I finally sat down and watched both Fyre documentaries this week, the Hulu one and the Netflix one, back to back on a night when I should've been doing literally anything else. Bad idea, honestly. Not because either film is bad, but because two hours of watching rich twentysomethings get conned out of their vacation money by a guy who is very clearly still lying in his own documentary interview is a lot to process in one sitting.
For anyone who's been living under a rock: Fyre Festival was supposed to be a luxury music festival on a private island in the Bahamas back in April 2017, promoted by a small army of Instagram models and Kendall Jenner posting an orange square to something like 100 million followers. What people actually got when they landed was a gravel lot, some disaster-relief tents, and a cheese sandwich in a styrofoam container that's now basically the mascot of the whole thing. The guy behind it, Billy McFarland, is currently in federal prison for fraud, which tells you roughly how the story ends.
The two documentaries came out four days apart last month, Hulu's "Fyre Fraud" and then Netflix's "FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened," and I think the timing of that is honestly more interesting than either film on its own. Somebody clearly saw the other one coming and it turned into a race to release first. Hulu's version got there first and it's the scrappier one. It interviews McFarland directly (reportedly paid him for the privilege, which a lot of people were annoyed about) and spends real time on the wider grift-culture, fake-it-till-you-make-it Instagram economy that made the whole festival possible in the first place. Netflix's is the slicker, more polished one, directed by Chris Smith, and it's genuinely the better piece of filmmaking. Better pacing, better structure, way better access to the actual event footage and the contractor who built the site.
Here's my complaint though, and it bugged me the whole time I was watching it: Jerry Media, the social media agency that ran marketing for the real festival and helped build the hype in the first place, is a producer on the Netflix documentary. That's not disclosed anywhere in the film itself, you only find out if you go read about it afterward. So you've got a movie spending ninety minutes being righteously mad at influencer marketing and grift culture, made in part by the people who did the influencer marketing. I don't think that ruins the film, but it left a bad taste, and it's the kind of thing that makes me trust the word "documentary" a lot less than I used to.
The best part of both, honestly, is the local Bahamian angle that gets almost no attention anywhere else in the coverage of this story. A woman named Maryann Rolle runs a restaurant on the island and fed the Fyre staff for days out of her own pocket, was never paid the tens of thousands of dollars she was owed, and eventually had a GoFundMe set up for her that raised way more than what she'd lost. She's in both films and she's the only person in either one who comes across as entirely sympathetic and entirely honest. Everyone else, the investors, the influencers, McFarland himself, is some flavor of complicit or self-serving or both. I've thought about her a lot more this week than I've thought about the guy currently sitting in prison.
If you only have time for one, watch the Netflix one, it's the better made of the two. If you've got a couple hours to burn on a slow weekend and want the fuller, messier picture, including the part where McFarland was apparently already running a new scam (ticket reselling, this time) while being filmed for a documentary about his last one, do both. Just don't watch them right before bed like I did. I laid there afterward thinking about styrofoam cheese sandwiches for way longer than any reasonable adult should admit to.