![]() Directed by Atom Egoyan, the film presented a less controversial version of Leveritt’s book, choosing not to point fingers at possible culprits. the following year-events thereafter are presented only in end-movie text. Thematically based upon Leveritt’s book, the Devil’s Knot movie begins with the disappearance of the three eight-year-old boys in 1993 and follows the subsequent arrest and trial of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. Hobbs’s husband was the stepfather of Stevie Branch and was, at one time, a suspect in the homicide. Reese Witherspoon plays Pamela Hobbs, the mother of murder victim Stevie Branch. ![]() Colin Firth plays Ron Lax (though the character was really an amalgam of Lax and his assistant, Glori Shettle), a private investigator from Memphis, Tennessee, and is the focal point of the movie, rather than the West Memphis Three. For the viewers familiar with the Paradise Lost series of documentaries, which had an international fan base, the movie seemed oversimplified. The movie premiered internationally at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival and nationally at the Ron Robinson Theater in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in May 2014. Unlike the documentaries, Devil’s Knot was not filmed in Arkansas. The movie Devil’s Knot (2013)-a dramatized rather than documentary account of the crime, trial, and aftermath-was released after the three Paradise Lost HBO documentaries, and also following the documentary West of Memphis (2012), produced by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, and directed by Amy Berg. The book covers some of the same material as the HBO Paradise Lost documentaries: Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000), and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011). The footnotes to the book take up fifty-three pages of the 421-page book, and they are often as informative as the main narrative, especially for those who are somewhat familiar with the case. West Memphis is one of the poorest cities in one of the poorest counties in one of the three poorest states in the country. The book’s journalistic narrative does not solely focus on the crime itself but also sets up the political, economic, social, and historical context of the Mississippi Delta region where West Memphis is located. All three books focus on the death of young children, the effects of poverty, and what seemed to be the continuing failure of the Arkansas judicial system to uphold the democratic ideal of a fair trial for all citizens. Devil’s Knot was followed in 2014 by Dark Spell: Surviving the Sentence (co-written with Jason Baldwin, one of the West Memphis Three), the second volume in a planned series called the Justice Knot trilogy. Mara Leveritt, a contributing editor to the Arkansas Times, won Arkansas’s Booker Worthen Literary Prize for her book The Boys on the Tracks(1999) and would later receive the same award for Devil’s Knot. The book provoked a larger discussion about the nature of the trial and its evidentiary bias, while the subsequent movie offered a fictionalized-and some said oversimplified-account of the events. The book depicts a bleak picture of small-town Arkansas in the 1990s, providing background for how, in the author’s view, this case assumed a level of hysteria that in many ways equaled the Salem Witch Trials. One of the teenagers of the so-called West Memphis Three convicted in the case was sentenced to death, while two others were condemned to life in jail without parole the three were freed in 2011. Mara Leveritt’s 2002 book Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three focuses on the facts of the 1993 murder of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis (Crittenden County) and the controversial court case that followed.
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