Fyre Fraud
Premise - A hulu original documentary on the colossal failure of the 2017 Fyre Festival, a newly launched music festival in the Bahamas intended to unite social influencers for the world's greatest party. A tale of ill-preparation and naivety turns criminal as Fyre Festival CEO Billy McFarland clearly engages in fraudulent activities, scamming guests, participants, vendors, and more of tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.
Review - I'm not super into the documentary format, which I've definitely written about before, but the Fyre documentary duo has been all of my feed for weeks, so I thought "why not?" Conclusion is that I'm still not super into the documentary format, but I enjoyed it - enough that I had to watch it all in one sitting instead of stopping to watch the superbowl.
Fyre Festival was a huuuuuge story, particularly among millennials, so why was it not really on my radar until these documentaries arose years later? As far as I can remember, my twitter feed was not drowning in fyre festival news at all. On the other hand, TanaCon, which was a convention disaster on a much smaller scale, was alllllllllll I heard about for a while. I started to question what kinds of social media I was really participating in. My home has always been YouTube, since I was in elementary school and the website was still new. I've been to VidCon before, and TanaCon was all about a new VidCon. The center of the storm was YouTubers, and I know all about YouTubers. Lots of them. But I know little to nothing about social influencers on Instagram, which I believe is what Fyre Festival focused on. The people I follow on Instagram are YouTubers first and foremost, and then have an Instagram page to support their YouTube channel. I know the names of some of the big influencers - like Emily Ratatata... whatever her name is, but that's about it. It made me wonder two things - 1) Is my seemingly large bubble on social media still that, just a bubble? Was I totally disconnected from what most people are seeing on social media? - Or the second question, 2) Is the impact of this failed Fyre Festival on a much smaller scale than the documentary makes it seem, because it was really only big, big news for rich Instagram-loving millennials?
Regardless of my previous knowledge or attachment to Fyre Festival, the documentary still had me hooked because I could relate to it by proxy - the notion of following people who commodify their lives and have this personality "brand." All of these people spending tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to this island with a whole bunch of other relevant people and promote their lifestyle "brand" and show lots of footage of how great it all was. If this was on YouTube I would have been eating this up, the way I've watched vlogs of Coachella.
The end result was infuriating only when considered what the expectations were vs. reality. If they expected to come to an island and live in tents, it's really not TOO awful... but it's more the fact that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for private villas that literally DID NOT EXIST on the island.
It's not stupidity, it was crime. They knew well in advance this couldn't happen. Even if at the beginning it was an earnest effort, they should have been able to tell at least a month or two in advance that the time was just not there. And a lot of the evidence shows that they knew they were in debt, and kept scamming people out of their money in order to try to make up for the debt. If a narrative film ever gets made out of this, I wanted him to be played by Ben Affleck. Something about his mannerisms/face reminds me a bit of Nick from Gone Girl (except Nick was innocent).
Many people made fun of it because the only people who really suffered as a result were rich, instagram-famous, likely narcissistic millennials, but they're still human beings who I believe were put in a potentially dangerous situation. They're lucky the health concerns weren't any worse. I think one person passed out, but that's about it.
As far as the actual execution, the only thing that really stood out to me was sometimes the audio editing felt was unpleasant. There would be certain gaps or words edited together that didn't sound right. (68/100).
Quote - "Here's to living like movie stars, partying like rock stars, and fucking like porn stars."
What to watch for - The footage of the actual festival is what I find the most horrifying. They were literally stranded on an island with limited food and water, in empty tents with nothing but a mattress - if they could get that much. People had to scramble to find tents.
EDIT 2/5/19 - I've now seen the Netflix documentary too, and now I say what's special about this particular documentary is that it has footage of Billy McFarland himself.
If you liked this documentary, I'd recommend trying the Netflix version released at the same time, Fyre! Or, for a different story, Shane Dawson's youtube documentary on TanaCon.
Directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Wiloughby Nason
Distributed by Hulu
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