Jacob Elordi will play Gary Gilmore in a new feature film of The Executioner’s Song, Deadline reported on November 10. Scott Stuber’s United Artists, which operates under Amazon MGM Studios (JoBlo), has acquired the rights to the 1982 film, and Elordi will produce as well as star. Stuber, Nick Nesbitt, Elordi’s manager Matt Vioral, and Sherry Marsh are the other producers. No director or screenwriter has been named yet (FilmoFilia).
The project’s strongest tie to Mailer’s book is its executive producer, Lawrence Schiller. Schiller conducted the interviews with Gilmore, his family, and the other key figures in the case that became the foundation of the book, and he directed the 1982 adaptation (Just Jared; ComingSoon).
Elordi, who is 29, earned an Oscar nomination for playing the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (Wikipedia). His other credits include Euphoria, Saltburn, Priscilla, and The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and he is next to appear opposite Scarlett Johansson in Ari Aster’s Scapegoat (ComingSoon; Dark Horizons).
The book and the first film
Gary Gilmore, a Utah parolee, murdered two young men, a motel manager and a gas-station attendant, on two July nights in 1976. Sentenced to death, he refused to appeal and insisted on his own execution. On January 17, 1977, a firing squad killed him at Utah State Prison, the first execution in the United States after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (Little, Brown, 1979), built from the more than 15,000 pages of interviews and court records Schiller gathered, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
The 1982 adaptation was a four-hour miniseries, produced and directed by Schiller from Mailer’s own screenplay. It premiered in September at the Deauville American Film Festival and aired on NBC that November (Works and Days, 1982). Tommy Lee Jones played Gilmore and won an Emmy for the role (Dark Horizons); Rosanna Arquette played Nicole Baker, his girlfriend.
Gilmore’s story has had a long reach. Just last month we told how the book gave U2 the working title of the song that became “Exit”. And the book stands behind another screen project the Society has followed: Andrew Haigh’s film about Mailer and Jack Henry Abbott, with Ben Stiller as Mailer, is based on Jerome Loving’s Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song.”