Have you heard the rumors that the production of New Moon has been stopped because Stephenie Meyer is being sued for plagerism?  Is it true?  Are they not going to finish the movie?

Some days when we open our mailbox, it’s quite a surprise.  We were innudated with requests about this story that is circulating that New Moon production is being halted.  What?  We were pretty certain we went to bed last night and everything was just fine.  Let’s figure out what’s going on.

The Evidence

A quick Google search revealed over 29,000 results on this subject.  It appears, however, that the rumor originated with a website called Max-Dan-Wiz.com with an article dated April 10, 2009.

Production Halted on Twilight Sequel

Allegations of plagerism halt production of popular movie sequel.

Hollywood, CA (Associated Press) Production on the hit sequel to the popular vampire series Twilight have been halted among allegations of plagerism by young author, Stephenie Meyer.

According to sources, Meyer has been accused of stealing the idea for her popular Twilight series of novels for young adults and teenagers from her college roommate, Heidi Stanton. Stanton, 36, of Salt Lake City, Utah, attended Brigham Young University during the early 1990’s and was for a time during their sophmore year roommates at a campus dormitory with the alleged author, Meyer.

The Twilight novels have sold over 42 million copies worldwide, and have been translated into 37 languages across the globe. Meyer who claims the premise for her popular vampire series came to her in a dream in June of 2003. Just three short months later she had completed the entire novel with very little to no previous writing experience….[the rest of the story at the source]

….No word on when or if production will resume for New Moon. Requests for interviews with Ms. Meyer or her representatives went unanswered Tuesday evening.

The story was picked up and repeated everywhere.  And all of them quote the same article.  No additional information or sources were listed.  So where did the information come from?

The blog quick clearly says that the story comes from Associated Press.  The AP is a very well respected international news source.  A quick search at their site however, shows no such story.  Nothing under “New Moon”.  Nothing about Stephenie Meyer being sued.  Clearly, the story didn’t originate there.

In addition, the article was published on Tuesday.  Filming has been continuing throughout the week.  We know for certain, for instance, that they were filming on Friday overnight, as fans got pictures with the cast after waiting all evening.  The story, including photos for the set, were posted on vancityallie.com. 

The Verdict

We could go on about why this story isn’t true.  The style of writing is not regular AP style.  It is unlikely that a college roommate of Stephenie Meyer would not have heard of the books until recently.  But in the end, the fact that the original blog quotes the story as coming from the AP, when it clearly did not is enough for us. 

The folks over at Twilight Lexicon appear to have also investigated the story and come to the same conclusion.  The Lexicon were able to contact Summit Entertainment who they report said the following about filming being halted:

“This story is certainly NOT true.  Please let your readers know.”

Well, it’s very nice to hear something from an official source.  We note that this is not some simple rumor being repeated or gossip gone awry.  This is a clear and deliberate hoax.  The production on New Moon has definitely not been halted.  BUSTED.

 Update

On April 21st, Stephenie Meyer issued a statement her website addressing the rumors.  No big surprise, there isn’t a scintilla of truth to them:

…. instead of commenting on happy things (which I admit I should have done a week ago; I was waiting for things to slow down for a day, silly me!), I’m commenting on ridiculous internet rumors so that my publicist’s day will be just a little bit better.

I am not being sued. No one has contacted me or my publisher to inform either of us that I’m being sued. I never had a roommate named Heidi. There is no professor in the BYU English department named Dr. Peter Benton (though there is a character on ER by that name). And most of all, I began writing Twilight exactly the way I’ve told people in countless interviews and events for the past six years: I had a cool dream, I wrote it down, writing it down was really fun, so I kept writing until I had a whole book.

The sad thing about this silly situation is that so many legitimate news outlets reported it without doing any research at all to determine if there was any truth to the story. And at least two of these facts are really, really easy to confirm. Particularly, the one about the BYU professor. A simple on-line search can give you that information. Also, a quick call to my publisher would have cleared up the whole lawsuit story. (Kudos to the fansites who did their due diligence and debunked this rumor days ago.)

I guess the moral of the story is that-big surprise-you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. Seems like it’s April Fool’s Day every day on-line.

Tags: new moon

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Busted, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.