New Moon Premiere

LOS ANGELES — Exactly 12 months ago, Kris­ten Stew­art and Robert Pat­tin­son were sur­prised to be greeted by throngs of eager fans of the novel “Twi­light” at the pre­miere of the big-screen adaptation.

What a dif­fer­ence a year makes.

The actors unveiled the sequel — “The Twi­light Saga: New Moon” — at the same loca­tion Mon­day night in the West­wood neigh­bor­hood of Los Ange­les. But this time they knew what was coming.

“I’m not as scared as I was last year,” said Stew­art, despite a brief touch-and-go moment as she signed auto­graphs. “At some point, the secu­rity guy said, ‘This is very unsafe.’ And I was like, ‘Uh.’ Other than that, every­thing was cool.”

Pat­tin­son, who plays vam­pire Edward Cullen in this lat­est adap­ta­tion of author Stephe­nie Meyer’s pop­u­lar series, said this year’s crowd of thou­sands of scream­ing fans was larger than the 2008 turnout.

“And it seems dif­fer­ent to me because we have done this world tour in the last week and it has just been unbe­liev­able in every sin­gle city,” he said. “It is about 10 times big­ger than any other city in the world.”

Some “twi-hards” __ as they call them­selves __ arrived as early as Thurs­day after­noon to secure a place in line for tick­ets allow­ing them to watch the stars’ arrivals on the red car­pet. The 800 avail­able tick­ets were all dis­trib­uted by Mon­day morn­ing, but the line still stretched for blocks well after lunchtime.

Nicole Zamora, 36, was sixth in line after get­ting to West­wood on Thurs­day after­noon. She and her three sis­ters wore “New Moon” T-shirts they’d made for the occa­sion and said they spent the week­end “read­ing, lis­ten­ing to the iPod and try­ing to sleep — any­thing to pass the time.”

Christina Fuentes and four of her friends trav­eled from New Jer­sey for the “New Moon” pre­miere. The 24-year-old wore vam­pire teeth (“They just clip on,” she said) and car­ried a home­made sign that read, “We flew in from NJ! We’ve been camp­ing out for three days just to see you!” She pasted her air­line board­ing pass to the poster as proof.

Scores of other fans — mostly young women — crowded onto street cor­ners near the Mann Vil­lage and Bruin the­aters, site of the pre­miere. They sat on beach chairs, dis­played home­made signs and wore T-shirts pro­claim­ing their alle­giance to either the hand­some vam­pire played by Pat­tin­son or his were­wolf rival, Tay­lor Lautner.

Laut­ner, who rises to head­liner sta­tus in “New Moon,” said he was also amazed by Monday’s fan response.

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