Power of a light

Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. were arrested in 1993 for the murders of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark. As detailed in 1996's "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills," the three men, then teenagers, drew the authorities' attention because they stood out in their impoverished rural community, especially Echols, with his long hair, black clothing and his devotion to heavy-metal bands that sometimes trafficked in macabre imagery. That and some tenuous circumstantial evidence was enough for the authorities to proceed with a theory that Echols and his cohorts were Satanists who had butchered the young boys in an occult ritual, which got Baldwin and Misskelley locked up for life and landed Echols on death row. But for Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, that might have been it.

"If they wouldn't have been there in the beginning to get the trial on film, there's every chance the case would have sunk into obscurity and people would have forgotten about it over time," said Echols at a news conference preceding the New York Film Festival premiere of "Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory" in September. "It was the first documentary that made people start noticing [our case]."

Berlinger and Sinofsky, who met while working at Maysles Films, the company run by nonfiction pioneers Albert and David Maysles, traveled to West Memphis at the behest of HBO Documentary Films President Sheila Nevins to cover what they thought would be a story about small-town kids gone horribly awry. "We thought we were making a film about guilty teenagers," Berlinger recalled, "kind of a real-life 'River's Edge.' " But even though investigators eventually extracted a confession from Misskelley, whose IQ placed him just on the cusp of mental retardation, it became apparent that the prosecution's case rested heavily on exploiting the supposed links between anti-conformist attitudes and deviant behavior.

Beginning with the members of Metallica, who uncharacteristically allowed their songs to be used in the "Paradise Lost" films, the cause of the West Memphis Three (as they came to be known) was taken to heart by such high-profile figures as Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder and the Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines, as well as many other, less famous figures who identified with being stigmatized for failing to fit in. Although Berlinger and Sinofsky weren't officially part of Save the West Memphis Three, the way their film helped galvanize the movement profoundly affected the decision to keep following the case, as well as the form of the films that followed.

Change in attitude

"If we'd talked 20 years ago, I would have told you I'm a storyteller first, a journalist second, and the advocacy part I don't really care about," Berlinger said. "But I've come to have a more complex, nuanced view. I still think you need to be a storyteller because the best-intentioned advocacy films that don't have a character or a story arc aren't going to be seen. I've gone from being 30 to being 50 over the course of these films, and I think it really represents a maturing, a realization that advocacy and storytelling are both important." Berlinger concedes that 2000's "Paradise Lost 2: Revelations" was "advocacy in search of a story." But with the third film, he and Sinofsky achieve a more graceful balance between agenda and artistry.