're going to go deeper into the fantasy, [...] And if you go deeper into the fantasy, you're going to make some not so good decisions. And you're going to do things like storm the Capitol building.
Alex Pappademas: Which reminds me— we can't talk about the story of the Robsten breakup without talking about the strange cameo role played in it by New York real estate developer and now-former Twitter user Donald J Trump.
About a month before Breaking Dawn 2 comes out, a seemingly back-together Rob and Kristen start showing up in public places. At one point while they are hanging out at the venerable and seemingly chill Silverlake dive bar Ye Rustic Inn, they pose for a photo with a fan.
And because the line between professional gossip reporter and amateur has sort of been eradicated, that fan then turns around and gives interviews about Rob and Kristen’s apparent reconciliation,
And while the Robsten reunification is taking place, no one is a bigger concern-troll about it than the future 45th President of the United States, who feels the need to tweet about and to Robert Pattinson at least eight times, beginning on October 17, 2012.
Here are a few of those tweets read by producer Sabrina Fang.
October 17.
TRUMP: Robert Pattinson should not take back Kristen Stewart. She cheated on him like a dog & will do it again-- just watch. He can do much better!
October 18th.
TRUMP: Robert. I’m getting a lot of heat for saying you should dump Kristen-- but I’m right. If you saw the Miss Universe girls, you would reconsider.
October 19.
TRUMP: So many tweets & stories on Stewart/Pattinson. Look, it doesn’t matter-- the relationship will never be the same. It is permanently broken.
Alex Pappademas: Trump’s Robert Pattinson tweets foreshadow the way he’ll increasingly act as a giant megaphone for the uglier parts of the American id. He’s glomming onto fan resentment around the cheating scandal in order to magnetize attention to himself.
TRUMP: Miss Universe 2012 pageant will be airing live on NBC and Telemundo December 19. Open invite stands for Robert Pattinson.
Alex Pappademas: But the misogynist backlash he’s leveraging is already going on. Even back in this period, Trump doesn’t create the things he dines out on. He just amplifies them.
In this case, Trump is rolling up the sexist perception of Kristen Stewart as the harlot who betrayed America’s vampire boyfriend with the equally rooted-in-sexism perception of her as a bad star. Which, again, stems from totally understandable things, like her refusal to be nice to the paparazzi who— as is now obvious— are genuinely out to get her.
ARCHIVE: Paparazzo: Why are you saying fuck off?
Kristen Stewart: Because you’re a piece of shit and don’t deserve to breathe the same air I do.
Paparazzo: Who’s a piece of shit?
Kristen Stewart: You are you fuck face.
Paparazzo: Why are you saying that? So are you and Robert back together? Are you and Robert Patterson back together? Are you dating anyone right now Kristen?
Alex Pappademas: Even before the whole cheating thing, Stewart was being described as ungrateful and difficult for the crime of seeming to not enjoy being part of Twilight-mania while doing the rounds for sequel after sequel year after year.
Constance Grady: They both seem super uncomfortable with Twilight as a franchise.
Alex Pappademas: Constance Grady from Vox again.
Constance Grady: Robert Pattinson makes that very explicitly clear. He talks in interviews all the time about how he thinks Edward's a terrible person and he thinks the whole thing is kind of embarrassing and reads like a sex dream, which he is not wrong about. And that was something that the public, and I think fans responded to as like, "Oh man, this guy's really keeping it real. He's saying the quiet part out loud." And it really works for Edward, because Edward hates himself. So it's really great that the actor playing Edward hates him, too. Whereas Kristen Stewart, I don't believe, was ever particularly vocal about her discomfort for Twilight while they were still filming and publicizing those movies. She was mostly just kind of awkward and bit her lip on the red carpet and was a little shy in interviews. And there is this sense that like, "Ugh, she's so ungrateful. She's such a bitch who doesn't really appreciate the fame that's being showered on her."
It was a wild double standard that they were being held to at the time.
Alex Pappademas: Once again, Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke.
Catherine Hardwicke: If you think about it, of course a huge chunk of the fan base are young women and they all wanted to be Bella. So they were just by nature, jealous of Kristen who got to be in the same room…with Edward, that would just be part of it. Nobody could be good enough because they didn't look like them.
Alex Pappademas: In 2021 a former US Weekly reporter named Jill Ishkanian told ‘The Cut’ that quote “literally no one cares about celebrities anymore” and said she knows former big-time paparazzos, guys who once pulled a thousand dollars per shot, who are now driving for Uber Eats or working for the Border Patrol.
The attention economy has pivoted. It’s driven more than ever by influencers— young people willingly and excitedly living their lives in public online, self-paparazzi-ing instead of vicariously following the exploits of big-screen celebrities.
And in a world where basically everything happens on social media, magazines and newspapers and even gossip bloggers no longer control the narrative around actual famous entertainers. If this whole Kristen Stewart thing had happened in 2022, an army of Stans would have come to her defense, like when some gamer dude from England tried to body-shame Billie Eillish in 2020 and got ratioed to death on Twitter.
Gen Z fans understand their power and woe betide you if you come at their faves with some sexist bullshit.
Rob and Kristen had to navigate a different world where old-media rules still applied. The good news is, they survived. And went on to use their Twilight clout to make the kinds of movies they actually wanted to make.
Once again, Catherine Hardwicke.
Catherine Hardwicke: They've both been able to green light incredible, interesting films. Indie films that would never have gotten made if they hadn't signed on. And if they didn't have that sensibility. So they've helped the whole Sundance movies and indie films and indie filmmakers. Huge applause for them.
Alex Pappademas: Rob has thrown himself into risky roles in films by auteurs like Claire Denis and the Safdie Brothers, he’s worked with Christopher Nolan and in a few months from now he’ll be Batman.
Basically both Pattinson and Stewart overcame any stigma lingering from the whole Twilight thing by turning out to be really good at acting.
As we’re making this show, Kristen seems to be on track to win an Oscar for her starring role in Spencer, Pablo Larrain’s film about Princess Diana, who died in 1997 of injuries sustained in a car crash while fleeing the paparazzi.
Spencer is a horror movie about what it’s like to be a princess.
But it’s hard to watch it without feeling like it’s also at least a little bit about what it was like to be Kristen Stewart during the Twilight years.
At one point, the movie’s thoroughly rotten Prince Charles tells her, “There has to be two of you. The real one, and the one they take pictures of.”
And earlier, Kristen-as-Diana bemoans, “I’m a magnet for madness. Other people’s madness.”
Once again, Catherine Hardwicke.
Catherine Hardwicke: Kristen, yeah that was a tough situation for her to be in. And for Rob, both of them. They really thought they signed on to an indie film with the director of 13 and Lords of Dogtown. That's what we all thought.
Alex Pappademas: Next time on the Big Hit Show!
Smut!
Randi Flannagan: Part of me felt guilty, like I was defiling Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy or some shit. Whatever, though, everybody fucks. Sex is the great equalizer. And scene.
Alex Pappademas: Songcraft!
“At what point do you progress to just saying, "Okay, I'm going to write an entire musical"?
Jasmyne Peck: Yeah. If I were reviewing it for a playbill, I would maybe stick it under the table in terms of off, off, off, off, off Broadway.
Alex Pappademas: And Sheen!
Shandra: I was on my phone for the entire movie because I just didn't want to be involved. And then I heard a voice.
And I just looked up and there he was. And it was Michael Sheen in his full vampire glory. And I was so magnetized to him.
CREDITS
From Higher Ground, this is The Big Hit Show.
It’s written and hosted by me, Alex Pappademas, and produced by Western Sound.
Colin McNulty is our showrunner.
Producers are: Sabrina Fang, Lori Galarreta, and Taylor Jones. Our production assistant is Stella Hartmann.
Alex MacInnis is our composer, sound designer and mix engineer. Savannah Wright is our fact checker. Our theme is composed by Dan Leone.
The Executive Producer is Ben Adair.
Executive producers for Higher Ground are: Dan Fierman, Anna Holmes, Mukta Mohan, and Janae Marable.
Executive producers for Spotify are: Daniel Ek, Dawn Ostroff, Courtney Holt and Julie McNamara.
Special thanks to ….
Joe Paulsen, Eric Spiegelman, and Jenna Levin.