Fyre Festival: New Netflix documentary explores failed 'luxury' music event

The documentary will air next week
New on Netflix: The latest documentary explores Fyre Festival
Netflix

The footage is shaky, shot on an iPhone. He pauses. “And f****** like pornstars,” prompts a voice, out of shot.

It’s a juvenile mission statement, befitting a riotous house of frat boys. Which about sums up this crew, the organisers of Fyre Festival, who collectively implemented an extravagant, exploitative organisational catastrophe that has become a gleeful byword for Instagram-age hubris.

Happily, the above scene lives on for posterity in a new, 90-minute Netflix documentary.

Directed by Chris Smith and released a week on Friday, it gives a prurient rundown of exactly how the clusterf*** happened, using interviews with organisers and guests, and close-range footage of the planning process, or lack thereof.

For those who didn’t follow it at the time — or who savour revisiting it — the story runs thus. Fyre Festival was a music festival, scheduled to take place in the Bahamas in April 2017. It was promoted on social media by gilded millennial models including Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner and Emily Ratajkowski, cost more than $3,000 for a ticket, and promised luxury glamping and palatial villas, gourmet food and yacht parties — all lavish bait for the social media generation.

In fact, it turned out to be “Lord of the Flies with Instagram’s top influencers”, as one person in the documentary puts it. The luxury yurts were emergency domes left over from Hurricane Matthew, and contained damp Ikea mattresses. There were never any villas, and the site was not a private island, but a construction site on the edge of a Sandals resort.

Fyre: The festival boasted luxury but quickly unravelled
Netflix

On the first night there was looting for loo rolls. There was no water and the “gourmet” food turned out to consist of two slabs of white bread with a limp, slick slice of burger cheese in the middle. The story, duly, went viral. There were various lawsuits mounted and an FBI investigation into the organisers.

“I had no idea it would end up like this,” says Marc Weinstein, who was drafted in to scout for luxury accommodation a month before the festival, and watched it implode at close range.

Hindsight grants wisdom, but surely it must have been fairly obvious this was leading to a massive catastrophe? “There were certain days when it was like: ‘There’s no way this is going to happen’. And then a small miracle would happen — someone would pull a rabbit out of their hat. We were all managing our own little projects, not getting the full picture.”

Perhaps so, though the documentary collects all these disparate strands and creates a narrative of inevitable ruin. Those who raise legitimate concerns about accommodation and sanitation are sacked — logistics are subordinate to egos and fantasies. The early recon trips are just parties; there is a lot of sitting around.

Huts: The accommodation at Fyre Festival
Netflix

To delude prospective punters that this is a private island the team Photoshops a map to separate the festival site off from the main island, then pretend it’s its own landmass. In terms of sophistication, this is not so much sleight of hand as finger painting.

The documentary also elucidates in detail how Fyre Festival’s investors were defrauded and how the organisers gorged on their money. Humour is tempered with exploitation: it’s estimated that there is still $250,000 owed to staff, who worked overnight for a month to build the site. One Bajan restaurateur lost $50,000 of her own savings, she explains, in tears, straight to camera.

At the centre of it all is Billy McFarland, founder of Fyre Media and an entrepreneur from New Jersey, who one former (and admittedly disgruntled) member of staff calls “an operational sociopath”. The festival was his idea and he was responsible for fundraising and organising it.

Food: Fyre Festival attendees soon made their meals go viral
Netflix / Twitter

The documentary skewers him deftly. Straight-to-camera interviews with former colleagues, who call McFarland “nerdy but smart” and “charismatic but trustworthy” are followed by shots of McFarland toting a cigar and falling asleep, holding a beer, on the beach. He travels to meetings in rented Maseratis and borrowed jets to project the image of the baller start-up bro. He is, patently, a fantasist.

“You can believe in him in the short term,” explains Weinstein. “But as you get closer to him, you realise how much of what he says is just complete lies.” Still, he says, McFarland was backed up by legitimate players, with big bucks: “I was introduced to him by a very well-established venture capital fund.” Fyre Festival had been poaching investors from the megalithic Coachella Festival.

But clearly, McFarland was a conman. He has since been sentenced to six years in jail for fraud.

So, has Weinstein watched the documentary? He’s seen clips. “It gave me post-traumatic stress disorder.”

FYRE is on Netflix from Jan 18

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