HBO, which loves to turn stories about politics and literature into TV movies, is developing a film about Norman Mailer’s disastrous friendship with imprisoned killer Jack Abbott.
Mailer helped Abbott, who assisted the famed writer on his 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Executioner’s Song,” get out of jail on parole in 1982.
Within weeks of his release, Abbott stabbed a waiter and aspiring actor to death in an East Village restaurant after a dispute over the men’s room.
Twenty years after the East Village murder, Abbott took his own life in a jail cell in upstate New York.