So far, audiences seem sold on the film, sight unseen. Twilight cost $37 million to make, but judging from the groundswell of support from Meyer’s fans—many of them teenage girls—producers should have little trouble recouping their costs, especially considering the ensemble cast of young male heartthrobs they’ve assembled. Meyer may not be J.K. Rowling, but she’s certainly no slouch. The final book in the series, Breaking Dawn, sold about 1.3 million copies on the day it was released last August (about a sixth of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ first day). Translation rights to the books have been sold in thirty-three different countries, and the second, New Moon, spent thirty-three weeks on the New York Times children’s best-seller list. Vampire stories have some staying power—especially vampire stories about lovelorn kids.

In adapting the first book, Hardwicke and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg opted to stay faithful to Meyer’s narrative. (Probably a wise decision, considering how rabid the readership is.) Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is an average teen living in Phoenix who decides to move to her father’s house in Forks, Washington, a dreary place where it rains three-quarters of the year, to give her mother and her new stepfather time to travel. At school, Bella meets Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), an alluring and initially distant presence, whom she begins to suspect is a vampire. As it turns out, Edward belongs to a coven of beautiful vegetarian vamps—a family of sorts, brought together by a shared mandate to drink animal blood instead of the human kind.

The two begin a relationship, fraught with all the usual, uh, interfaith difficulties. Meanwhile, a rival group of equally beautiful but less friendly bloodsuckers descends on the town, one of whom decides to hunt Bella for sport. The chase is on, and it’s up to Edward to save her. “It’s just such a great metaphor for unrequited love,” says Rosenberg. “Bella feels very normal, and that can be hard when she’s surrounded by these modelesque figures, who are so difficult to relate to physically. It’s the same for any kid growing up in L.A., when you’re surrounded by models and actors.”

Perhaps energized by the beauty-myth subtext and the allure of forbidden love, Meyer’s fan base has proven to be an active one. Groups like Twilighters, Twi-Hards, and even Twilight Moms have organized online, and in July they flocked to San Diego’s Comic-Con, where Meyer, Hardwicke, Rosenberg, and members of the principal cast showed footage and took questions from the crowd—at least when they could be heard over the screams. The response to actors Robert Pattinson, Cam Gigandet, and Taylor Lautner was “a little like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan,” Rosenberg recalls. “It was insanity.” The coming-of-age story’s sequels have yet to be planned, but given the reaction so far, Hardwicke is sanguine about her chances of revisiting the series. “I mean,” she says, “who wouldn’t want to be bitten on the neck by a handsome vampire?”

TWILIGHT IS OUT IN NOVEMBER 2008 FROM SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT

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Taylor Lautner’s smile arrives in the hotel lobby before he does — a huge white movie-star grin.

The 16-year-old Hudsonville native has a lot to smile about.

Monday, he’ll be on TV in one of NBC’s most-hyped shows of the new season, a spy drama called “My Own Worst Enemy,” starring Christian Slater.

The buzz couldn’t be bigger for his November movie, “Twilight,” based on the phenomenally popular teen vampire books by Stephenie Meyer.

Last month, his cool quotient went up when he was a presenter at MTV’s Video Music Awards, appearing with “Twilight” co-stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.

As Kimberly writes on the Taylor Lautner fan Web site: “Taylor is SO SO SO SO SO HOT!”

Taylor hails from Hudsonville but moved to Los Angeles in 2003 to pursue an acting career.

Things worked out. His big break came at age 13 when he was cast as Shark Boy in the 2005 movie “The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl.” Then he won a role in “Cheaper by the Dozen 2,” with Steve Martin and Hilary Duff.

He sat down to chat in the hotel lobby at Country Inn and Suites on 28th Street SE, where his family stayed during a recent trip to Michigan to visit family.

He’s wearing the jeans and hip T-shirt of a 16-year-old, but he has the confident self-assuredness of somebody older. Easygoing with a near constant smile, Taylor seems comfortable in his skin, although he has this disconcerting jiggly knee thing he calls “my worst habit.” He twists his hip, styled-but-messy hair with his fingers a lot as he talks.

Taylor says he’s a regular kid who loves football, movies and cake batter ice cream. He poses shirtless for teen heartthrob photos, but still says stuff like, “Oh, my goodness.”

“I’m no different than anybody else,” he shrugs.

Except girls everywhere are giddily typing, “I love him sooooo much!” and “His smile makes me melt” on Internet fan sites. He’s featured in just about every teen magazine on the stands. He’s all over YouTube.

“I try not to pay attention to it,” he says of the “Taylor is so hot” talk. “That stuff just comes with it.”

That stuff is building with the frenetic anticipation of the teen vampire film “Twilight,” which opens Nov. 21.

When Taylor auditioned for a role in the film last November, he had never heard of the book.

“My agent said, ‘You really want this — it’s a big one.’”

He auditioned, then heard they had narrowed it down to three actors to play Jacob Black, a teen werewolf.

As days and weeks passed, “I realized how big it was,” he says. “Suddenly, it was all over the Internet. I started hearing about all the hype, all the fans. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness. If I get this, it’ll be huge.’ I realized I really want this.”

Not since Harry Potter has a book-to-film project inspired so much excitement. More than 100 fan sites are devoted to the “Twilight” phenomenon, some solely about Taylor’s popular character, Jacob Black.

A month after Taylor auditioned, he got a phone call. His dad, his agent and his manager were all on the phone.

“I knew,” he says with a grin. “I was sweating, I was so excited.”

His character is introduced in the first book of the series, but isn’t huge. “I’m only in three scenes in the first movie,” he says.

But Jacob becomes a big part of the story in the books that follow, as his rivalry with vampire Edward intensifies. Which means fans already are rabid for the loyal werewolf.

Taylor was amid the frenzy at RiverTown Crossings’ Barnes & Noble in August at the midnight-release party for the final book in the “Twilight” series, “Breaking Dawn.” In town to visit family, he dropped in for a surprise visit.

As he entered the book store, he heard the buzz start: “That’s Jacob Black! It’s Jacob Black!”

“Then I heard this mom say, ‘No, that kid’s name is Taylor. He used to live across the street from me.’ And the girls said, ‘No, that’s Jacob Black.’ And the mom said, ‘No, that’s Taylor — he’s my old neighbor.’” He laughs.

“She didn’t know I was gonna be in the movie.”

He signed books for two hours.

“I didn’t realize 1,000 girls were gonna be there,” he says. He stayed at the bookstore, signing and posing for photos, until the last gleeful girl had left — at 2 a.m.

“I would feel miserable if I left and there were still 100 girls who had been waiting two hours to get my autograph,” he says.

He says nothing prepared him for the reaction at Comic-Con International in July in San Diego — the huge convention for comic books and other popular art forms — when 125,000 people tried to get into a preview of the “Twilight” film and a panel discussion with the cast. Only 6,500 fit in the auditorium.

“There were 11,000 people waiting in line for autographs,” he says, shaking his head. While he was there, he and other cast members did 52 online and radio interviews and 25 TV interviews, he says.

How does he keep from getting a big head?

Taylor laughs.

“My parents wouldn’t allow it,” he says. “That’s not the way they brought me up.”

Taylor’s dad, Dan, says as Taylor’s star rises, so does their determination to keep him grounded.

“Because of all that’s happening for him, we want him to do normal things,” Dan says. “We kept him in public school as long as we could, so he could be with his peers. We give him responsibilities at home — chores he has to do. He gets an allotted allowance and he has to budget it.

“We’re trying to teach him things, so that when he goes out on his own, he’ll be prepared.”

It’s been a crazy couple of months for the whole family, Dan says, adjusting to Taylor’s increasingly higher profile among obsessed fans as buzz builds for the “Twilight” movie. They’re doing their best, he says, to keep their son’s personal life private.

“We want to protect him,” he says. They also want to celebrate.

“We had no idea what was gonna happen,” Dan says of his son’s career. “We tell him ‘You have no idea what’s gonna happen tomorrow, so enjoy today. Have fun.’”

Early days

Taylor was born in Grand Rapids and lived on Rosewood Avenue SE until he was 4, then moved to Hudsonville with his parents Dan, a commercial airline pilot, and mom Deb, a former Herman Miller employee and now project manager for a software development company. He has a younger sister, Makena, 9.

A sports kid, he loved wrestling, football, basketball. At age 6, he started lessons at Fabiano’s Karate in Holland.

By age 7, he attended his first national karate tournament in Louisville, Ky. There, he met Mike Chat, who specialized in extreme karate, with stunts and flips. He ran a camp at UCLA and invited Taylor to attend.

“I fell in love,” he says. “By the end of the camp, I was doing aerial cartwheels with no hands.”

He trained with Chat for the next several years, earning his black belt and winning several junior world championships. Chat suggested Taylor try acting.

“He saw that I wasn’t shy, that I was confident, that I talked a lot,” Taylor says.

That you were cute?

He looks embarrassed. “Yeah, I guess.”

The Lautners would fly to California for auditions when the talent agency called.

“They’d call at 9 or 10 at night, which was 6 or 7 their time, and say, ‘We’ve got an audition tomorrow — can you be here?’ We’d leave really early in the morning and get there about noon,” Taylor says. “I’d go to the audition in the afternoon, take the red-eye back to Grand Rapids then go to school.”

They’d do that a couple of times a month. Taylor was 11.

“Then we decided, ‘This is insane,’” he says. “We can’t keep on doing this.” The family decided to move to L.A. for a month, “to try it,” he says.

“I got one call-back,” he says. “That gave me the drive to keep going.” He grins. “It happened on our very last day there.”

The next step — move there for six months. Taylor landed a Rugrats movie commercial for Nickelodeon.

“It was my first job — I was so ecstatic,” he says with a grin. “I thought, ‘This is what I’ve been waiting for.’”

The Lautners moved to L.A. five years ago.

“It was a big deal to leave,” Taylor says. “All our family was here.” His dad’s family is in Traverse City, his mom’s in Manistee. Several aunts and uncles live in Hudsonville.

“There were more auditions. I heard no, no, no, no. So many times.” He says karate helped him hang in there.

“From karate, I had the confidence and drive to push myself,” he says.

He had those traits early, says his former karate instructor and family friend Tom Fabiano, who started teaching Taylor when he was 6.

“A lot of boys that age are bouncing off the walls, but Taylor was always deliberate, focused,” says Fabiano, owner and instructor of Fabiano’s Karate in Holland. “He wasn’t a typical kid. He always worked extra hard.”

Taylor stops by to see him every time he’s in town visiting family, Fabiano says.

“He signs autographs for all the kids, poses for pictures. He’s still that well-mannered, great kid.”

Moms love him, too, Fabiano adds with a laugh.

“There was one mom here, a big ‘Twilight’ fan, and when I told her Taylor was gonna stop in she screamed, ‘I have to meet him!’”

In his first months in L.A., Taylor landed some small TV roles and voice-over work. Then, at 12, he won a starring role in the movie “The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl,” a superhero kid movie directed by Robert Rodriguez, who had directed the popular “Spy Kids” films.

“Oh, we freaked out,” Taylor says with a grin. “My whole family couldn’t sleep for, like, a week.”

When “Shark Boy” hit theaters in summer 2005, Taylor was in Canada filming “Cheaper by the Dozen 2,” playing Eliot Murtaugh, a neighbor of the Baker family. He had scenes with Steve Martin.

“That’s when I stopped looking at movie stars as movie stars, and just looked at them as people,” he says.

He returned from Canada to newfound fame as the kid star of “Shark Boy.”

“Ten-year-old boys were the ones who first recognized me,” he says. “I’d be in the store, and boys would whisper to their moms. Then the moms would say, ‘Excuse me — are you Shark Boy?”

He grins.

“I just thought it was so cool,” he says. “I couldn’t believe people wanted my picture.”

The number of fans approaching him tripled after “Cheaper by the Dozen 2,” he says. “But now, it was girls.”

At school, he says, he remained a regular kid.

“Kids still looked at me as Taylor, because they knew me from before,” he says. “You gotta remember who your friends were before you got famous.” There are people, he says, who “suddenly want to be your best friend.”

Monday night, he’ll be more famous.

In “My Own Worst Enemy,” which debuts at 10 p.m. Monday on NBC, he plays Jack Spivey, the teenage son of main character Henry Spivey, played by Christian Slater. Commercials have been hyping the show for weeks.

“My character is a star varsity soccer player,” Taylor says. “And I’m gonna be able to use some of my martial arts.” He grins. “It’ll be cool.”

He’s firmly rooted in Hollywood, “but I love coming back here,” Taylor says of Michigan. “In L.A., whatever you do for fun, you gotta spend money. Here, you go jet skiing on a lake. It’s such a fun place for me. I go fishing with one set of grandparents, I go quad riding with the other set. We go trap shooting. It’s so much fun.

“Here, people are way more down-to-earth.”

Lautner may be “just like everybody else,” but he’s movie-star guarded about his personal life.

“I date, like any teen,” he says. Girlfriend?

He laughs.

“My dad won’t let me.”

Five things to know about Taylor Lautner:

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It’s 5 p.m and Taylor Lautner is the first to arrive at the Venice, California studio for our CosmoGirl shoot. A few minutes later, his Twilight costar Kellan Lutz walks in. The guys high-five and joke about how Robert Pattinson – their other costar – is always late. By 6:30, I’m getting a little impatient because we’re still waiting for our lead vampire. Finally, Robert tiptoes in, sleepy-eyed and full of apologies, “Sorry, I overslept,” he explains in his sexy British accent.

He’s so charming that my aggravation immediately vanishes. I totally see why Kristen Stewart’s character, Bella, would want to spend an eternity with this guy, vampire or not. As the three actors change into jeans and white shirts, every girl on set finds an excuse to sneak into the dressing room, hoping to get a peek. Then – as if on cue, just around twilight – Rob, Kellan and Taylor emerge. Check out what we chatted about during the shoot.

Q: So how would you describe your three characters?
Rob: [My character] Edward is the conflicted and reluctant vampire. He’s a poet, and very deep and profound. He’s just extraordinarily troubled.
Kellan: Emmett’s the tough guy, the protector, but he’s a big old teddy bear to his little brother. He’s a goofball, but when he snaps, he’s menacing and there’s no stopping him.
Taylor: Well, in the first film, Jacob is a normal high school guy – outgoing, friendly, and loyal. I’m a lot like him in Twilight, but I’m excited to play him in the sequels as his character evolves.

Q: Are you at all similar to your characters?
Kellan: Rob is definitely Edward. He’s so complicated, so poetic… I mean, you cannot help but like this guy! I’d say I’m definitely the protector type. I have six brothers and one sister, and I got beaten up a lot because I was in the middle. But then I learned to defend myself.
Rob: Yeah, Kellan protects me all the time. It’s like having a globe around me. Really, he’s like a globe of protection!

Q: Twilight isn’t just a “vampire movie”, it’s a love story. Do you guys like romantic films?
Taylor: I really liked Enchanted. In fact, I’ve seen it five or six times.
Kellan: I like The Notebook, Tristan & Isolde, and Romeo + Juliet. [I enjoy] period pieces that aren’t just about winning the girl but are also about the struggle of class, wealth and privilege.

Q: What about horror movies?
Taylor: My friends just introduced me to how great they can be. I really liked The Hitcher, and Gothika gave me nightmares.
Rob: I don’t like that “hiding behind doors” element when suddenly it’s like “Boo!” I like the more eerie and disturbing horror flicks. One of my favorites is The Exorcist.
Kellan: I love scary movies. I think the pure gore movies are pretty funny. It doesn’t bother me to see someone get their head chopped off.

Q: Twilight’s tagline is: “When you can live forever, what do you live for?” Would you want to live for eternity?
Rob: Uh, yes, I think so, especially if I could turn it on and off. I kind of like the idea that I could see what death is like and then come back again. That sounds good to me. I want to have my cake and eat it too.
Kellan: I can’t wait for the afterlife, to spend eternity wherever it might be. But it would also be cool to live for hundreds of years and get to see how the world turns out. If I could stay 23 years old for 500 years, I’d probably take that deal.

Quotes:

Rob: I never felt like I was making a ‘vampire movie’, even when we were ripping each other’s heads off.

Taylor: I hadn’t heard of the Twilight books before the movie. Now I see girls everywhere reading them. The series is huge!

Kellan: I loved vampires growing up. I dressed up as one for Halloween three years in a row.

From Cosmo Girl – October 2008.