Pittsburgh teen dies imitating stunt from ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’

A high school student from the suburbs of Pittsburgh died Friday night when he fell out of the back of a pickup truck.

The 17-year-old from Tarentum, PA was out driving with friends when he stood up in the bed of their truck . He fell out of the vehicle when it went around a sharp turn and died from blunt force trauma from the head. No drugs or alcohol were involved, and the death has been ruled an accident, according to The Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

The The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a 2012 film that was set and filmed in Pittsburgh, features a scene where Emma Watson’s character stands up in the back of a pickup truck while speeding through the Fort Pitt Tunnel. Although the movie’s crew wanted a stand-in to actually perform the dangerous stunt, Watson insisted on doing it herself, according to Contact Music.

Stephen Chbosky, the film’s writer and director, explained how cautious they were in filming the scene: “We took every precaution that you could possibly take – we had so many safety cables on Watson and Lerman. People can understand that it’s not as easy as it looks in the movie.”
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