Movies and tourism and touristification

After the movie Sideways, featuring a journey of a couple friends in the wine country not of Napa or Sonoma, but Santa Barbara, tourism skyrocketed, and the local tourism agency created a wine tour-trail based on the movie. See "Sideways: Wine Country movie has tourism only headed up" and "Have Movie, Will Travel" from the American Way airline magazine.

- Touristification
- Sideways, The Winery Tour

In today's Seattle Times, Emerson Richards writes in "Don't let 'Twilight' suck the life out of Forks" about his worries that Forks, Washington, featured in the Twilight series of vampire stories, could get wrecked by people going to find what doesn't exist (vampires, werewolves, Bella, Edward, etc.) and the town being made over in response, in order to maintain appeal to tourists. From the article:

The tourists going to Forks are choosing to do so not for the real, natural beauty and sincere character of the town, but rather to try to relive or recreate or be a part of fictional vampire love affairs. This is yet another marker that our society is choosing escapism. Art as "Twilight" series author Stephanie Meyer has called her artistically and intellectually bankrupt pulp fiction — should inspire and beget more art, not the commercialization, and therefore, degradation of genuine America

Parents should not send their children to Forks until they can appreciate it for what it is. Do not let Forks become disingenuous. It is not the home of Edward and Bella. It is not a land protected by Native American werewolves. Do not turn this honest town into another Silver City, where the only remnants of the advertised Wild West past lay alongside the bones buried in the Comstock Cemetery in the desert outside of town.

Forks is purer than that. Forks has its own natural enchantments. Forks is what is left of true America. It is America without Starbucks, America without Disney and without superficiality.

Forks is all that is right with America set in beautiful landscapes of rock, tree and moss. And that is why Forks should be visited.

Please, do not let Forks suck!