I can’t think of a sitcom or recent comedy movie that made me laugh as much and as hard as FYRE: THE GREATEST PARTY THAT NEVER HAPPENED. I saw it on Netflix. There's a competing one on Hulu. It is more of an examination of the organizer and the scams he ran. Well worth watching. I just found the Netflix one more fun and dealt more with the actual event.
Anyway, here’s the scoop:
A slick charismatic sleazeball named Billy McFarland decided to stage a Woodstock-like music festival/fantasy/wet dream for rich entitled Millennials. He was going to secure a private island in the Bahamas, put everyone up in luxury beach villas, fly them all there on private jets, provide top chefs to feed them, top shelf booze to lubricate them, and hear such super groups as, uh, Blink 182. All for only $12,000 a person. But hey, it was a way to kill a weekend.
Billy (short for Bilko I believe) and his in-groovy organizers put together a promotional video filled with super models and all the excess one one-per-center would want. These guys knew how to exploit social media and completely sold out within days.
Now all Billy and the gang had to do was deliver. And that’s when the fun began. Everything that could go wrong did. They were kicked off the island, had to scramble to find another one, the luxury villas were hurricane tents, the caterer quit, music acts pulled out, super models were nowhere to be found, and Billy was going through money like water, working around the clock to mount this boondoggle.
Speaking of water, they had shipped over truckloads of Perrier but they were held up in customs. So Billy asked one of the gay organizers if he could take one for the team and blow the customs guy to get their water. And he agreed to do it.
And all that is just the set up. The real comic payoff comes when the hipster partygoers arrived. The world’s greatest exclusive party became LORD OF THE FLIES. Also invited were “Influencers.” Is anyone more insufferable than an “Influencer?” Just too cool for school. To see them inconvenienced is worth the time to see this documentary.
I suppose if I were a better person my heart would go out more to the festivalgoers who paid a fortune only to get royally fucked over. But these are the people who get into clubs while you wait in lines behind a rope. These are the Donald Trump Juniors of the world. As comedian Rob Fuches says while guesting on CONAN, “If you paid thousands of dollars to go on a trip to see Blink 182, that’s on you. That is Darwinism at its finest.”
Since every attendee had iPhones there is video of everything and like I said, it’s a Schadenfreude extravaganza. Check it out. You’ll probably see the 24 year-old asshole who cut you off last week with his Tesla. And again, the Hulu documentary is also excellent. It's more like young Donald Trump if he had been caught.
from By Ken Levine
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