Stephen Chbosky‘s novel, first published in 1999 and titled
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, soon became one of the top ten most-banned books by the American Library Association.
Now we learned that Summit Entertainment is in talks to pick up the project, with plans to begin shooting this June.
Chbosky himself plans to write and direct it, and
Emma Watson and
Logan Lerman attached to the project.
John Malkovich is independently producing The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which tells the story of a teen who assumes the alias “Charlie” (Lerman), and describes the various events of his high school life in letters to an anonymous person.
Emma Watson would play Charlie's friend Sam.
Here's a full description of the story:
“Charlie, the wallflower of the title, goes through a veritable bath of bathos in his 10th grade year, 1991.
The novel is formatted as a series of letters to an unnamed “friend,” the first of which reveals the suicide of Charlie's pal Michael. Charlie's response – valid enough – is to cry. The crying soon gets out of hand, though – in subsequent letters, his father, his aunt, his sister and his sister's boyfriend all become lachrymose.
Charlie has the usual dire adolescent problems – sex, drugs, the thuggish football team – and they perplex him in the usual teen TV ways.
Into these standard teenage issues Chbosky infuses a droning insistence on Charlie's supersensitive disposition. Charlie's English teacher and others have a disconcerting tendency to rhapsodize over Charlie's giftedness, which seems to consist of Charlie's unquestioning assimilation of the teacher's taste in books.
In the end we learn the root of Charlie's psychological problems, and we confront, with him, the coming rigors of 11th grade, ever hopeful that he'll find a suitable girlfriend and increase his vocabulary”.
With every new update on this story – we'll be back!
