Fresh from earning an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the Creature in Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi is poised to headline and shepherd a screen adaptation of Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer-winning novel from 1979, The Executioner’s Song.
The Executioner’s Song unfolds as a dense, fictionalized biography of Gary Gilmore, an American killer convicted of murdering two men in Utah who pressed to see his death sentence carried out, even as a nationwide moratorium on capital punishment—triggered by the Supreme Court’s Furman v. Georgia decision—set out to correct disparities in how states enforce punishment and how that enforcement runs afoul of the Eight and Fourteenth amendments. Gilmore resisted anti-capital punishment lawyers who sought to save him and was ultimately put to death by firing squad in 1977.
The novel is divided into two sections: “Western Voices,” and “Eastern Voices.” The first portion traces the forces that shaped Gilmore into the man he became, including a childhood spent in detention facilities across the barren American West. The second half focuses on the media storm and the national debate surrounding the case, with particular emphasis on Gilmore’s relationship with the celebrity photographer Lawrence “Larry” Schiller, who conducted numerous interviews with Gilmore, his relatives, and others connected to the case and was the one who brought the project to Mailer originally.
Mailer expanded Schiller’s groundwork into a nearly thousand-page, sparely written epic that probes the nihilism of the American West, the country’s predilection for violence, the fevered tempo of media coverage, the exploitation of working people, and the cult of white male loneliness. In a review for The New York Times Book Review, Joan Didion lauded Mailer’s achievement, calling it “an absolutely astonishing book,” and she noted how it surprised her by addressing something far broader than its initial premise: “The Executioner’s Song did not suggest, in its inception, the book it became,” she wrote. “It began as a project put together by Lawrence Schiller, the photographer and producer who several years before had contracted with Mailer to write ‘Marilyn,’ and it was widely referred to as ‘the Gary Gilmore book.’”
It seemed one of those lives in which the narrative would yield no further meaning… What Mailer could make of this apparently intractable material was unclear. It might well have been only another test hole in a field he had drilled before, a few further reflections on murder as an existential act, an appropriation for himself of the book he invented for An American Dream, Stephen Rojack’s The Psychology of the Hangman. Instead Mailer wrote a novel, a thousand-page novel in a meticulously limited vocabulary and a voice as flat as the horizon, a novel which takes for its incident and characters real events in the lives of real people.
What she found instead, she writes, was a novel telling a story of a uniquely American desperation. She marvels at how Mailer uses his sentences to convey this above all else: the countless failed attempts for relatedness between people and things, with the sparseness of his prose summoning a “search for a field of negative energy linking these events and these people and the empty melancholy of the place itself.”
She also notes, with surprise, that the strongest of the novel’s voices are the women: “Men tend to shoot, get shot, push off, move on. Women pass down stories.”
Schiller and Mailer had collaborated as photographer-and-writer on numerous projects, beginning with 1972’s Marilyn: a Biography, and The Executioner’s Song is unquestionably their most monumental. Schiller, who directed the 1982 film adaptation of the novel starring Tommy Lee Jones, will executive-produce the new adaptation.
Elordi, who rose to stardom in HBO’s Euphoria, will play Gilmore (a fortuitous thing, given the resemblance between the two men). Elordi has been gravitating to literary projects—most obviously Frankenstein (for which he was nominated for every major acting award). Recently, he has also starred in Emerald Fennell’s 2026 adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and the miniseries adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s Booker-prize winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North which was released on Prime Video, last year. Recently, he also played Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla and co-starred in Ridley Scott’s postapocalyptic thriller The Dog Stars.
This marks Elordi’s first turn as a producer (not executive producer); Scott Stuber of United Artists and Nick Nesbitt will produce, in addition to Elordi’s manager Matt Vioral and Sherry Marsh.
Schiller, whose photographic legacy is entwined with the landmark moments of the 20th century, was the last person to photograph Marilyn Monroe before she died. He also photographed Lee Harvey Oswald the night he was killed, and Jack Ruby moments after he killed Oswald. He photographed Paul Newman and Robert Redford on the set of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (and also directed the photographic section of the film), and captured the Watts riots and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests. He captured landmark touchdowns by O. J. Simpson and Muhammad Ali defeating Floyd Patterson to win the World Heavyweight Boxing Title. As a filmmaker, he made numerous projects for television, and won an Emmy in 1986 for his adaptation of Peter the Great. He collaborated with O.J. Simpson on a book called I Want to Tell You, while Simpson was in prison, and after he was acquitted, collaborated with former Time magazine journalist Jim Willwerth to write the New York Times bestseller American Tragedy: The Uncensored Story of the Simpson Defense. His photos and stories appeared in countless publications, including Life, Paris Match, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, and the Saturday Evening Post.
