BEFORE: Yep, one documentary about the Fyre Festival is not enough. Just think about how many pandemic documentaries are probably in production right now! When life gives you lemons, I guess... But it might be important to look at this disaster from a couple of different angles. This one was on track to be the first doc about Fyre on the scene, but then what was planned as a Hulu series got turned into a solitary movie, so "Fyre Fraud" got released on Hulu just four days before this one hit Netflix. Interesting...
Billy McFarland carries over from "Fyre Fraud", as do several other persons of interest.
THE PLOT: An exclusive behind the scenes look at the infamous unraveling of the Fyre music festival.
AFTER: Another thing that's interesting is the list of the producers and executive producers of this film - some of the names are shared with the people being interviewed. Hmm... it seems this film was produced by the fine folks at FuckJerry Media, which was the company promoting Fyre at the time. Now, "producer" is a funny title, it could mean a lot of different things - sometimes it means someone who raised money or financed the film directly, other times it's someone who was very hands-on and instrumental to the entire film on a daily basis, and sometimes it's just a title given to someone for no reason, in exchange for some other service.
Here it sure looks like the fine folks at FuckJerry Media were trying to get their side of the story out there, whether that's truthful or not, I can't say, but my guess is that their business may have suffered some after the disaster that was Fyre Festival, and they felt they needed to get the story straight. These particular people who were both producers and interview subjects spend a fair amount of time distancing themselves from Billy McFarland, or else they claim now that they tried VERY HARD to get Billy to realize the impending disaster, and implored him to cancel the festival and refund all the money. Right, sure they did - I'm sure all of Billy's employees had the best interest of every single paying customer at heart, meanwhile they were cashing their own paychecks, right? And now all they see is permanent damage if they don't clear the air, you can bet they don't want to put "Fyre Festival" on their company's list of accomplishments, so they're trying to put some spin on the narrative instead.
I'm sorry, guys, "We were only following orders" didn't work for the Nazi concentration camp guards, so it's probably not going to work for you. If the whole lesson of Fyre is that "mistakes were made", everybody has to own their own part of those mistakes. Notice how every interview subject here makes a point of saying that they spoke to the FBI during the ensuing investigation - right, because that's what you do when the FBI comes to talk to you. Because if you DON'T talk to the FBI, well now they REALLY want to talk to you, and they're going to find a way to make that happen. I'm not saying Billy McFarland is a saint, far from it, he's a con artist and a piece of millennial garbage, but every single one of these FuckJerry people talked to the FBI to save their own skin and point their fingers at Billy.
Of course, as they say, the fish stinks from the head on down, so Billy McFarland's in jail, and he's now prevented from ever being a corporate officer or director, lifetime ban. I don't think he'll even be allowed to coach Little League when he gets out, but we'll see. Still, there's a LOT of blame to go around. What about Ja Rule? He downplayed the accusations of "fraud" in a post-festival meeting, but admitted there was "false advertising" - which is also known as "fraud". There's a class-action suit that awarded millions to festival-goers, but how is Billy ever going to raise the money to pay that off, if he can never work as a highly-paid CEO or corporate officer? Ohh, the irony.
A crowdfunding campaign raised over $200,000 to pay that Bahamian caterer, who was never paid by Fyre, so that's something. I guess with Billy always moving money around, taking the money meant for THIS thing and using it to pay THAT thing instead, I guess the caterer was the last link in the chain? They also brought in $2 million's worth of alcohol, without realizing that they had to pay a huge import fee to bring that in to the Bahamas, almost $900,000. And you don't want to KNOW what they had to do to get the Evian water through customs. The U.S. marshals auctioned off the Fyre-branded merchandise like t-shirts, with the money going to festival victims. Side question, did those little girls who sang at Trump's inauguration ever get paid? Can someone look into this? Hello, Michael Moore?
I don't think it's that uncommon to use money raised for one thing to do another - I've worked on a couple of Kickstarter campaigns, and near the end of the process, there are often a lot of costs involved with fulfilling the rewards, making the DVDs, postage, mailing supplies, that sort of thing. And by that point, the money raised by the crowdfunding campaign to make the movie has all been spent - I definitely requested putting aside a couple thousand to cover reward fulfillment, but it just wasn't possible, all the money was needed to pay the studio bills and cover the production costs. So, when it was time to mail out the rewards, the postage had to come from somewhere else - so we needed to land a new project to finish paying for the last project. Billy McFarland, I feel your pain. (Sort of - I don't condone wire fraud or stock fraud or booking Blink-182 as your headliner.).
Really, this is the same chain of events as "Fyre Fraud", only viewed through a different lens - obviously that's one that tried to be very apologetic toward FuckJerry Media and other employees/producers/potential defendants. Does "Fyre Fraud" display more objectivity? Yeah, probably. Should this film be subtitled "The Greatest Party That Never Happened" or "Let's Throw Billy McFarland Under the Bus"? Again, he probably belongs there anyway, but you didn't have to give him a push.
On one level, I get it - even events that DO eventually come together to be awesome may go through that awkward phase during development where nobody's really sure, maybe it's gonna happen, maybe it's not, it might rain, something might catch on fire, there might be food poisoning, but we're just going to put our heads down and hope for the best. But in this case people KNEW that the dumpster was going to catch on fire, and perhaps they didn't do enough to stop the guy with the match. Or, you know, maybe have the fire department on standby, whatever. There were things that could have been done - festival insurance could have been bought (it wasn't), people could have been warned (they weren't) and those influencers could have stated more clearly that their posts were advertisements (umm, of course they didn't.). Those models and actresses then made up for their involvement by agreeing to donate their fees to charity. (Ah, but did they? Can I see some paperwork on that?)
The right way to run a festival, it turns out, is to start really small. Did Coachella or Lollapalooza or Burning Man become well-attended media sensation destinations overnight? Nah, it took a few years. San Diego Comic-Con started in ONE ROOM in a hotel 40 years ago, and then grew each year until it had over 120,000 attendees. (Pre-pandemic, of course, this year they had zero attendees because the convention center was being used to house homeless people.). But my point is, you start small and you do what you can do, and then if there's a small profit made, you roll that into making next year's event a little bigger, a little better, a few more vendors and a few more restrooms. You don't go from zero to super-deluxe in your first year, that's impossible, especially if you dick around for 8 months and only leave yourself a few weeks to, you know, start actually making some arrangements. Just saying.
The B.S. at the end is quite unbelievable - one FuckJerry sympathizer says that the Fyre Festival DID happen - only it was months before the failed concert, when they shot that promotional video with the bikini models running down the beach and feeding each other grapes on a boat. Is this guy serious? Dude, that wasn't a festival, that was just a promo shoot - you DO know the difference, right? There were no bands, no stages, no crowd of paying guests, how can you say that the Fyre Festival "happened"? I want some of whatever this guy was smoking, I guess if this guy went out to dinner at a restaurant and you showed him a picture of the food, that would be same as eating the meal, right? Only it's not as satisfying, is it, dickwad?
Watch whichever Fyre documentary you want, just be aware that one of them is clearly propaganda.
Well, that's going to wrap up my Summer Music Concert (and Documentary) chain. I'm sorry if it wasn't up to your standards, but then again, the circumstances were beyond my control. You really should have upgraded to my Deluxe V.I.P. package, which would at least have come with a cheese sandwich. All the influencers did it, and they're all happy and satisfied and thin and gorgeous, don't you want to be like them?
Also starring Seth Crossno, Ben Meiselas, Vickie Segar, Calvin Wells (all carrying over from "Fyre Fraud"), Gabrielle Bluestone, Michael Ciccarelli, C.C. Clarke, Columbo, Mark Crawford, Shiyuan Deng, Martin Howell, Jillionaire, Brett Kincaid, Kindo, Andy King, Justin Liao, Mdavid Low, Stacy Miller, Mark Musters, James Ohliger, Mick Purzycki, Adam Renna, Mary Ann Rolle, Luca Sabatini, Samuel Trost, Keith van der Linde, Marc Weinstein,
with archive footage of Ja Rule, Hailey Bieber, Bella Hadid, Chanel Iman, Carola Jain, Kendall Jenner, Alyssa Lynch, Grant Margolin, Conan O'Brien, Shanina Shaik, Bill Spadea (all carrying over from "Fyre Fraud"), Alessandra Ambrosio, Jason Bell, Rose Bertram, Larry Bird, Ron Funches (last heard in "Trolls"), Elsa Hosk, Magic Johnson, Jessica Nutt, Gisela Oliveira, Emily Ratajkowski, Lais Ribiero, Andy Richter (last seen in "Girlfriend's Day"), Angelo Roefaro, Frank Tribble Jr., Cassandra Lee Walker, Gerri Willis.
RATING: 4 out of 10 useless RFID wristbands
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