Norman Mailer and Larry Schiller reunite in 2006 (The Mailer Review). The Brooklyn-born writers collaborated on several of Mailer's most commercially successful projects, including Marilyn: A Biography (1973) and the Fiction Prize-winning Executioner's Song.
An impresario whose credits extend from the still photo montage in Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid to a variety of "true crime" tomes, writer/photographer/director Larry Schiller had previously collaborated with Mailer as a silent partner in the 1970s on his bestselling large-format biography of Marilyn Monroe and The Faith of Grafitti, an early chronicle of the art form in New York City. (Long at work on the ambitious literary novel that would eventually see print as Ancient Evenings in 1983, Mailer had taken to writing popular nonfiction at a prolific clip to subsidize a large overhead that encompassed nine children and five former wives.)
It was Schiller who initially acquired the literary and film rights to the story of Gary Gilmore, a career criminal and convicted murderer who demanded to be executed following the reinstatement of the death penalty under Gregg v. Georgia in 1976 following a five-year de facto moratorium. Before bringing the project to Mailer's attention, Schiller conducted extensive interviews with Gilmore and was present for his execution (prefigured by two suicide attempts, it was the first instance of capital punishment in nearly a decade) in January 1977. An integral figure in the voluminous book that emerged over the next two years, he would ultimately direct a 1982 television film adapted from the work by Mailer himself.
(The book's designation as a "true life novel" remains an enduring anomaly in the annals of the Prize; while Mailer confessed to "extrapolation" to Little, Brown editor Ned Bradford, Mailer biographer J. Michael Lennon has noted that the book's veracity has never been challenged a la Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. According to Lennon, the book was marketed in this manner at Mailer's insistence to ballast his chances of winning another Pulitzer while circumventing an illustrious array of nonfiction competition, including Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, Thomas Thompson's Serpentine and the sleeper hit on cognitive science that would eventually win the Prize [Douglas Hofstader's Gödel, Escher, Bach]. He later expounded upon this choice to the New York Times: "Nonfiction provides answers and fiction illumines questions. I think my book does the latter.")
In a wide-ranging 2007 interview with academic Jeffrey Severs published in The Mailer Review, Schiller outlines his decisive role in the gestation of the project and the ensuing film.