I take issue with the film

Mailer's docu-novel brings that out, but it's hard to do so in a film,. particularly one where every viewer knows the protagonist is dead in real life. In fact, Norman Mailer's book is in some parts really an oral-history record of the Gilmore case - it's plain that some chapters are pretty much transcripts of interviews with people that Schiller and others did in the months after Gary was executed. In particular, the law people and those people who met Gilmore in his final months in jail.

As Schiller was visiting the Brigham Young University of Salt Lake City in the month before the execution, a student asked him why he wasn't doing the story on [Gilmore's victim] Benny Bushnell instead. He replied that Gary mattered beyond his own case and that among killers - and he'd met a few - "only Gary has the courage to see the consequences of his acts in the eye". Quite right.