Chbosky had always intended to adapt the novel to film, but did not rush to do so. He was hesitant to sell the rights to the film to anyone, but eventually sold them to Mr. Mudd Productions as long as they let him write and direct the film. Filming began in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in May 2011 and lasted approximately fifty days.[2][5][6][7]
In 1991, Charlie, who has suffered from clinical depression since childhood, has been discharged from a mental health care institution. Uneasy about beginning his freshman year of high school, he is shy and only manages to make friends with his English teacher.
Charlie meets two seniors, Patrick and his stepsister Sam. After the homecoming dance, Sam and Patrick invite him to a party with their friend group. He unknowingly eats a cannabis brownie, gets high, and makes speeches to the amusement of the party-goers. He also walks in on Patrick and Brad, the high school quarterback, kissing. Patrick tells Charlie that Brad is closeted, so he agrees to keep it a secret. Charlie discloses to Sam that his best friend committed suicide the year before, making her realize that Charlie has no other friends, so she and Patrick bring Charlie into their group. On their way home, the three hear an unknown song on the radio. Sam instructs Patrick to drive through a tunnel so she can stand up in the back of the pickup while the music blasts.
Sam needs to improve her SAT scores to have a better chance of being accepted into Penn State University, so Charlie offers to tutor her. This improves her scores, and at Christmas, she gives him a vintage typewriter. They discuss relationships, and Charlie reveals he has never been kissed. Sam reveals that her first kiss was at age 11 by her father's boss. Charlie reveals that his Aunt Helen was also sexually assaulted as a child. Sam tells Charlie she wants his first kiss to be from someone who loves him, and they kiss.
At a party, Charlie trips on LSD. He cannot control his flashbacks of Aunt Helen, who died in a car crash on her way to buy him his 7th birthday gift. He ends up in the hospital after falling asleep in the snow. At a regular The Rocky Horror Picture Show performance, Sam asks Charlie to fill in for her boyfriend, Craig. Their friend Mary Elizabeth is impressed and asks him to the Sadie Hawkins dance, and they enter an unsatisfactory relationship. At a party, when Charlie is dared to kiss the prettiest girl in the room, he chooses Sam, upsetting both her and Mary Elizabeth. Patrick tells Charlie to stay away from the group for a while and Charlie sinks into depression.
Brad shows up to school with bruises on his face after his father catches him having sex with Patrick. Brad says he was jumped and beaten up. When his friends start bullying Patrick at a lunch break, he does not help him stand up for himself and calls him a "faggot". In anger, Patrick punches him, causing him to retaliate. Brad's friends beat Patrick and prevent Sam from intervening when Charlie does before blacking out. Upon recovering, he finds that he has incapacitated Brad's friends. Sam and Patrick thank Charlie, and the three become friends again.
Charlie's mental state worsens. Patrick tries to cope with what happened with Brad and kisses Charlie before immediately apologizing. Sam is accepted into Penn State, and she breaks up with Craig on prom night after learning he is cheating on her. The night before she departs, she brings Charlie to her room. They confide in each other and kiss, but when Sam touches Charlie's thigh, he experiences a flashback of his Aunt Helen, which he passes off.
After Sam leaves for college, Charlie's emotional state and flashbacks worsen. He calls his sister, who realizes he is in distress and calls the police. Charlie eyes a kitchen knife as they burst through the door and awakens in a hospital, where psychiatrist Dr. Burton brings out his repressed memories, revealing that his aunt sexually abused him as a child.
The night Charlie is released from the hospital, he is visited by Sam and Patrick. The three revisit the tunnel, having identified the song (Heroes by David Bowie), and Charlie and Sam share a kiss. Charlie stands up in the back of the truck. He acknowledges that he feels alive and that, at the moment, "we are infinite".
Chbosky incorporated both fictional ideas and personal experiences into the novel.[10] After five years with these elements in mind,[10] he had the idea of writing the novel during a difficult period in his life.[11] He was experiencing an unpleasant breakup of his own,[11] which led him to ask, "Why do good people let themselves get treated so badly?"[12] The author tried to answer the question with the sentence "we accept the love we think we deserve". This quote references the struggle of finding self love, encompassing one's life and hope for the future, and not just romantic love.[13]
The story began when Chbosky was in school, evolving from another book on which he was working.[10] In that book he wrote the sentence, "I guess that's just one of the perks of being a wallflower", which led him to realize "that somewhere in that... was the kid I was really trying to find."[10] Chbosky began writing the novel in the summer of 1996 while he was in college,[14] and within ten weeks he completed the story.[10] He rewrote it into two more drafts, concluding the published version in the summer of 1998.[14]
Charlie was loosely based on Chbosky himself. Like the novel itself, Chbosky included much of his own memories from the time he lived in Pittsburgh into the film.[15] The other characters were manifestations of people Chbosky had known throughout his life;[16] Chbosky focused on people's struggles and what they are passionate about, attempting to pin down the very nature of each of the characters.[17] The characters of Sam and Patrick were an "amalgamate and celebration" of several people Chbosky has met; Sam was based on girls who confided in him, and Patrick was "all the kids I knew who were gay and finding their way to their own identity."[15]
Shortly after the novel's release, Chbosky began to write a screenplay for it.[18] Chbosky recalled a meeting with his agent saying, "My agent said we would average a call a week, whether it was from producers optioning it or a writer or director wanting to adapt. Even a German film company, I don't know the name of the company, but they wanted to buy it and turn it into a German film, which I would love to have seen, in an alternate universe kind of way. Yeah, there were many offers, but I couldn't let it go. I don't know how to sell something this personal. And especially what the book meant to the fans—I couldn't let it go to anyone else. I owed the fans a movie that was worthy of their love for the book."[18] When he finally did sit down and started on penning the screenplay, he found it more difficult than the book. The novel took him just four months to write, while the script took him a year.[19]
Chbosky would not sell the rights to the film unless a studio also let him adapt and direct the film. John Malkovich's production company—Mr. Mudd Productions—purchased the rights to the film and let Chbosky himself write the script and direct the film.
In May 2010, Logan Lerman and Emma Watson were reportedly in talks for the project[24] and confirmed the following year.[25] In April 2011, Mae Whitman signed on as Mary Elizabeth and Nina Dobrev was cast as Candace. Paul Rudd was cast as Mr. Anderson later that month.[26] On May 9, 2011, Kate Walsh announced that she was cast in the film as Charlie's mother and had begun filming.[27] On May 19, 2011, it was announced that Ezra Miller had joined the film.[28]
The Rocky Horror Picture Show scenes were filmed at The Hollywood Theater in Dormont[32] after Chbosky learned that the theater was re-opening; he had seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show there when he was younger.[33]
The soundtrack to The Perks of Being a Wallflower was released by Atlantic Records on September 11, 2012, a month before the film's release.[35] The film's music was chosen by the film's director Stephen Chbosky and music supervisorAlexandra Patsavas, while the incidental music was scored by Michael Brook.[36] The score album was released September 25, 2012.[37]
Chbosky wrote on the album's liner notes, “I’ve shared them with friends. And they have shared their favorites with me. Some of the songs are popular. Some of them are not known by a whole lot of people. But they are all great in their own way. And since these songs have meant a lot to me, I just wanted you to have them as a soundtrack for whatever you need them to be for your life.”[38][39]
The film was initially scheduled for release on September 14, 2012, but in August 2012, it was announced that the release would be delayed by a week to September 21, 2012, in selected cities.[42] The film continued to expand on September 28, 2012, with a nationwide release on October 5, 2012. The UK premiere was on September 23[43] at the Cambridge Film Festival.
Rating
The film originally received an R rating for "teen drug and alcohol use, and some sexual references". The filmmakers appealed, and the MPAA changed it to PG-13 for "mature thematic material, drug and alcohol use, sexual content including references, and a fight—all involving teens".[44]
Box office
The Perks of Being a Wallflower received a limited release of four theaters in the United States on September 21, 2012, and grossed $228,359 on its limited opening weekend, averaging $57,089 per theater. The film earned $17,742,948 in North America and $15,641,179 in other countries, for a worldwide total of $33,384,127.[2][45][46]
Reception
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 85% based on 172 reviews, with an average rating of 7.50/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a heartfelt and sincere adaptation that's bolstered by strong lead performances."[47] On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 67 out of 100, based on 36 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[48] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[49]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three and a half stars out of four, writing in his review, "All of my previous selves still survive somewhere inside of me, and my previous adolescent would have loved The Perks of Being a Wallflower".[50]
The lead cast also earned positive notice. Ian Buckwalter of The Atlantic said, "The primary trio of actors delivers outstanding performances, starting with Watson, who sheds the memory of a decade playing Hermione in the Harry Potter series with an about-face as a flirtatious but insecure free spirit. Miller also plays against their most recent performance, which was as the tightly wound eponymous teenage psychopath in We Need to Talk About Kevin, to deliver a giddy, scene-stealing turn as Patrick. Lerman, best known for the Percy Jackson series, shines as Charlie, a role that demands he be immediately likeable while still holding onto some deep darkness that can't be fully revealed until the end."[51]
John Anderson of Newsday also praised the cast, saying "As Sam, the quasi-bad girl trying to reinvent herself before college, she (Emma Watson) brings honesty and a lack of cliche to a character who might have been a standard-issue student. But equally fine are her co-stars: Ezra Miller, who plays the gay character Patrick as something messy and unusual; Paul Rudd, as their English teacher, is refreshingly thoughtful. And Charlie is portrayed by Lerman as quietly observant, yearning and delicate in a way that will click with audiences regardless of age".[52]
Some critics had a less favorable response to the film, with the main criticism being that the portrayal of teenage issues is idealized and the casting uninspired. The Miami Herald critic Connie Ogle notes that "the suicide of Charlie's best friend, which takes place before the film opens, seems glossed over too quickly" despite the event being Charlie's main character motivation in the film.[53] Jack Wilson of The Age writes, "the script is transparently fake at almost every moment, congratulating the gang on their non-conformity while soft-pedalling any aspect of adolescent behaviour—drug use, sex, profanity—that might upset the American mainstream."[54]Richard Corliss of Time criticized the casting of actors in their twenties to play teenage characters unlike Heathers (1989), another coming-of-age film in which the lead actors were actual teenagers.[55]
The film also influenced the "Tumblr culture" that was around online when the film was released, with online users posting GIFs of the film's cast and aphorisms on the site during the early 2010s.[59]
Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson is an English actress. Known for her roles in both blockbusters and independent films, she has received a selection of accolades, including a Young Artist Award and three MTV Movie Awards. Watson has been ranked among the world's highest-paid actresses by Forbes and Vanity Fair, and was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2015. Watson was also listed by Forbes as an honouree on the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2015 and 2016.
Mae Margaret Whitman is an American actor. She began her career as a child actor, starring in the films When a Man Loves a Woman (1994), One Fine Day (1996), Independence Day (1996), and Hope Floats (1998), and the television series Chicago Hope (1996–1999) and JAG (1998–2001). She earned mainstream recognition for her performances in the Fox sitcom Arrested Development, the NBC drama series Parenthood (2010–2015)—for which she was nominated for a Critics' Choice Television Award—and the NBC crime comedy series Good Girls (2018–2021). She also had roles in the films Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), and The DUFF (2015), the latter earning her a Teen Choice Award nomination.
Joan Mary Cusack is an American actress. She received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her roles in the comedy-drama Working Girl (1988) and the romantic comedy In & Out (1997). Her other starring roles include those in Toys (1992), Addams Family Values (1993), Nine Months (1995), Cradle Will Rock (1999), Where the Heart Is (2000), Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) and Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (2008). She has also provided the voice of Jessie in the Toy Story franchise (1999–present), for which she won an Annie Award, and Abby Mallard in Chicken Little (2005).
Logan Wade Lerman is an American actor. He appeared in commercials in the mid-1990s, before starring in the series Jack & Bobby (2004–2005) and the movies The Butterfly Effect (2004) and Hoot (2006). Lerman gained further recognition for playing the title character in the Percy Jackson film series, d'Artagnan in 2011's The Three Musketeers, starred in the coming-of-age dramas The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), Indignation (2016) and The Vanishing of Sidney Hall (2017), and had major roles in the 2014 films Noah and Fury. In 2020, he returned to television with the series Hunters.
Stephen Chbosky is an American film director, screenwriter, and author. He is best-known for writing the bestselling coming-of-age novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999), as well as for writing and directing the 2012 film adaptation of the book. Most recently, he directed the 2017 drama Wonder and the 2021 film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen. His first psychological horror novel, Imaginary Friend, was published in October 2019.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a 1999 young adult novel by American author Stephen Chbosky. Set in the early 1990s, the novel follows Charlie, an introverted and observant teenager, through his freshman year of high school in a Pittsburgh suburb. The novel details Charlie's unconventional style of thinking as he navigates between the worlds of adolescence and adulthood, and attempts to deal with poignant questions spurred by his interactions with both his friends and family.
A wallflower is someone with an introverted or shy personality type who will attend parties and social gatherings, but will usually distance themselves from the crowd and actively avoid being in the limelight. They are also social around friends but not strangers, though once around friends, the strangers become less impactful. The name itself derives from the eponymous plant's unusual growth pattern against a wall as a stake or in cracks and gaps in stone walls. "Wallflowers" might literally stand against a wall and simply observe others at a social gathering, rather than mingle.
Sarah Emily Ramos is an American actress who began her career as a child actress. She is known for her roles on the television series American Dreams (2002–2005) and Parenthood (2010–2015).
"Asleep" is a song by the English rock band the Smiths. It was released as a B-side to the single "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side" in September 1985, reaching No. 23 in the UK Singles Chart. It appears on the compilation albums The World Won't Listen and Louder Than Bombs, and on the deluxe edition of The Queen Is Dead in 2017.
Nikolina Kamenova Dobreva, known professionally as Nina Dobrev, is a Canadian actress. She is known for portraying Elena Gilbert and Katherine Pierce in the CW's supernatural drama series The Vampire Diaries (2009–2015).
Johnny Simmons is an American actor. He is known for his roles as Dylan Baxter in Evan Almighty (2007), Chip Dove in Jennifer's Body (2009), "Young Neil" Nordegraf in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (2023), Brad Hayes in The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), serial killer Adam "Balloon Man" Kemper in Elementary (2012), Peter Newmans in The Late Bloomer (2016), and Shane in Girlboss (2017).
Peters Township High School is a public high school that is located in McMurray, Pennsylvania, United States. The current building was built in 2021. This new building was constructed just up the road from the old school, and was constructed at a cost of $83,175,452. The new building opened to students on January 19, 2021.
Noah is a 2014 American epic biblical drama film directed by Darren Aronofsky, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ari Handel. Inspired by the biblical story of Noah's Ark from the Book of Genesis and the Book of Enoch, it stars Russell Crowe as Noah, along with Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Emma Watson, Logan Lerman, and Anthony Hopkins.
The 11th Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association Awards were held on December 10, 2012.
The 33rd Boston Society of Film Critics Awards, honoring the best in filmmaking in 2012, were given on December 9, 2012.
The 17th San Diego Film Critics Society Awards were announced on December 11, 2012.
The nominees for the 9th St. Louis Film Critics Association Awards were announced on December 11, 2012. The winners were announced on December 17, 2012.
The soundtrack to the 2012 coming-of-age drama film The Perks of Being a Wallflower written, directed and based on the 1999 novel of the same name by Stephen Chbosky, features a selection of pop, rock and jazz compilations by various artists, handpicked by Chbosky and music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas. The album was marketed and released by Atlantic Records on September 11, 2012, in digital platforms, CD and vinyl. Michael Brook composed the film's incidental underscore, published by Lakeshore Records on September 25, that featured nine tracks.
Imaginary Friend is a psychological horror novel by American author Stephen Chbosky. It was published on October 1, 2019 by Grand Central Publishing and was an instant New York Times Best Seller.
↑ Kit, Borys (February 9, 2013). "'Argo' Writers Win Scripter Award". The Hollywood Reporter. Prometheus Global Media. Archived from the original on December 12, 2015. Retrieved September 17, 2014.
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