EXCLUSIVE: So the rumors are true. I’ve confirmed that Summit Entertainment is taking Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke off the sequel in this big new franchise. No doubt my news will speed up the studio’s announcement, and Summit will surely scramble to spin this as all going down amicably along the lines that she “couldn’t fit the film into her time frame”. But this terrible news for Hardwicke comes just as she and the Twilight cast are on their European press tour. No doubt, tomorrow’s interviews in France will now focus entirely on what, if anything, Catherine did to deserve this treatment. This also could blow up into a scandal for Summit if it chooses a male director over Hardwicke, whose Twilight easily beat Mimi Leder’s 1998 Deep Impact box office gross as the biggest opener for a female director. That was a record embraced by Hollywood feminists as a sign of growing gal power. Now Hardwicke’s career will surely be damaged by this very public firing because, even though the pic was skewered by critics, it is already a $160M low-cost blockbuster. Summit has started preparing the sequel New Moon, based on Meyer’s second book in the series, and, to contain costs, the studio is considering making third book Eclipse back to back).

The word from inside Summit is that Hardwicke, the acclaimed Thirteen director, “was ‘difficult’ and ‘irrational’ during the making of Twilight,” one insider explains to me. “That doesn’t mean anything when you’re talking about a filmmaker because they all are, but still…” (Indeed, Joe Roth and Sony kept saying those things about Julie Taymor on Across The Universe. Yet she made a cult classic and is now directing Marvel/Sony’s Spider-Man for Broadway.) From another of my sources, “Summit didn’t like her. They’re saying the DP [director of photography] Elliot Davis is the one responsible for the film’s sumptuous visual look, that the editor Nancy Richardson had to save the film in post-production, and Summit thought Hardwicke’s [CAA] agent Beth Swofford was alternately ineffectual and hysterical [when it came to controlling her client].”

In fact, I’m told that the studio has even had quiet talks with other CAA directors for the last week. “And Swofford never told Hardwicke about that and that she was about to get kicked to the gutter,” an insider tells me. “To add insult to injury, Hardwicke can now look forward to being grilled by the press for days on end, in front of the cast, about why she’s getting shit-canned.”

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What do Pattinson and Edward have in common? “I always get carried away when I’m kissing people,” Pattinson quipped. “I think you’re making their night right now,” Hardwicke joked.

For all the swooning, declarations of love, and marriage proposals proffered last night, it would have been easy to imagine oneself in the midst of a French restaurant on Valentine’s Day — instead of the gray-walled mezzanine of a New York City Apple store. But that’s just the effect Twilight star Robert Pattinson has on his rabid teen — and adult — fans, some of whom waited in line for more than 12 hours to be dazzled by the heartthrob during a Q&A session with Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke.

I’ve been to enough Twilight events to know what to expect: screaming girls — lots of them. Though this wasn’t my first time at the vampire rodeo, even I was worried about one young Twilight-hoodie-bedecked teen sitting behind me, who was shaking so violently I thought she might go in to convulsions. And as if to work her and her fellow acolytes into even more of a frenzy, the 22-year-old Pattinson arrived a fashionable 15 minutes late — and with his signature tousled tresses covered by a gray beanie (a development that left me a wee bit disappointed). However, it took just one shy “hello” from the Brit for any tardy transgressions to be quickly forgotten.

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I added more pictures from Rome Film Festival

- Twilight Photocall at Rome Film Festival – October 30, 2008 x46
- Twilight Premiere at Rome Film Festival – October 30, 2008 x22

I’ve added HQ versions from the Rome Festival Photoshoot pictures and HQ Stills

Rome Film Festival x06 (HQ)
Twilight Stills (HQ)

Preview: