In 1987, a then‐17‐year‐old Stephen Chbosky (pronounced sha‐bos‐key) attended a film festival at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh where he met one of the city’s most famous citizens—horror king George Romero. The aspiring screenwriter and director asked Romero to sign a poster for him that now hangs in his office. The inscription reads: “Steve, stay scared. I hope you get your first script produced. George Romero.”
His first screenplay may remain unproduced, but his first literary effort, the young adult novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, was published in 1999, and has gone on to become a cult favorite that has been required reading at some schools and banned at others. Now Chbosky has written and directed a sensitively framed film based on his acclaimed novel. Like the book, the movie follows its hero, Charlie, through a thrilling, traumatic and ultimately triumphant first year of high school.
A graduate of the prestigious screenwriting program at the University of Southern California, Chbosky began writing the book while still in college, completing it a few years later while living in New York. “I wrote the book for very personal reasons,” he says. “I was going through a difficult time in my personal life. But I had also reached a point in my life where I was ready to write about why good people have to go through such bad things and how a family of friends can get you through. I really needed answers for myself and it was like Charlie tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘I’m ready to tell my story.’”
Ironically, it’s the intensely personal nature of the material that makes it so universal, he says. “I was not trying to please everybody or reach everybody. I was just trying to tell my own truth. I never thought about appealing to a wide audience. I authentically told my story, and I think that people respect that.”
The book’s remarkable success led to several offers for the writer to adapt the story for the movies. Instead, Chbosky moved to Los Angeles to pursue other projects, including writing the screenplay for the movie version of the Broadway phenomenon “Rent” and co‐creating the CBS television series “Jericho.” But he knew that at some point he would return to Charlie’s story.
“I always wanted to make a movie based on my book,” he says. “I saw the images so vividly when I was writing it. But I wanted the time and distance to do it right. In the interim, I worked on a lot of different scripts. I honed my craft until I was ready to write a script that was authentic to the book.”
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