Ja Rule, a simple man of simple tastes, had but one modest request. “Real talk, like, we’re spendin’ a lot of fuckin’ money,” he growls at a cowed underling early in the lurid new Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. “If we wanna go fuckin’ see the pigs, we go see the pigs.” He shakes his head. “That’s it. If we wanna go fuckin’ see the pigs, and the girls wanna go see the pigs, we go fuckin’ see the pigs.”
So Ja and the girls go fuckin’ see the pigs. It is late 2016. By “the pigs,” he means the adorable and only occasionally bitey little guys roaming near Norman’s Cay, a tiny island in the Bahamas where Ja and his business partner, a charismatic young visionary named Billy McFarland, are filming the promo video for their latest venture, the Fyre Festival. This will be an “immersive” and “transformative” new music festival, set to transpire over two weekends in April and May 2017, taking place both on a private Bahamian island “once owned by Pablo Escobar” and “on the boundaries of the impossible.” Only one of those locations was the truth, and not the Pablo Escobar one.
By “the girls,” Ja means the models and influencers gathered there to frolic and imbibe. By “there,” just to clarify, I mean the promo-video shoot and not the Fyre Festival itself, which despite a luxe social-media campaign driven by the likes of Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid featured few models or frolicking influencers, and turned out to be a world-historical disaster of mega-vi proportions such that it has inspired two movies out this week that are now at war with each other. “The pigs at one point bit Billy in the balls,” recalls promo-video director Michael Swaigen with an admirably straight face in the lurid new Hulu documentary Fyre Fraud. “And he’s running off, and people are just laughing.” They’re still laughing. There is much—too much, now, really—to laugh at.
The Fyre Festival promised exclusivity and unimaginable luxury, a diamond-encrusted Coachella with bespoke private villas and gourmet meals and various yacht escapades and a real-life treasure hunt soundtracked by the likes of Major Lazer, Tyga, Disclosure (DJ set), and Blink-182. Instead, it delivered a livestreamed and notably Ja Rule–free hellscape of FEMA tents, thunderstorm-soaked mattresses, airport calamity, and the cheese sandwich heard round the world.
It was the perfect midair collision of FOMO and digital schadenfreude, of millennial narcissism and predatory late capitalism, and now of a monolithic streaming service and its feistiest competitor. Fyre, directed by Chris Smith, was announced in December and will hit Netflix on Friday; Fyre Fraud, directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, dropped on Hulu Monday in an admirably petty surprise release. (To put it in streaming-wars terms, Fyre Fraud is the Cloverfield Paradox of Fyre Festival documentaries.)
It gets spicier, and much more convoluted, from there. Hulu’s movie is in some ways an explicit indictment of Netflix’s movie, which was produced in part by Vice and Jerry Media, a.k.a. Fuck Jerry, a.k.a. the social-media powerhouse that helped propagate the myth that drove the Fyre Festival disaster in the first place. (A former Jerry Media employee is one of Fyre Fraud’s most prominent talking heads.) McFarland, who is now serving a six-year prison term for wire fraud, is the supervillain of both films, but sat for an interview only for the Hulu project, for which he was paid an undisclosed amount; Smith told The Ringer this week that the figure could be as high as $250,000, and that McFarland demanded as much as $125,000 to talk for Netflix’s Fyre, which Smith says he declined on ethical grounds given the damage, financial and otherwise, McFarland has already caused.
All of this is a mess. A glorious, maddening, thrillingly gleeful mess. If you can stomach only one movie on this topic, Netflix’s Fyre takes the proverbial cheese sandwich—Smith, who directed 1999’s Sundance darling American Movie and 2017’s Netflix jam Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, is far more adept at both creating dramatic tension and delivering coherent information. Whereas Hulu’s Fyre Fraud is wilder, and shoddier, and far bitchier, and thus arguably better attuned to the spirit of the ongoing farce in question. Also, to its credit, Fraud includes the line, “If you’ve never been out on bail before, that’s the time in your life when you want to be committing the least number of crimes.” It might take more than one movie to fully sate your hunger for Fyre Festival schadenfreude. It might take more than two.
Billy McFarland’s previous bright idea, which caught fire in 2016, was Magnises, a since-disgraced credit-card company that he swears was just poorly spelled, and not an attempt to imply the phrase magnum penises. The idea, see, was that he bought a giant sheet of metal from China and cut out a black card that would hit the table at the club or wherever with a satisfying, virile clang.
This clang, in turn, caught Ja Rule’s attention. McFarland attempted to book Ja for a party, found the process cumbersome, and soon partnered with the rapper on Fyre Media, a concert-booking app that seemed, relative to all of McFarland’s other ideas, both viable and not immediately criminal. The Fyre Festival was first conceived as a promo for the app, and wound up destroying it—and everything and everybody else around it—instead.
In Netflix’s Fyre, Ja and McFarland describe their rapport, in archival footage, using the phrase “Magic Bird,” a reference to the way Magic Johnson and Larry Bird once enlivened and revolutionized the NBA. They even came up with a little trademark toast, which they deliver during the Fyre Festival promo-video shoot:
Ja: Here’s to livin’ like movie stars, partyin’ like rock stars … Billy?
McFarland: … And fuckin’ like porn stars.
Big whoops from all assembled. Cellphone video of this scene appears in both Fyre and Fyre Fraud, which indeed share a decent amount of footage, but surprisingly few interview subjects. Netflix’s movie lays out the backstory with a far surer hand, and defends a much firmer thesis: It turns out that putting on a music festival is really hard work, and takes a really long time, and much of that work is insanely boring. “Instead of thinking about models, you’re gonna have to think about toilets,” counsels one early organizer, who is basically kicked off the island for arguing that all the paying guests couldn’t possibly fit on the island, but not before someone spills beer on his map during a planning meeting.
Netflix’s Fyre is full of pained testimonials from people with fake-sounding jobs like “music-festival consultant” that turn out to be real jobs, or at least jobs one can do very poorly when one is led by a debonaire-schlub scammer like McFarland who lies about basically everything. This includes the private island he didn’t really buy, the custom villas (costing as much as $50,000 for the weekend) he didn’t really build, the superstar acts he didn’t really pay, the prepaid “cash-free” wristbands he didn’t really activate, and all the toilets he didn’t really get around to thinking about.
Smith’s movie gets better the deeper it drills into these mundane details, climaxing with a genuinely bonkers anecdote in which one of Fyre’s main organizers, an eerily calm man named Andy King, recounts the story of an irate Bahamian customs officer, four 18-wheeler trucks full of Evian water, a $175,000 bill due in cash for their release, and a proposal so indecent I’m too scared to even attempt to paraphrase it:
Billy called and said, “Andy, we need you to take one big thing for the team.” And I said, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been taking something for the team every day.” And he said, “Well, you’re our wonderful gay leader. And we need you to go down—will you. Suck. Dick. To fix this water problem?”
And I said, “Billy, what?” And he said, “Andy, if you will go down and suck Cunningham’s dick—who’s the head of customs—and get him to clear all the containers with water, you will save this festival.” And I literally drove home, took a shower, I drank some mouthwash, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I’m really”—and 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 dick.
If you’re still conscious, you’ll be pleased to know the customs guy “couldn’t have been nicer,” and this gambit proved unnecessary, and the hell with all of this.
Hulu’s Fyre Fraud dwells far less on these particulars, laser-focused instead on the scammer icon who ignored them. McFarland is exhaustively described, in both docs, as an affable and energetic and inspiring young thought leader charming enough to lead all these lambs to slaughter. Practically everyone involved with Fyre Festival knew, for weeks if not months leading up to opening night on April 27, 2017, that disaster was imminent. But nobody—as everyone on camera insists—could stop it. Nobody but McFarland. Everyone, to varying degrees, admits to some complicity, to some modest degree of guilt. But everyone eventually pulls the rip cord, parachutes to safety, and leaves him to take the blame. They believed in him. They were mistaken in doing so. It’s all his fault. The fact that they’re certainly not wrong doesn’t make them right.
On camera for Fyre Fraud, McFarland is neither as likable nor as unlikable as you want him to be, his every unenlightening answer bracketed by awkward pauses that feel manufactured—by him, or the filmmakers, or both. Everybody’s got an agenda, both on-camera and behind it, and sorting out this chain of vengeance gets exhausting, if not outright irritating.
The Hulu movie’s thesis is that self-obsessed millennials, with their selfies and their post-9/11 trauma and their Kardashian worship, practically brought Fyre Festival on themselves. Fraud relies more heavily on journalists, with far fewer direct participants, and lots of Documentary 101 padding via goofy clips from such tired sources as The Simpsons, The Office, Saturday Night Live, Family Guy, and various old-timey cartoons, plus Lena Dunham’s “voice of my generation” line from Girls. It takes great pains to define such terms as FOMO and influencer. And it stalls until the McFarland on-camera interview finally grows testy, which is to say remotely interesting, as when he’s called out on Fyre Festival’s comically woeful housing situation:
McFarland: We had 250 houses rented for millions of dollars, with paper receipts and pictures of every house.
Off-camera interviewer: Why didn’t their guests get to those houses that you rented?
McFarland: We had a box of physical keys, cars to take people there, and maps for every single house. And the box of keys, uh, it unfortunately went missing.
Interviewer: You lost a box of keys to $2 million worth of houses?
McFarland: Mmmhmm.
Interviewer: So why didn’t you tell that to the guests?
[Long, extra-awkward pause.]
By the end of Fyre Fraud, a frazzled McFarland is fielding questions like “Has anyone ever called you a compulsive liar?” Meanwhile, his girlfriend, also interviewed on camera and getting noticeably more tremulous as the film goes on, seems on the brink of some sort of revelation. But no gotcha moment is forthcoming, for anyone, ever—everyone involved got got a long, long time ago.
In another sense, both Fyre and Fyre Fraud are remakes of Carrie, with bloodthirsty viewers just biding their time until the prom scene. The footage of the actual Fyre Festival and its immediate aftermath—mostly culled from social media, giddy news reports, and hackneyed late-night-talk-show jokes—doesn’t last as long as you want it to, given that the whole actual viral calamity lasted only a matter of hours. The first batch of doomed partygoers, already miffed at not getting a private-plane flight from Miami to the Bahamas, were crammed into an old school bus and driven out to a dystopian tent city, where a chastened McFarlane jumped on a table and told everyone to grab a tent, triggering an ugly Lord of the Flies–style free-for-all as night fell and the mood grew darker still.
Everyone’s luggage eventually arrived, and was promptly tossed off the back of two semi trucks in yet another chaotic free-for-all. The artists had all long since canceled; with the whole festival finally called off, everyone rushed back to the airport that night, where flight delays left them huddled until morning without food or water, the doors chained shut for safety. The single most shocking thing about the Fyre Festival, in retrospect, is that somehow, nobody died.
The consensus, among all the gawkers following this woeful saga on social media, was that all of this was, and remains, hilarious. Both movies make clear that the Fyre Festival’s paying customers were met with instant multimedia ridicule, and neither movie argues that this was unjust; these people dropped a ridiculous amount of money on a patently ridiculous thing, and in essence got what they paid for, which is a ridiculous experience they can brag about to their detriment for the rest of their lives. Some of them got to be in a big-time documentary or two! Sometimes you do it for the ’Gram, and sometimes the ’Gram does it for you.
Which is not to say that McFarland’s transgressions and outright crimes were victimless. Netflix’s Fyre is relatively tender in its treatment of those poor employees on the booking-app side of the Fyre Media equation, who watched from New York as the brand disintegrated overnight, and a week or two later suffered through a conference call where McFarland announced, “We’re not firing anybody, we’re just letting you know, there will be no payroll in the short term.” Fyre, and to a lesser extent Fyre Fraud, also generates some much-deserved sympathy for the day laborers, restaurant workers, and other actual Bahamian citizens who never got paid, or actually lost money paying their own employees, and got stuck cleaning up the festival’s mess, physical and otherwise.
Those people—a few of whom, in Fyre Fraud, are identified as “local fixers”—are your only real option, in terms of rooting interests. Even this saga’s more heroic figures are a little too smug about it. Calvin Wells, a New York City venture capitalist, caught on to the Fyre Festival scam early, set up a Twitter account called @fyrefraud, and tried to take it down from the inside via leaks to The Wall Street Journal and whatnot. He’s a delightful presence in the Netflix doc, especially when he recounts that the festival finally found a location in Exuma immediately north of a Sandals resort, and got away with claiming to be a private island only by Photoshopping the Sandals out to make it look like water. But he’s a much heavier and more tiresome presence in the Hulu doc, retelling the Photoshop story to diminishing returns, chortling about Dave Chappelle’s old Ja Rule bit, and generally killing time while burnishing his halo. The canary in the coal mine doesn’t necessarily deserve a parade.
There’s a similar self-congratulatory air to the PR war at the core of the Fyre vs. Fyre Fraud dustup. Bizarrely, the Hulu doc ends by announcing the existence of the Netflix doc, and highlighting Jerry Media’s involvement in it, and underscoring that the social-media team there kept posting rhapsodically about the Fyre Festival for weeks and even days before the shit hit the fan. Which is true, but in the Netflix doc, even with Jerry Media’s direct involvement, company CEO Mick Purzycki doesn’t work too hard to exonerate himself, copping to a mass complaint-deletion policy as angry customers started spamming Fyre Festival’s accounts as the event drew nearer. But he adds that eventually, he refused to tweet out any more promises or flowery images from the promo video once the full scale of the carnage was clear, whereupon he was introduced to the new social-media team. Everyone will take only so much blame; everyone is willing to look bad on camera only if it’ll presumably make somebody else look worse.
All of those roads, of course, lead to Billy McFarland, who rode out the Fyre Festival aftermath in a luxe NYC hotel penthouse, where he hatched a new scheme. Specifically, the Fyre Festival email list was quickly spammed with offers for cheap tickets to the Grammys, the Met Ball, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, and other events that do not, in fact, sell tickets. But that project, too, quickly ran aground, and the wire fraud required to keep Fyre Festival financially solvent long enough to fail horribly has since landed McFarland in jail. Both documentaries make clear that this is likely not the last we’ll hear of him; I look forward to his 2028 presidential run, and so, begrudgingly, do you.
Which leaves poor Ja Rule, still out in the trenches with fewer supermodels (well, maybe) and certainly fewer fuckin’ pigs. He and McFarland are staring down a hefty $100 million–plus lawsuit. The Magic Bird partnership is in tatters. But the hustle is eternal. Late in Fyre Fraud, Ja pops up again via a clip of his 2018 appearance on Drink Champs, wherein he got loaded, took a little more credit for the Fyre Festival idea than was strictly advisable, and tried his best to hawk his hastily rebranded concert-booking app. Fyre Media is dead; long live the Fyre Festival media ecosystem. “It’s very different,” Ja concluded of his new/old venture. “But it’s similar.” I know the feeling.
