"Lord of the flies" of the Instagram era

Tickets for the Fyre festival in Bagams cost hundreds of thousands of dollars - but it was waiting for a failure. Two documentary films came out about this story at once

In April 2017, Fyre Festival was supposed to take place on the Bagams - a music festival, which was positioned as Coachella for fashionable and rich; The price of tickets reached 250 thousand dollars. Nothing came out: when the audience arrived at the festival, it turned out that instead of luxurious villas, tents were waiting for them, instead of luxurious food - a cheese sandwich, but there would be no concerts, because the scene was not built. The noisy failure of Fyre Festival was discussed a lot, and its organizer was soon detained by the FBI agents. This week, immediately on two streaming services, documentaries about the history of Fyre Festival: “Fyre Fraud”, shot by the directors, Jenner Furst and Julia Neason, on the Hulu website, and “Fyre” made by Chris Smith, on Netflix . Medusa editor Alexander Gorbachev looked both - and tells what new can learn about the history of Fyre Festival and its organizers.

The organizer of the festival Billy McFarland and had previously been engaged in inflation

The first large project of McFarland - now he is 28 years old - has become Magnice. Her customers received copies of their credit cards made of stainless steel - and as members of the Magnise club could claim a variety of exclusive access to various social events.

In fact, as customers and employees of MagnISS say, the main thing that the club members received was access to the house that McFarland rented at Manhattan: concerts, workshops and parties were held there. The owner of this house eventually sued Magnyses, finding that the building after constant drunkenness is in terrible condition. With exclusive access was even worse. According to one of the employees of the company, he was arranged as follows: McFarland announced several dozen VIP tickets to the Hamilton super-popular musical, raised money-and then on the eve of the performance, when people began to demand the promised one, bought tickets from the resellers. McFarland took the money for this from the funds that customers paid him for the next “exclusive” access - for example, for a superboll.

At the same time, most people who worked with McFarland speak of his charisma: to almost everyone, he seemed a brilliant businessman and visionary; Almost everyone was completely trusted to him to the last.

Fyre was created as a boucking application. And at first she was doing good things

Making Magnyses, McFarland met his future deputy Grant Margolin and Raper Jah the Rule. Together they soon launched the FYRE application, inviting a team of designers and managers to it. The idea of ​​Fyre was to change and simplify the market of corporate concerts: through the application you could directly contact the representatives of certain artists - and invite them to your party, having agreed on the amount.

The application gradually began to develop, and its creative director at some point proposed organizing a music festival to popularize the Fyre brand. In the future, he did not control the organization of the event.

The main reason for the success of Fyre Festival is Instagram

In the fall of 2016, McFarland and Jah Rul - at least they said so themselves - traveled around the bagamas on a small plane, noticed a small beautiful island and landed on a runway. The island was called Normans Kay; It was there that McFarland and partners decided to organize the festival next spring - despite the fact that there was no decisively no infrastructure.

First of all, the partners decided to advertise the future event. They invited to the island one and a half dozen of popular instagram models (they are called “influents” in the films): Bellu Hadid, Haley Baldwin, Emily Ratakovsky and others-as well as two filming groups. According to operators and directors from these groups, in fact, McFarland and his friends simply had fun on the island and around him in the company of beautiful girls: there was neither a script, nor a shooting plan; Everything happened spontaneously.

The Netflix film provides shots with such a scene: Ja Rules and Margolin offer two models to jump into the pool after them; They think that this is for work, but it turns out that just like that. Another time, the whole company went to the neighboring island, where the famous Bahamas floating pigs live; One of them bit McFarland in the groin. The models themselves, to which, after the failure of Fyre Festival, there were many complaints, the directors of the films were not given an interview.

One way or another, the material taken on the bugmas was enough to create several promoters in which models in swimsuits have fun on the beach and dance. To promote the festival in social networks, Jerry Media, one of the most successful American SMM agencies, was hired. Its employees came up with a move: at some point, the models and other “influenters” hired by Fyre Festival, posted an orange square with a festival account tag. It worked - the account instantly became popular, and the promoters, which looked like the dream of millennials , began to virously spread in social networks.

Netflix and Hulu films diverge in the interpretation of the role of Jerry Media in the history of the festival. The creators of the company - they are in the Netflix film - argue that until the last moment they did not know that the festival would not take place and the organizers were not ready. The former Jerry Media employee, who claims that he was responsible for the promotion of Fyre, told the directors of the film Hulu that the company from the very beginning understood that something was wrong with the festival-but up to the festival weekend continued to actually deceive the subscribers, thinking that everything was somehow formed.

Instagram bet was the main strategy for promoting the festival further. So, Kendal Jenner was paid for a post about Fyre Festival $ 250 thousand. Less influential “influens” for one post was offered a full VIP package at the festival-with free accommodation at a luxurious villa on the beach.

The festival team made a lot of effort to take place. But it was physically impossible, and Fyre bosses did not listen to anyone

Billy McFarland said that the island of Normans Kay “bought”, but it was not true-another person owned them. The festival for him was a way to clear the reputation of the island from past connections with the drug business. When the owner saw in the promotional role the words that the festival would be held “on the former island of Pablo Escobar”, he informed McFarland that there would be no festival on Normans.

A few months before the start of the festival, his team was forced to look for a new site - and found it next to one of the resort hotels on the island of Bolshaya Exum. True, it was completely different to the picture from the promotional facilities: the site was several thousand square meters flooded with concrete; There was no infrastructure there. The preparation of a festival of this scale, as the interlocutors of directors say, usually requires from 12 to 18 months. The Fyre team had no more than three. The artists buging at the festival were instructed to engage in the young employee of the Fyre application, who had never done this before; He invited Major Lazer, Disclosure and other artists to the Bagams, having almost half overpaying each group.

Nevertheless, all the contractors hired by McFarland and his partners tried very hard to manage on time - as residents of the Big Exam say, in the spring of 2017, almost all adults of the island were occupied at the festival site. At the same time, the organizers did not want to listen to advice or objections - and constantly made mistakes or made unrealistic requirements.

So, at some point McFarland was obsessed with the idea that a pirate ship would stick during the festival to the island; Money and time were spent on his search. The Fyre Festival was scheduled for the worst dates of the possible - on the same weekend, a large regatta took place on the big exum, one of the main cultural events of the year in the Bagams. Because of this, all local hotels for these dates were completely booked; Fyre Festival employees had to negotiate with the owners of private houses in exorbitant prices. It quickly became clear that luxurious villas on the beach, which were promised to customers of VIP packets, does not physically exist-and it is impossible to build them within the right time.

The closer the date of the festival was, the more its employees understood that the catastrophe was inevitable - but McFarland and Margolin did not listen to anyone. According to Netflix, one of the contractors, Andy King, he cried after each working meeting.

The organizers of the festival also did not take into account that Bagams are another state: because of this, they had to pay a huge tax on imported alcohol; Other things that are vital for the festival, they simply forgot to cleanse.

Shortly before the King festival, McFarland called and said: “You are the main gay in the team. Are you ready to suck a member for Fyre Festival to take place? " It turned out that several tanks with drinking water were stuck at the customs - and McFarland understood the chief of customs so that he was ready to miss them only if he was provided with sexual services. King even arrived at customs - but it turned out that the official just wanted to get a bribe.

Fyre Festival all the time ended money. McFarland got new - deceit

There were two ways to replenish the balance of the festival, which all the time had unforeseen expenses. The first is to collect more money from visitors. The interlocutors of the directors diverge of whether all ordinary tickets were really sold on Fyre Festival: Netflix states that yes; In the film Hulu-that the organizers announced a sald out to sell more expensive packages.

A few weeks before the festival, all his visitors received a letter. It reported that the calculations on the island will be carried out through festival bracelets: they will implant a special chip attached to the account of each bought ticket (festival employees say that this would be technically impossible because of problems with the connection and electricity on the site). In this regard, the organizers proposed to replenish their accounts in advance - indicating that most visitors put at least 3 thousand dollars on them. According to the films, in this way McFarland received from visitors at least $ 2 million.

In addition, McFarland regularly flew to New York to get money from investors. As it turned out later in court, the businessman succeeded, because he lied about the successes of the FYRE application: he overestimated the transactions in the application by more than 20 times, and also argued that performances of first -sized stars were organized through him.

All this, however, did not help too much. It became clearer that the festival had problems; There was even a special site where someone drained the materials of the working meetings of the organizers-after which they began to look for a traitor in the team. It was even more complicated with visitors who bought tickets: a few days before the festival they were still not informed where and how they fly to the islands, and they threw the Fyre Festival Instagram account with questions. At the request of the organizers, moderators from Jerry Media deleted these comments; Then the comments began to automatically hide according to some keywords (“tickets”, “organization” and even the word “festival” itself); In the end, they simply turned off the whole.

Fyre Festival himself failed, not yet begun. It is amazing that no one was injured

For the last few weeks, workers and contractors slept for three hours - but still did not have time. When they parted from the site late at night on the eve of the day the festival began, a tropical rain poured - and flooded all the built tents and the mattresses lying in the open air. As one of the employees of the festival recalls, at that moment someone laughed and said: “Well, in any case, now they will not come out of the water dry.”

The first aircraft with visitors to the festival began to fly to the island in the early morning of April 27. Instead of the promised “elite charters”, ticket buyers flew on huge “Boeing”; When they landed, they were taken to the restaurant to the other end of the island, promising later to transport to the site. They arrived there in the evening - and found that their housing was not luxurious villas, but tents like those where the victims of natural disasters are settled. Inside lay mattresses in wet polyethylene. Baggage to the site was brought in two huge trucks; Where whose bag was impossible to understand.

By this moment, it became clear that the festival would not take place. New arrived visitors were deployed directly at the Big Exuman Airport. An employee of the festivals, who was responsible for the Bucking, canceled the performances of the artists. Other employees tried to distribute visitors to tents, but McFarland climbed the table and said that "each for himself." Further events are compared by the interlocutors of the directors with the “Hunger Games” and the “Lord of the Flies”. One of the visitors recalls that he specially urinated in the next tent so that no one spent the night next to him and his friends. Others urgently began to look for transport back to the airport - but they managed to fly home only the next day.

In an interview with the directors of the film, Hulu McFarland said that the organizers had a plan of resettlement of people on the villas-however, a box with keys to the houses “somewhere”.

McFarland himself at some point simply disappeared from the island. Other employees actually had to flee - the Bahamas workers began to demand that they pay, but there was no money. Andy King was forced to change clothes with one of his subordinates and leave the festival under the seat of the car.

McFarland was detained and released on bail. And he began to scold again

Fyre's employees were shocked by what happened and considered the festival catastrophe by betrayal by the founders of the company. At first, McFarland and Jah Rula told them that everything would work out - they say, Samsung also exploded phones, and the company is all right; A few weeks later, McFarland told the employees that Fyre could no longer pay them (formally no one was fired - that is, no one received compensation either).

In parallel, the FBI became interested in McFarland-due to the fact that he deceived investors and forged the company's documents to get money. He pleaded guilty and was released on bail.

At the end of 2017, Fyre visitors began to receive a newsletter by e -mail called NYC VIP Access. A man named Frank offered them cheaply buying access to the most elite events in the city: the Met Gala charity ball, the Victoriaʼ Secret or Autograph Taylor Swift. Tickets for MET Gala are not sold, the Victoria_S Secret show was not even announced, and Taylor Swift does not conduct an autograph session-but this did not prevent 15 people from giving the company to 100 thousand dollars.

Soon, the Vice journalist found out that McFarland is behind the NYC VIP Access, and Frank is the person whom he hired so as not to call people himself and not scare the clientele. Soon after this, McFarland was arrested on charges of fraud; In October 2018, he was sentenced to six years in prison. In prison, he teaches the foundations of musical literacy to other prisoners.

McFarland's partner Margolin paid the state a fine, but escaped the prison; They say that now he works in the ambulance. From both films it follows that Jah Rula from the very beginning understood that the festival was doomed, but the rapper himself denies everything - and did not bear any responsibility for what happened. Recently, he launched a new application, which works approximately according to the same model as the FYRE application.

One individual lawsuit against the organizers of Fyre Festival is already satisfied - the court decided to pay the victim $ 5 million. The court has not yet considered a collective lawsuit of visitors to Fyre Festival. The workers in the Bagams did not pay anything; One of them told Netflix that she was forced to pay with his subordinates - and lost their savings accumulated in several decades.

The Hulu film is better. But it cannot be legally look in Russia

The texture of the two films almost coincides: there and there, there are excursions into the McFarland biography, thoughts on how the history of Fyre Festival characterizes the features of millennials, interviews with the direct participants in the events - subordinates of McFarland, visitors to the festival, Bagamic workers and so on. The documentary even ends the same way: in the final of the film, Hulu McFarland calls from prison to his girlfriend Anastasia Eremenko, who is interviewed by the directors at that time; In the final of the Netflix film - one of the Bahamas (though not from prison).

However, there is still a difference. For example, in intonation: Netflix tells the story of Fyre Festival more like a tragedy; Hulu — скорее как комедию абсурда. Кроме того, версия Hulu более многомерна — в частности, за счет того, что одним из героев фильма является бывший сотрудник Jerry Media Орен Акс, который признает, что люди, которые вели SMM фестиваля, тоже понимали, что грядет катастрофа.

Наконец, режиссерам фильма Hulu удалось взять интервью и у самого Макфарленда. Правда, состоит оно в основном из откровенного вранья и неловких пауз — а после выхода фильма выяснилось , что Макфарленду за него заплатили. С другой стороны, в контексте всей истории Fyre Festival это выглядит даже по-своему логично — как еще одна деталь грандиозного (неудачного) надувательства.

Alexander Gorbachev