British writer Tom Rob Smith led an enlightening Q&A session on the difference between writing prose fiction and writing for the screen this afternoon at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, where he is one of the headline speakers.
During the session, the Emmy winner, best known for the novel Child 44 and the series The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, also shared his next project: A fiction book based on the West Memphis Three murder case.
“I can tell you because I’m coming right to the end of it,” Smith said when Deadline asked about his next project in Thessaloniki.
“It’s based on an American crime. A case called the West Memphis Three. It was a killing that took place in 1993. No one was interested in it when it happened. Then HBO made a documentary about it called Paradise Lost. Everyone got involved, including Peter Jackson and Johnny Depp. I’m doing a fictionalized version of that account.”
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Smith added: “It’s not like Versace, which was a kind of mirror of the case. This is more like Child 44, where you’re taking a real case and telling a story about its ideas rather than the real people.”
Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr., and Jason Baldwin, known as the West Memphis Three, were convicted as teenagers of the 1993 murders of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. The prosecutors at the time said the murders were committed as part of a satanic ritual. Echols was sentenced to death, while Misskelley Jr. and Baldwin were given life sentences. The trio was freed in 2011 after serving 18 years. New DNA evidence excluded the three men from all of the crime scene evidence found at the scene.
Echols, Misskelley Jr., and Baldwin’s received public support from several high-profile figures, including Johnny Depp and Peter Jackson, who funded their legal defence. The men were also the subject of three Paradise Lost HBO documentaries by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky.
Deadline covered the documentaries and the trio’s release extensively at the time. The story was also captured in Devil’s Knot, a 2013 fiction feature directed by Atom Egoyan and starring Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon. The Arkansas Supreme Court reopened the murder case and ordered fresh testing of the DNA found at the crime scene in 2024. The case is still ongoing.
Thessaloniki runs until November 15.