Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened (reviewed by Dad)
If America’s “dot-com” and celebrity cultures decided to hook up and not think safety (or anything else) first, the Fyre Festival fiasco would be their likely offspring.
Oh wait a minute, it was!
For those of you not hip enough to be in the know, the Fyre Festival was a disastrous music festival that was supposed to take place in the Bahamas in 2017, but was cancelled just as guests arrived.
The brainchild of Billy McFarland, a entrepreneur in a long line of “Next Steve Jobs” wannabes, and his partner in crime (literally), rap celeb Ja Rule, this failed yuppie version of Woodstock has been exquisitely covered in the Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened.
The documentary lets the story unfold from interviews and Internet video postings made by those involved, giving the film a cinema veritas feel defined by our social-media-stuffed age.
On the whiteboard, the idea for the Fyre Festival probably made perfect sense. McFarland, who won the attention of investors through his founding of Magnises (a company that offered a black metallic credit card that provided access to special indulgences) parlayed his reputation as a man who could separate yuppies from their cash into his next venture: Fyre.
According to the documentary, Fyre was supposed to have been a website that would be the “Uber of Celebrity Bookings” (note to investors: avoid projects described as the “Uber of” anything), one that would allow you to book a musician or model online, rather than going through antiquated processes like dealing with agents (or other human beings).
To generate buzz for the launch of the new app, McFarland and his business partner Rule came up with the idea of holding a music festival on a remote island in the Bahamas they had allegedly bought from jailed drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. With access to celebs and key influencers, the organizers launched with a glitzy web video promising participants a luxury week under the Bahaman sun with major artists, meals served by celebrity chefs, and bikini-clad supermodels on tap.
The social-media launch was a sensation, selling out its high-priced huts and cabanas almost immediately. The only problem with the arrangement was that nothing they were promising existed in the physical world.
When those representing Escobar forbade the organizers from using their original island location after the globally viewed promo video boasted of the island’s drug-king origins (mention of which was expressly forbidden in the original deal), the planners just pulled up stakes and moved the event to Exuma, the biggest island in the Bahamas which, unlike the original venue, at least had plumbing.
But the theoretical possibility of flush toilets did not necessarily mean that luxury accommodations for 6000 rich kids expecting the party-of-the-century could be accommodated. In fact, by the time the first set of guests arrived, all that awaited them was a set of geodesic tents designed for hurricane relief victims, with mattresses drenched from a hellacious storm that hit the island the day before the start of the event. Only after the first set of attendees cannibalized whatever shelter and bedding was available to let them survive the night did the organizers face reality and cancel the event, leaving one set of guests stuck on the island, and the rest stranded at various Florida airports.
Netflix’s Fyre documentary benefits from the fact that everyone involved with the plot, including participants, planners and victims of the disaster, kept their digital cameras rolling throughout the entire process, giving filmmakers incomparable access to all players scheming and suffering in real time. Even after the whole festival fell apart and McFarland was indicted for fraud, he continued to try to scam wealthy sucker/subscribers by spamming them with bogus offers of tickets to exclusive events. This further criminal behavior was also caught on (unbelievably) self-created digital film.
Towards the end of the documentary, one commenter on the whole fiasco described it as Instagram brought into the real world. Now I don’t have an Insta account, but Ben does. So I’ll let him tell you if that’s an apt metaphor for this microcosm of the end of civilization known as the Fyre Festival.
Ben Replies: The world of social media is the toxic, brilliant actualization of the domino effect. Watching a complete fraud such as this festival spread like wild-Fyre (no pun intended) is the kind of antidote we need to lower our trust in what we see online. This documentary is hilarious while also providing a frightening wake-up call regarding the lengths of deception one evil genius would go to make a boatload of cash in hopes of run off into the sun just ahead from a gang of screaming upper-class twenty-somethings deprived of their promised performance from Lil Yachty. The wonder of everyone involved with the project who are interviewed in this film gives Fyre an ensemble-comedy feel that makes the movie all the more effective. One of the most astounding stories I have ever heard, and a great piece of documentary moviemaking.
