CoachesAid.com - High School Sports

By RON NEWBERRY

CoachesAid.com Washington Content Coordinator

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KALAMA – The wild hair didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Nor did his pale complexion.

When Rachael Dove was approached by a slender, handsome young man in the hallway at Kalama High School, she didn’t think much about it.

“He came up and said ‘Hi.’ He asked me how I was doing,” Dove recalled.

Most teenage girls would have been reduced to a puddle of goo at the thought of standing face to face with heartthrob Robert Pattinson. But Rachael Dove didn’t see it that way.

“I thought he was a new kid,” she said. “I thought he was in Running Start.”

The memory of that March, 2008 encounter brought out laughter from Dove as she retold the story while watching her sister’s Kalama High School basketball team practice this week.

At that time, when a Hollywood movie crew took over this small town, high school campus for two weeks, only a few knew what “Twilight” was all about.

Fast forward 20 months and “Twilight” is a global phenomenon, which has attracted legions of fans young and old and generated nearly $400 million at the box office. The second of four movies in the series, “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” is out in theaters this week, which has started a buzz all over again at Kalama High School.

“It is exciting especially when you see how big the Twilight saga is getting,” said Mike Hamilton, principal of Kalama Middle/High School, which share the same brick building. “It comes back to the year they were here. We saw all the actors. We got to meet the directors. It was a matter of pride. It was very exciting.

“People are wanting to know if the school is going to be in the next movie.”

Hamilton doesn’t expect it to be. At least not in any fashion close to the first movie, where Kalama High School played a starring role as a believable stand-in for Forks High School.

Forks, with its penchant for rain, is the vampire-friendly setting of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” books. The books revolve around a high school girl, Bella Swan, and her vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen.

Because of Forks’ remote location, movie producers opted instead to shoot “Twilight” in greater Portland, Ore., and Southwest Washington. Production of the second and third movies, “New Moon” and “Eclipse” were moved to Vancouver, B.C., but Hamilton believes there’s a chance that Kalama High School could make a cameo appearance.

“They shot a lot of footage the last time they were here,” Hamilton said. “I’d assume they still have plenty of footage. They did bring in a professional photographer (over the summer) to shoot a day of stills. I think what will happen is they’re probably going to green screen some of that.”

No matter what the future holds, Kalama High School will be forever linked to the original movie.

Many of the movie’s key scenes are shot in the school’s parking lot, the courtyard and a grassy hill that leads to the woods where Bella confronts Edward about being a vampire.

The gym scene where Bella conks a classmate in the head with a volleyball is shot in the Kalama High School main gym, which was transformed to appear like the one at Forks with a blue and gold Spartans logo, banners and scoreboard. The Kalama wrestling room was used for the movie’s hospital scenes.

Today, the gym is back to normal, decked out in the Kalama Chinooks’ orange and black school colors with a new scoreboard paid for by money “Twilight” producers donated to the school.

At basketball practice this week, players didn’t seem to care that they were running drills on the same gym floor used in a major Hollywood production.

“It’s not a big deal,” girls basketball coach Ron Palmer said. “I haven’t even seen the movie.”

“At first, everyone was like “Woooo,” sophomore Lisa Dove said. “They didn’t shoot ‘New Moon’ here, so it’s kind of over. But it’s still cool.”

“Twilight” mania still has a strong pulse at Kalama.

There are signs and posters around school and a display near the main office advertises custom “Twilight” T-shirts that bear an image of the high school, Bella’s truck and a borrowed quote from the movie poster “Things will never the same.”

“We’re known as Twilight kids,” ninth grader Tommy Phillips said. “There are people from MySpace. They add me. They say, ‘Oh you’re from Kalama. That’s where Twilight was filmed.’”

Most outsiders, however, seem to have no clue.

“Nobody believes me,” seventh grader Morgan Loree said. “I tell people the movie was filmed here. They’re like, ‘Right.’”

“A lot of people don’t believe it was filmed at my high school,” said Rachael Dove, who graduated from Kalama in 2008.

“Kalama is like a blip,” said her sister, Lisa Dove. “Even people from Vancouver don’t know where Kalama is.”

That’s something the town is trying to change – with “Twilight” possibly playing a role.

Last summer, hard-core “Twilight” fans from all over the world stopped in Kalama to visit the high school campus. “Twilighters,” as they're called, still trickle into town and are expected to continue as new movies are released, especially during the summer months.

“I’m hoping we get footage in the new movie,” said Melissa Wilson, a middle school teacher and basketball coach. “Just a little bit. That’s all it’s going to take and people will come.”

Kalama’s downtown business district has been hit hard by the recession and recent fires. The chamber of commerce is looking for a boost and is exploring ways to capitalize on the town’s connection to “Twilight,” perhaps taking part in some sort of themed celebration.

They better hurry. There are new rumors circulating that filming of the fourth and final movie of the series, “Breaking Dawn,” will return to the Portland area. Shooting of that movie is expected to start in March, 2010.

Ron Newberry can be reached at ronnewberry@coachesaid.com

You can check out the town of Kalama website to learn a little more about its connection to Twilight.