CBA recently had a chance to interview York Baur, the producer of Twilight in Forks, the 90-minute documentary video released in conjunction with Twilight Saga: New Moon on DVD.
Of course I was anxious as I sat waiting in Borders for York Baur to show up for our interview. He is the producer of Twilight in Forks, the video Summit is marketing along with the New Moon DVD. Who wouldn’t be nervous! The moment York and his teenage son, Alex, walked right over to me, I knew this would be, not just OK, but fun. He had cheated, he said. He looked me up on the Internet.
York and I had “met” months ago, when they were still self publishing Twilight in Forks. I was curious, how it all had changed. “We weren’t pursuing anything,” York said. In one whirlwind trip to LA, they were on MTV, chatted with Larry Carroll, and stopped in at Summit to give them a heads up about the venture. “Two weeks later, there was a deal in place.” York had high praise for Summit’s team, especially the Home Entertainment Division who he worked with, calling Summit the “antithesis” of everything people hate about Hollywood. “Summit is unique in many respects,” he commented, “but in particular because they are not afraid to take risks and try things, and be entrepreneurial. I think that is what has enabled New Moon to outsell Twilight in a year when DVD sales in the aggregate are down year over year, and that doesn’t happen by accident.”
My response to the video was to tear up in several places, as I relived my pilgrimage to Forks/Mecca, but I knew not everyone responded that way. “We got interviewed by the wall street journal!” Baur said. “But you know, they are journalists as opposed to a deeply personal reaction like yours and so it’s been more fun to watch twitter with the little bursts of “OMG, I really want to go!” Alex chimed in here, obviously proud and happy for his dad, “My dad called me into the office and you can just see the tweets flying by.” “Which is another good sign,” added York . “And you can see Portuguese flying by and Spanish and German. Its been fun because it is global. I followed a young lady in Chile -how she reacted to it- and I wished her well with all the earthquakes. She replied back, ‘Yes, we’ll get through it and this is helpful.’ So it is just fun to see that we are making people happy. Also someone in Brazil had a launch party for our movie. I have a picture of it. When people are having a launch party half way around the world… There are always haters, who don’t get it, who don’t get Twilight. Like John Granger, said in the video, ‘It is about people having this amazing literary experience.’ Who cares if Stephen King doesn’t get it?” Whether Forks is Mecca or, as suggested in the film, Eden, when people say “I came for Twilight, but I will come back for Forks”, York’s mission has been accomplished. He said he feels lucky to have the “lens of Twilight” to be able to show what an incredibly unique part of the world it is.
York told me they used a different technique from say, Michael Moore, in making the video. “Did you notice there is no narration, only the people talk?” York pointed out. “That was important for two reasons. First, it is more engaging if it is the people telling the story and secondly, we wanted the people to tell their story. That was important to us, to let everybody that’s in the film tell it in their own words“
Listening to the people tell their stories, like those of the Quileute tribe being derived from the wolves, one realizes there are an awful lot of co-incidences between the book and the real Forks area. For instance, Roy Black, an honest-to-goodness, real Quileute, talks about their legends in the video. For York, Charlene Leppell’s stories about the real Cullens and the “Cullen” house are the most intriguing. Charlene, a life-long resident of Forks, tells of a real Cullen family, who lived on the Quileute prairie. Cool, huh? Better yet, is the story of the Rixon house, the real “Cullen” house, not the Bed and Breakfast one in town. While researching the area, Stephenie Meyer came across a real estate ad for the Rixon house and used the information from that ad as a the basis for the Cullen House in the book. Little did she know how close the house she would go on to describe in the book would be to what that real house was. There are pictures in York’s video from a fire, which would later destroy the house on the very day the Twilight DVD was released. The Baur connection to the Rixon house goes back to fishing on the Sol Duc river, that runs through the property, when their kids were young. It’s way back off the highway, in the forest, over an old falling apart bridge, in a setting the perfectly mirrors what you would imagine the Cullen house to be. “All which Stephenie Meyer had no way to know – I mean she saw a real estate listing. She wouldn’t have been able to feel it, because she wasn’t there. If you ever see it you’ll see the setting is just spooky, not in a horror film sort of way, It is like the history of the forest is right there. It is incredible.”
It is all pretty incredible and we are so happy for you, York, and your company!
If you haven’t check out Twilight in Forks, you need to. (You have to see the real biology lab and the real biology teacher at Fork High!) Thank you York, Alex, and company for making this video so everyone around the world can feel a bit of what it is like to make that pilgrimage to Forks, Washington.
Joyce – A big thank you to you and all of the great fans, the towns people of Forks, and the Quileute Tribe for your support of our project! Hope you all can make it to the real town some day soon…
[...] Bauer, producer of Twilight in Forks whom we interviewed on CBA recently, announced that additional footage from Forks that didn’t make it into the video will be [...]
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