I'd be surprised if someone isn't writing a musical about Billy McFarland. Good looking, gregarious and everyone's good friend. He could sell ice to the eskimos, at a handsome profit. In this doco, he comes across as a very entitled, amoral, smooth operator who still hasn't grasped that he did anything wrong. His interviews don't really achieve much, other than confirming that he won't answer key questions about his role in the disastrous Fyre Festival in the Bahamas. When asked a difficult question, he just stares, dumbfounded, like he's wracked his brain but can't imagine what to say. The doco succeeds in showing how McFarland and his promoters mounted a dazzling social media campaign to promote the Fyre Festival that played consumers like a violin. The promoters used celebrities and influencers and strategically placed posts to start a tsunami of desire among the public to get tickets. The promo video alone was a ridiculous con - portraying a few scantily clad models frolicking in paradise with pigs, campfires and jet skis, and adding some stock concert footage. It had nothing to do with reality. The rapper Ja Rule doesn't quite succeed in wriggling out of his major role in the affair. He lent his name to the event, seems to have known that the whole thing was doomed but then later claimed he did nothing wrong. Watching the footage of ticket holders arriving in the Bahamas is at times comical - matching their expectation of a well run festival with luxurious facilities, versus sleeping in crummy tents with little food or water. However, let's not forget that as disasters go, this is a small scale one. This ain't an earthquake or war refugee camp. Many of the concertgoers are rich white kids who probably look back now and laugh. I am glad the filmmakers included interviews with island staff who actually worked hard at short notice to try and build the festival but who didn't get paid. One of the video people is asked whose fault the whole fiasco was. He says "everyone's". I don't know about that, but those who bought tickets - who believed the social media hype that was sold to them - may now have cause to be a little more skeptical in future when someone tries to sell them a pile of dung dressed up as gold.
Review of Fyre Fraud
