The Perks of Being a Wallflower is an upcoming Stephen Chbosky's indie that is definitely getting bigger and bigger every day. Of course, you already guess that we're here for a little casting update, because according to the latest reports, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World star, Johnny Simmons has joined the project that already stars Emma Watson, Logan Lerman, Nina Dobrev and Mae Whitman. We call that a great team!
Chbosky wrote the screenplay from his own 1999 novel that soon became one of the top ten most-banned books by the American Library Association.
John Malkovich is independently producing Chbosky's project 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.
Watson stars as Charlie's friend Sam, while Whitman is set to star as Mary Elizabeth, “the tattooed vegetarian first girlfriend of Charlie”. At this moment, still no details about Simmons' character, but we'll keep an eye on it!
A little description of the novel once again: “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.”
