It was good to have the face of actor Elias Koteas as my first face of Gary Gilmore. I heard of him from the media but the most recent reference I had was the one from Rafael Chaparro Madiedo novel "Opio en las nubes" ("Opium in the clouds"). In that book, Gary Gilmore is Gary Gilmour, a mix of the american criminal that requested the fulfilling of his death sentence after a 10 years ban on executions in United States, and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. Also a condemed to death inmate, this Gary dies in the electric chair and wears a blue shirt instead of the white. That Gary got into my heart because he loved mornings more than noting, that Gary "had a slight sensation that the best in life happened in the mornings. Mornings were a transparent lapse of time, a thin invisible line where dreams, words, parks and whiskey weave in. He was convinced that woman were made in the mornings." That is one of my favorite lines ever.
Caught by Chaparro's abstraction of Gary I could not resist to give him a human form once I knew they would project "Shot in the heart," a film by Agnieszka Holland, based on the memoir written by Gary's brother Mikal Gilmore. Not the best movie, but it has a good casting, starting with Koteas as Gary (Koteas is Vaughan in David Cronenberg's "Crash"). He played a hard, energetic, touching Gary. The film taught me the original Gary wore white clothes during prison and tied his sneakers with red and blue shoelaces, like some kind of santero --plus the story of his family has a haunted house and many supersticions. I also learned he was a fan of Johnny Cash.
After some YouTube research I found that Tommy Lee Jones also performed as Gary for the adaptation of Norman Mailer's "Executioners Song", and, of course, I saw real Gary, very similar to Koteas.
From all that, I decide to create a Gary. Mine is Gary Gilmour Cash. He is a santero, loves mornings and feeds cats. He also likes freedom and pleads for beauty.
