DOCUMENTARY
It’s really entertaining to watch fools and their money parting in such spectacular fashion,
Laugh & cringe at the same time
We’re a month into 2019 and the internet has already been gifted two magnificent memes. The first is a screenshot of rapper-entrepreneur delusional interviewee Soulja Boy, looking to the side, gloriously outraged as he says: “DRAAAAKE?!” That meme now represents offence or disgust. The second meme that January gifted us comes courtesy of Netflix. It’s just a picture of US events producer Andy King’s face. No specific facial expression is necessary — it just has to be a screenshot of King looking into the camera. What does that represent? Well …
What has turned King into an internet star is the Netflix documentary FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, which takes us behind the scenes of the infamous Fyre Festival of 2017. Millions of us watched online in real time with schadenfreude as the music festival fell apart. Attendees live-tweeted their tropical paradise weekend as it turned out to be a weekend in hell.
Watching super-rich kids (anyone with R3m to spend on a three-day experience must be drowning in money and privilege — but also suffering from a drought of good common sense) freaking out because the luxurious accommodation, private yacht and five-star cuisine they had paid for was, in actual fact, refugee tents, a cruise ship and dry cheese sandwiches was pretty entertaining, I won’t lie.
Some background: the Fyre Festival was the biggest pop-culture story on the internet for a little while. The brainchild of tech scammer Billy McFarland and selfproclaimed rap “mogul” (highly doubt it, but OK) Ja Rule, Fyre was meant to be a music festival in the style of Coachella, but taking place on a private island in the Bahamas (formerly Pablo Escobar’s property) and aimed solely at rich kids. The ticket prices were insane (the most expensive package cost $250,000 (about R3.4m), the line-up was confusing (Blink 182 alongside Migos), and the marketing campaign was silly (models and influencers partying in bikinis on a boat).
But it landed, with 95% of the tickets selling out in less than two days. It all seemed fine, but by the time the festival rolled around a few months later, everything was in the toilet. The organisers got sued by attendees. McFarland was arrested and is currently in jail for fraud.
(In one scene from the doccie, during a conference call between Fyre employees and McFarland, Ja Rule insists that it wasn’t “fraud” but “false advertising”. Last week, in reference to his relationship with McFarland, Rule tweeted: “I too was hustled, scammed, bamboozled, hood winked, lead astray!!! [sic]”)
With FYRE, Netflix takes us behind the scenes using footage and interviews with people who were involved with the project (everyone but Ja Rule and McFarland, with the latter apparently demanding a $250,000 fee to speak to Netflix) to show us how a crazy idea turned into an even crazier news item. It also feels like an allegory of the perils of exclusivity, excess, money and ego.
The documentary will make you laugh from both pleasure and disbelief as much as it will curl your toes. It’s a stressful watch and it also makes you wonder how those involved didn’t get a heart attack from everything going so spectacularly wrong.
Which brings us back to Andy King. The poor man was so invested in making Fyre Festival a success that at one point, on McFarland’s request, he was willing to give a Bahamian customs official a blowjob so that he would waive a $175,000 fee needed to release four trucks of Evian water. King says in the doccie: “I got into my car to drive across the island to take one for the team and I got to his office fully prepared to suck his d**k.” What a team player.
It’s one of the most spectacularly outrageous moments in a documentary filled with spectacularly outrageous moments. LS ●
A CRAZY IDEA TURNED INTO AN EVEN CRAZIER NEWS ITEM
FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened is streaming on Netflix. Hulu also has a Fyre Festival doccie, titled Fyre Fraud, which does feature McFaland.