With the exception of the thousands of people who got scammed into spending a full college tuition on Fyre Festival, the world has been collectively LOLing at the disaster since we first heard about it in 2017. Now, thanks to the new documentary, FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, we finally have an inside look at what actually happened. Plot spoiler: The entire story is equal parts messed up and wildly entertaining. Stream Now First of all, the release of the documentary was its own WTF moment. Fyre was surrounded by sketchiness before it was even released. Hulu casually dropped their own Fyre documentary, Fyre Fraud on Monday, apparently just to flex on Netflix's previously announced project. This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. Hulu surprise dropping its Fyre Fest documentary today, mere days before Netflix was set to drop its own, is the level of aggressive pettiness I'm here for pic.twitter.com/hROF7C6HqV — Caroline Darya Framke (@carolineframke) January 14, 2019 Hulu's documentary features interviews with Billy McFarland, the head scammy mastermind behind the festival, while Netflix's uses footage from Jerry Media (the Fyre marketing team and people behind @fuckjerry). Reportedly, the team behind the Netflix doc felt it was wrong to pay Billy for the interview, but Hulu thought it was important to get the scoop from him. Either way you look at it, the people involved in both works knew what was going behind the scenes throughout the creation of Fyre Festival, sooo take it all with a grain of salt. Billy, as a human being, is a total spectacle. Billy McFarland, the CEO and founder of Fyre Media, is basically a millennial Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street. He pulled off a bunch of fraudulent activity by being charismatic and selling the idea of a luxury lifestyle to anyone who would buy it. He clearly doesn't think his plans through, and throughout the documentary, you hear about him pulling insane shit like speeding off into the jungle on a four wheeler when he doesn't feel like facing a giant dumpster fire he's created. At one point, Billy falls asleep on the beach in broad daylight while they're supposed to be filming promotional materials for the festival. Solid management skills! Yep. This happened. Netflix Everyone around Billy is just like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You'd think that with the number of people who were involved in the extreme failure that was Fyre Festival, at some point someone would be like, "this is bad." Right? Well, yeah. People did try that. But, Billy would just convince them not only that it would work, but that it was their job to make it work. Or, he'd tell them to "just stay positive," and they'd have little choice but to kiiind of make things work. At the end of the documentary, the whole team had mostly come to the agreement that if they had just failed fast instead of struggled the whole way through, it wouldn't have been AS BAD. The financial side of the story is mind-boggling. Literally every single time any dollar amount is mentioned, it sounds like a scene from Richie Rich. Kendall Jenner gets wired $250,000 for an Instagram post. An attendee adds $800,000 to an RFID bracelet that was supposed to allow people to make cashless purchases for experiences at the festival, like meals and boat rides. (Except, there were no meals. Or boat rides. LOL.) Some festival-goers spend $250,000 on accommodations, and still ended up in those hurricane tents. Netflix The festival itself turned into a free-for-all The tents weren't assigned to attendees, so everyone just stormed them all at once and turned into actual savages when they realized what they were in for. There was no system for claiming baggage off of the 18-wheeler it showed up on. Giphy The island kind of just turned into the beginning of Birdbox where the entire population is just running into the distance without any real direction and a bunch of random things are on fire. (But, as Ja Rule points out at one point, nobody died! It's not that bad!!) Social media gave life to, and then killed Fyre Festival The documentary points out that there was hardly any substantial information given about the festival, and that the entire thing began and ended with social media. The hype around it began when 400 influencers, including the world's most famous supermodels like Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner, and Hailey Baldwin shared a mysterious orange tile to Instagram with a link to the Fyre Festival website. People didn't even really know when to book flights, but were willing to blow thousands of dollars just because of the really successful social media campaign. Instagram Although there were tons of red flags about the event, the moment the world collectively decided that it was a complete disaster was when a tweet of a photo of the sandwiches attendees were given went viral. Netflix So, yeah. A sandwich destroyed a multimillion dollar social media campaign. Still not as a crazy as an egg surpassing Kylie Jenner's world record for the most-liked Instagram post, but it's up there. Hannah Chambers Hannah Chambers is an entertainment editor at Cosmopolitan. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io<doc-sep>Fyre Fest: Call it the ultimate scam; call it the most ill-fated music festival of all time; call it social media schadenfreude at the expense of rich millennial influencers. However you regard the fiasco, the imploded event has entered pop nomenclature as a synonym for disaster. Which is why the Fyre Festival, created by tech-bro entrepreneur Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule, is the subject of not one, but two documentaries out this week. The third week of January was apparently the prime time for Hulu and Netflix to release dueling documentaries on the same notorious festival. But which one truly captures the quintessence of Fyre Fest? And which ones should you watch? To get to the bottom of the symbiotic streaming releases, three Polygon staffers convened to debate the merits and cross-check the facts: Karen Han watched Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened; Allegra Frank saw Hulu’s Fyre Fraud; and Petrana Radulovic watched both. Let the great Fyre feud begin. Petrana Radulovic, junior entertainment reporter: Fyre Fest touted deserted island (once owned by Pablo Escobar), hot Instagram models, big musical acts, and a week of extended partying in private villas. It was all too good to be true. Festival-goers were herded onto a gravel parking lot near a Sandals resort, met with emergency hurricane tents instead of luxury accommodations, and discovered there was barely any food and water. Later, organizer Billy McFarland was met with a class action lawsuit. There’s a lot going on with this whole fiasco, from start to finish. What would you say was the focus of the respective documentaries? What sets them apart? Karen Han, entertainment reporter: The Netflix documentary, Fyre (subtitled The Greatest Party That Never Happened), directed by Chris Smith, paints a pretty comprehensive picture of how the Fyre Festival debacle came to pass. There’s a story there rather than just a recounting of events, as the documentary involves interviews with the people who were involved with the so-called festival, the people who fell for it, and those who essentially became collateral damage. It’s the last aspect of the documentary that gives it weight, as impact upon the people of the Bahamian island of Great Exuma, who were duped into paying and working for an event that was never more than a scam, is clearly shown. These interviews also help fill the space left by what’s arguably the biggest thing missing from Fyre (though it’s debatable just how helpful it’d be), which is an interview with Billy McFarland, the man behind the whole operation. Allegra Frank, deputy news editor: To the benefit of Hulu’s Fyre Fraud — ethically dubious as it may be (and we’ll get to that) — McFarland, the scam artist mastermind at Fyre Fest’s heart, sat down to talk. And directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason made ample use of their time with McFarland, to the point where he becomes the centerpiece. This sounds like a dramatic difference from the Netflix doc. Fyre Fraud’s narrative isn’t so much centered on the gloriously hellish disaster that was this misbegotten music festival; instead, this is the story of how Billy McFarland managed to come up from rich-boy obscurity, get a bunch of other rich boys’ money, and somehow never learn his lesson. It’s the making of a con artist, whose taste for scamming first developed long before his days of hanging with Ja Rule in the Bahamas. Karen: It’s definitely noticeable that McFarland isn’t in the Netflix documentary, though I think that partially has to do with the fact that he is in Fyre Fraud. The picture that’s painted of him, however, doesn’t make me think that his participation in Smith’s work would have illuminated anything we don’t know about him: that he’s an unrepentant scammer, and that he seemingly has no regard for the way that his actions affect the people around him. Fyre ends with an explanation of his latest scam — selling fake tickets to ritzy events — which he’s running while out on bail. It doesn’t seem like he’s particularly interested in being honest. Allegra: I can’t speak to his sincerity, but I will say this: Billy McFarland is a terrible liar. It’s abundantly clear in Fyre Fraud, and it’s transfixing in the same way that Robert Durst was in HBO’s true-crime miniseries The Jinx a few years back. McFarland hasn’t been accused of murdering his wife (like Durst was), but spending 90 minutes watching him try to wrangle back the reins, contrasted with the reality of how badly Fyre Fest went down, makes for a fascinating portrait. After all, you can’t just read about Robert Durst’s or McFarland’s tells for when they’re lying; you gain understanding from seeing them. I appreciated getting a deeper look into the psychology of someone who could stick up for an out-and-out, overpriced failure even in the face of jail time — or the truth. Petrana: For the record, Karen, the Hulu doc ends with his most recent scam, which is selling music production lessons to fellow inmates. Karen: Excuse me!! ! Petrana: So Billy allegedly getting paid a big sum to be in the documentary itself has turned out to be a bit of an ethical conundrum. But it wasn’t just the Hulu doc — sorry for the pun — getting the fire here. The Netflix documentary is produced by the media company involved in this whole thing. Does any of that impact the movies for you? “So many things had to go right to make it this big of a failure.” —Billy McFarland, liar Karen: It’s a little ironic that both documentaries are ethically dubious given their subject matter. There’s also something apt about the fact that the exact details that have been reported aren’t totally clear, and seem to indicate that McFarland was running yet another scam. Smith said that McFarland came to them, saying that the Hulu production was offering him $250,000, and that he’d take $125,000 to appear in the Netflix doc as well. Since then, Furst has denied that sum (though not that they paid), and noted that McFarland has, time and time again, proven himself a compulsive liar. As for Jerry Media’s involvement with the Netflix doc, it’s a bit of a mark on the film’s record, as the company was directly involved in setting up the festival. That said, the documentary doesn’t try to make Jerry Media look good, and the company’s involvement also means that Fyre has a mind-blowing amount of behind-the-scenes footage from the planning and (woeful) execution of the event, not just footage from the people (and “influencers”) who were there at the time. Petrana: The Jerry Media people who appear in the Netflix doc insist that they had little information on what happened on the production side, whereas the former Jerry employee who talked to Hulu said that was not the case at all. Shade. Allegra: While some extra color from the festival itself would be a nice addition to Fyre Fraud, its absence — or rather, its reliance on primary accounting from attendees instead, like you mentioned — isn’t often felt. Furst and Nason seem to know they’ve landed a home run by securing Billy for their doc, even if the financial behind-the-scenes part reflects poorly on the doc’s journalistic standards. But just as Jerry Media didn’t relieve itself of any culpability in Fyre, Billy comes off 100 percent badly in Hulu’s Fyre Fraud. They did not pay him to participate in a puff piece. They paid him to talk about his greatest failure the only way he knows how: with unnerving, calculated sincerity. Karen: And, all that said, I feel like there’s one big figure missing from both documentaries: Ja Rule. Where is Ja? Petrana: Ja is missing from both these docs and the criminal charges. There were other important figures involved in Fyre Fest, some who appeared in both docs, some only in one, and some just briefly mentioned in one play big roles in the other. Who are the most prominent players in each doc — and do they appear in the other?<doc-sep>Andy King’s Fyre Festival story—wildly unspooled in Netflix’s new documentary, Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened—may not be one of dignity. But it is one of incomprehensible sense of duty. King, a producer of Fyre Festival, was so committed to the first-time, Ja Rule and Billy McFarland-created “music festival” that, even when the production was already an epic fiasco, King was willing to degrade himself in a Hail-Mary attempt to salvage any part of it. During the documentary, King recounts how McFarland reached out to him after Bahamian customs, which had not been paid $175,000 in fees, detained the festival’s water supply. According to King, McFarland told him, “You’re our wonderful gay leader and we need you to go down [to customs]. Will you suck dick to fix this water problem?” On paper, this reads like a joke that isn’t particularly funny. But in the documentary, King says he was “honestly” willing to go to this H.R.-violating length to procure hydration for a festival that couldn’t even spell “fire” properly. “I literally drove home, took a shower, I drank some mouthwash. . . . I got into my car, to drive across the island to take one for the team. And I got to [the customs officer’s] office, fully prepared to suck his dick.” Dear readers, King did not have to. The customs officer, it turned out, “couldn’t have been nicer.” Even though King thought he saved the event by procuring the festival’s water, he, well, . . .absolutely did not. His courageous retelling of this story, however, has made him a kind of unsung hero on the Internet. And, this weekend, King was shocked to discover that people had actually made memes dedicated to him. He was surprised for several reasons—one, he didn’t know what a meme was; two, he doesn’t use social media; and three, he thinks it’s “mind-boggling” people care about him and the documentary as much as they do.<doc-sep>
One thing is for certain: The Fyre Festival was nothing short of a rich, influencer-driven disaster. It was supposed to be a high-end getaway music festival with headliners Blink-182, G.O.O.D. Music, and Lil Yachty. Fans were promised beautiful people, beautiful food, beautiful beaches, and beautiful accommodations. But when the wealthy attendees began arriving at Great Exuma on April 27, 2017, they found themselves in the middle of chaos. There were wet mattresses! Postponed shows! No water! Lost baggage! Delayed flights! And for God's sake, people with disposable income were expected to eat poorly constructed cheese sandwiches! As the frantic social media reports made it back to civilization, the Fyre Festival became a viral story. But after the social media firestorm faded, the Ja Rule and Billy McFarland brainchild had serious legal implications. This resulted in multiple multi-million dollar lawsuits and a federal criminal investigation. But what ever really happened at the ill-fated Fyre Festival and its shady creator? That's what both Netflix and Hulu aim to explore with rival documentaries. Netflix announced its highly-anticipated documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened late in 2018, but on the week of its release, Hulu scooped the mega-streamer by releasing Fyre Fraud. The Netflix documentary highlights the disaster on the ground. The Hulu documentary features details straight from the creator's mouth—Billy McFarland—along with a more in-depth explanation of the lead up to the Fyre Festival. I've watched both documentaries, and I can tell you that you should do the same if you really want a comprehensive picture of the disastrous Fyre Festival. This is what I learned. Influencers were taken on a ride... by influencers Both Fyre Fraud and Fyre highlight how integral influencer culture, particularly on Instagram, was to the successful marketing of Fyre Festival. The fest itself was ultimately meant to launch the Fyre app, which would act as a high-end booking app for people who can afford to have, say, Ellie Goulding at their bar mitzvah. Kendall Jenner was paid a quick $250,000 for one post of the promotional video. Others also shared the promotional video which was marked by the blank orange post that pre-empted the video's start. Hulu Influencers who posted it were promised a variety of things from free admission to premium housing. When the planning process behind securing promised villas and housing to influencers fell through, different influencers were given different treatment. Some were simply not accommodated at all, while others (few) ended up in villas. The one through line is that even on the ground, attendees didn't have a clear idea of what actually was going on. The gravity of Jerry Media's involvement is still unclear Hulu's Fyre Fraud's focus is much more focused on the preparation for the Fyre Festival, which is damning for Jerry Media (of @fuckjerry fame), who was hired on for marketing expertise. Jerry Media is the company that developed the iconic orange slide that kicked off the promotional video that so many influencers shared. Ex-Jerry Media employee Oren Aks is interviewed in Fyre Fraud, and alleges that the company knew a great deal about the event falling apart and even tried to cover it up. "Any time there'd be anything that was distasteful or calling Fyre out on anything, it was always a matter of 'go to that source and eliminate it,'" Aks says in the documentary. The Netflix version of events is a bit more different. The deleting of negative message was also mentioned in the Jerry Media-produced documentary, but instead of implicating the marketing team hired (which was Jerry Media), it implicated the Fyre Media team and focused more on the action and less on the company doing it. Hulu Bahamians were royally fucked by the Fyre Festival If Netflix's documentary really excels at one thing, it's highlighting the financial burden that McFarland and his cohorts placed upon Bahamians. Workers and business owners on the islands have still gone without payment. Bahamians suggest that practically the entire island of Exuma was brought in to help put the festival together, but the goal of getting the festival off the ground was more important than the logistics behind having some 200 workers as contractors. To this day, many Bahamians haven't been paid for the services they provided. Some preferred not to discuss it at all. The dinner that @fyrefestival promised us was catered by Steven Starr is literally bread, cheese, and salad with dressing.