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.
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The Executioner’s Song 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,” 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’sMarilyn: a Biography,andThe Executioner’s Songis 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’sEuphoria, 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 Northwhich 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 thrillerThe Dog Stars.
This marks Elordi’s first turn as a producer (not executive producer); Scott Stuber of United Artists and Nick Nesbitt will also 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 calledI Want to Tell You, while Simpson was in prison, and after he was acquitted, collaborated with former Time magazine journalist Jim Willwerth to write theNew York Times bestsellerAmerican Tragedy: The Uncensored Story of the Simpson Defense.His photos and stories appeared incountless publications, includingLife, Paris Match, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek,and theSaturday Evening Post.
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