Jacob Elordi will star in an adaptation of The Executioner's Song

Fresh off his Oscar-nominated turn as the Creature in Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi is set to star in and produce an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer prize-winning 1979 novel The Executioner’s Song.

The Executioner’s Song (referred to as a true crime/nonfiction novel) is a complex, fictionalizd biography-of-sorts of American murderer Gary Gilmore, who, after being convicted of murdering two men in Utah, insisted on his death penalty sentence being carried out, despite the national moratorium on capital punishment implemented by the Supreme Court case Furman v. Georgia, which decided that different states’ inconsistent approaches toward criminal execution violated the Eight and Fourteenth amendments. Gilmore, who fought anti-capital punishment attorneys insistent on preserving his life, was eventually executed by firing squad in 1977.

The novel is broken up into two sections: “Western Voices,” and “Eastern Voices.” The first part is about the forces that made Gilmore into the man he became (including a youth spent in child detention facilities in the barren American west), while the second is about the media frenzy and national debate around the case, and spotlights, in particular, Gilmore’s relationship with the celebrity photographer Lawrence “Larry” Schiller, who conducted many interviews with Gilmore, his family, and others related to the case and brought the project to Mailer, in the first place.

Mailer continued Schiller’s research to craft a nearly 1000-page, plainly-written epic about the nihilism of the American West, the American proclivity towards violence, media madness, the exploitation of the working class, and the cult of white male loneliness. In her review in The New York Times Book Review, Joan Didion raved about Mailer’s accomplishment, calling it “an absolutely astonishing book,” and noting how it shocked her by being about something much more than what it initially seemed:

“The Executioner’s Song” did not suggest, in its inception, the book it became. 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.” This “Gary Gilmore book” of Mailer’s was understood in a general way to be an account of or a contemplation on the death or the life or the last nine months in the life of Gary Mark Gilmore, those nine months representing the period between the day in April of 1976 when he was released from the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, and the morning in January of 1977 on which he was executed by having four shots fired into his heart at the Utah State Prison at Point of the Mountain, Utah.

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 The Executioner’s Song” is ambitious to the point of vertigo, and the exact extent of its ambitiousness becomes clear at the end of the first chapter, when a curious sentence occurs, a sentence designed as a kind of Gothic premonition. Brenda Nicol… has gotten a call from the penitentiary at Marion saying that her cousin Gary Gilmore was coming home–by way of St. Louis, Denver, Salt Lake–to Provo. “With all the excitement,” Chapter One of “The Executioner’s Song” closes, “Brenda was hardly taking into account that it was practically the same route their Mormon great-grandfather took when he jumped off from Missouri with a handcart near to a hundred years ago, and pushed west with all he owned over the prairies, and the passes of the Rockies, to come to rest at Provo in the Mormon Kingdom of Deseret just fifty miles below Salt Lake.”

Against the deliberately featureless simple sentences of “The Executioner’s Song,” sentences that slide over the mind like conversations at K-Mart (“Gary was kind of quiet. There was one reason they got along. Brenda was always gabbing and he was a good listener. They had a lot of fun. Even at that age he was real polite.”), the relative complexity and length of this sentence at the end of Chapter One is a chill, a signal that the author is telling us a story of some historical dimension. Notice the intake of breath on the clause “and the passes of the Rockies,” notice the long unbroken exhalation that ends in a fall on “just 50 miles below Salt Lake.”

It is a largely unremarked fact about Mailer that he is a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story. His sentences do not get long or short by accident, or because he is in a hurry. Where he does or does not put the comma is a question of considerable concern to him: his revisions on “The Deer Park” are instructive in the extreme. Brenda Nicol may not have been taking into account that handcart, those prairies, those passes of the Rockies, but Mailer was, and, in that one sentence, the terms of the novel had laid themselves out: a connection would be attempted here, a search for a field of negative energy linking these events and these people and the empty melancholy of the place itself.

“The Executioner’s Song,” then, was to be a novel of the West, and the strongest voices in it, as in the place itself, would be those 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 Bronte’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 Artist, 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 Monrie before she died, and photographed Lee Harvey Oswald the night he was killed, and Jack Ruby moments after he killed Oswald. He photographed Paul Newman and Robert 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. 

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Featured image credit: made by Olivia Rutigliano from a composite of images. Clockwise from right: Gary Gilmore (The Salt Lake Tribune), Lawrence Schiller (his website), Jacob Elordi (JoshPopov, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons), and Norman Mailer (public domain via Wikimedia Commons)