Book Publishing
After extensive interviews with the widow of Lenny Bruce, Schiller and the writer Albert Goldman published Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce!! (1974); and, with the photographer W. Eugene Smith, he produced Minamata (1975), the epic pictorial chronicle of mercury poisoning in Japan.
Perhaps nothing in Schiller’s career proved more remarkable, though, than his collaboration with Norman Mailer--a friendship unique in American literary history. For nearly thirty-five years the two worked closely together, on books including Marilyn (1973), The Faith of Graffiti (1974), Oswald’s Tale (1995), Into the Mirror (2002), and The Executioner’s Song (1979), for which Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize. Schiller, who did much of the legwork, interviews, and research for The Executioner’s Song, gained exclusive access to the book’s subject, Gary Gilmore, and went on to produce and direct the award-winning TV miniseries based upon it, starring Tommy Lee Jones. Similarly, Schiller embedded himself into the so-called “Dream Team” defending O. J. Simpson, and with his unique insider’s perspective on the case, co-wrote (with James Willwerth) The New York Times No. 1 best-selling American Tragedy (1996).
“To my skilled and wily colleague in interview and investigation…
feeling as close as family (and occasionally as contentious).”
Norman Mailer
Dedication to Lawrence Schiller in Oswald’s Tale