UTICA — A star of the “Twilight” vampire movie series is due to sign autographs at the debut of Utica’s new weekend-long Halloween-festival in late October, city Mayor David Roefaro said Monday.

The “Fright Nights” festival, presented by the city and Keeler Productions, will take place in Hanna Park outside City Hall on Friday, Oct. 22, from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. and on Saturday, Oct. 23, from 4 p.m. until 1 a.m.

Peter Facinelli, who played vampire doctor Carlisle Cullen in the latest “Twilight” movie, will sign autographs from 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 23, until midnight. The festival will also feature live music, local foods, carnival rides, games, and local vendors.

Friday’s events will include a beer and wine happy hour from 5 to 8 p.m. and a performance by the nationally acclaimed “Disco Divas.” Tim Creaser, a Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond sound-a-like, will perform both nights, and Dashboard Nixon will perform Saturday.

Costume contests are slated for both children and adults on Saturday, and a canned food drive organized by APAC Customer Services will benefit local food pantries.

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Yahoo!’s most recent “Who Knew?” video features Twilight series author Stephenie Meyer, and it reports that, where last year is concerned, she became the “biggest brightspot for the industry” in the face of overwhelming sales declines.

The number one topseller for the year, according to the report, was New Moon, and it was followed by Eclipse, Twilight, and Breaking Dawn.

New Moon was published in 2006, and it hit the best-seller list almost right away. Chances are, its accelerated popularity in 2009 has something to do with the fact that The Twilight Saga: New Moon was filmed and released to theaters that same year.

Pretty good for books being celebrated at Banned Books Week for being among the “most-challenged”!

Source/Twilight Examiner | Via/Twilightish

EXCLUSIVE: Maggie Grace will play a new vampire threat to Kristen Stewart’s Bella in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn. Grace, who played Liam Neeson’s in-distress daughter in Taken, will play the role of Irina in the final installments of the Stephenie Meyer novel, which director Bill Condon is directing in two separate films.

Irina is a member of the Denali coven, considered cousins to the Cullen clan as the only other “vegetarian” vampire group. When Irina blames the Cullens for the death of her lover, her actions set in motion a terrifying chain of events. The first of two pictures will be released by Summit Entertainment on November 18, 2011, followed by the finale on November 16, 2012. Melissa Rosenberg is writing both scripts, and Wyck Godfrey, Karen Rosenfelt and Meyer are producing. Grace just completed the Dwayne Johnson-starrer Faster for CBS Pictures and re-teamed with Taken producer Luc Besson in Lockout, the outer space saga that stars Guy Pearce as a wrongly convicted man offered his freedom if he can rescue the president’s daughter (Grace) from an outer space prison taken over by violent inmates. Grace is also waiting to reprise in Taken 2. She is repped by UTA and Global Creative.

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Oh I’m so happy about this. I loved her as Shannon on Lost, and in Taken!

How far would Kellan Lutz go for the rescue animals he loves? As it turns out, he’d happily get naked for them. “Why not?” he told PEOPLEPets.com Saturday night at PETA’s 30th anniversary gala and Humanitarian Awards in Los Angeles. “We were just talking about that. We have to see if Calvin Klein will let me do it. We could have a collaboration.”

The Twilight hunk — who starred, fully clothed, in a PETA ad earlier this year — won a humanitarian award Saturday for his dedication to animal adoption. And nowhere is his love for rescues more evident than in his devotion to his own dogs, Kevin and Kola.

“They’re amazing,” he said. “I took them to Runyon Canyon [on Friday], which I haven’t done in the longest time. Kevin’s so small, and he keeps up, but they’re definitely pooped.”

Read more: Here | Via/Twilightish | Via/KellanLutzOnline

Let the countdown begin. Cameras are pretty close to rolling on Breaking Dawn.

“We start sometime in October and go all the way through to late April,” Kellan Lutz says. “I just did a [wardrobe fitting] and a contact lenses test.”

As for that much anticipated, hard-to-imagine birthing scene…

Lutz cracked, “I think they should show it and have Emmett in the background laughing.”

Joking aside, Lutz says he knows what director Bill Condon has planned for the potentially gory sequence. “I love the way that they’re showing it,” he said. “I really thought that was going to be really a tough thing to show.”

Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg recently told us the birth of baby Renesmee won’t necessarily be gruesome. “I don’t think it’s about the amount of blood you show,” she said. “It’s about the intensity of it. It’s on their faces. It’s all from Bella’s point of view when you’re seeing what’s going. It should feel visceral. I think it’s going to be pretty intense.”

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Although Twilighters will certainly miss The Twilight Saga cast after both Breaking Dawn films finish in theaters in 2012, fans may miss Nikki Reed the most since Reed recently revealed that she will go behind the camera to start a different career.

According to HollywoodLife, Breaking Dawn star Nikki Reed recently revealed that she wants to branch off into other areas of the film industry after Breaking Dawn wraps. At the L.A. premiere of Last Day of Summer, Reed recently admitted her potential future plans after The Twilight Saga. “I directed a music video a few months ago, which was really awesome, and is a direction I want to move in. [I want to do more] directing, producing – just creating. I feel like this industry has so much to offer and at times it’s so easy to just get stuck in one category and, to be honest, that category is really full right now.”

Source | Via/Twilightish

The Sacramento Bee recently got a chance to speak with Chris Wolstenholme, the bassist for Muse, about the band’s growing popularity in the United States and what effect Twilight has had on them?

How much did appearing on the “Twilight” soundtracks help your popularity in the States?

It really helped. I think in this day and age when people don’t go out and buy as many records, you use things like that to expose yourself to people who don’t know the band. It caused more of a buzz, and more people came out to see us live, and now it is sort of catching up. We are playing in arenas over here, and we are really enjoying it. I think that is what we always wanted but we thought we could never have.

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As we are going into Banned Books Week it’s worth taking notice that The Twilight Series is once again taking the honor of being one of the ALA’s ten most frequently challenged books for 2009.

The “Twilight” series, first published in 2005, is featured by the American Library Association for Banned Books Week, which runs this year from Sept. 25 to Oct. 2.

One of the most popular fictional series of the past five years, “Twilight” has the keen distinction of also being one of the American Library Association’s Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2009. Writing about the supernatural is a surefire way to find your books banned. Fantasy, vampires magic, the supernatural and even science-fiction books are grouped in with Satanism, the occult and witchcraft by those who attempt to have the books removed from library shelves.

Vampires are easy targets for book banning, as the banning of the “Vampire Academy” in Texas proves. Even with its vast popularity and cross-marketing machine (from books to movies, game boards and school supplies), the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer has been challenged and either banned or returned to school library bookshelves.

Read the entire article on Yahoo Here

Via/TwilightersAnonymous

Wait, what?! That’s right. Twilight Producer Mark Morgan gave Hollywood Life the low down on what almost happened to your favorite vampires. In his own words, “[The fans] would have killed us.

“Even if you haven’t seen the Twilight flicks or read the series, you probably still know that the plot revolves around the love story between Edward Cullen and Bella Swan. But before Summit bought the rights to the books, the original script swapped the brooding romance for non-stop action. At the time, studios didn’t think Bella’s endless lovesickness would interest anyone. Instead, the studio wanted to turn Bella into a vampire in the first movie and kill off her father.

“We went shopping to every studio around, but everyone passed,” Morgan told Hollywood Life. “Finally Summit said ‘let’s do it.’ It was a total blessing.

“Before long, Twilight became an international bestseller and Summit realized they had a blockbuster on their hands. A new script was written to appeal to the rabid fan base.

“I mean, one of their drafts literally had a Korean FBI agent who was hunting and tracking vampires across the coast. There was SWAT in the trees and literally it was like, ‘Red leader, read leader one,′ and the vampires were picking them out of the woods.

“Just imagine if the original script had gone into production! The world might never have seen Taylor Lautner’s abs, and Robert Pattinson would just be that guy who played Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter.

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Summit Entertainment, the studio in charge of the massively popular “Twilight” vampire saga has announced that the two part finale “Breaking Dawn” will not be shot in 3D. The stars of the film have mixed opinions on the matter.

Kristen Stewart felt that shooting the films in 3D would offer viewers the chance to see the world through the eyes of a vampire and open up the story more to the audience. Taylor Lautner on the other hand felt that a cautious approach should be adopted. He felt 3D shouldn’t be widely applied to all films and should help bring a story to life.

Despite other studios and filmmakers rushing to film everything in 3D to meet the demand of the recent craze, Summit has chosen not to shoot the two part finale using 3D cameras. The studio has not however ruled out converting the project to 3D in post-production.

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