'I have a story to tell. It is a story of murder told from inside the house where murder is born. It is the house where I grew up, a house that, in some ways, I have never been able to leave.'

--from the book 'Shot in the Heart',  
by Mikal Gilmore

     "Shot in the Heart," is a TV movie based on journalist Mikal Gilmore's memoir of the same name about his brother Gary Gilmore, the murderer who campaigned for his own execution in 1977.

By Paula Bernstein NEW YORK (Variety) - HBO Films has greenlit "Shot in the Heart," a TV movie based on journalist Mikal Gilmore's memoir of the same name about his brother Gary Gilmore, the murderer who campaigned for his own execution in 1977.

Agnieszka Holland (``Europa, Europa'') will direct the telepic from a script by Frank Pugliese (``Homicide: Life on the Street''). Production begins in Baltimore in early February.

Giovanni Ribisi (``The Gift'') will star as Mikal Gilmore, with Elias Koteas (``The Thin Red Line'') to play Gary Gilmore. Eric Bogosian, Lee Tergesen (``Oz'') and Sam Shepard also have been cast.

Told through the perspective of Mikal Gilmore, ``Shot'' is the story of a wildly dysfunctional family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery and murder. It will chronicle the final days of Gary Gilmore, who, after being convicted of murder, petitioned to be shot by a Utah firing squad, becoming the first person to be executed since the U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) lifted a national death penalty ban in 1976.

Gary Gilmore was the subject of Norman Mailer's tome ``The Executioner's Song,'' which became a 1982 NBC miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones.

``Shot in the Heart'' had lingered in development since 1992, when it was first optioned for Warner Bros. by the late director Alan Pakula in the form of a book proposal. When Pakula's option lapsed, director-producer Robert Greenwald bought the rights to the project and brought it to HBO. According to HBO, Greenwald is no longer associated with the project ``due to creative differences.''

Mikal Gilmore is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine where he has written for many years.