There were probably plenty of news stories coming out of the White House alone in 2017 that captured your attention, but likely none of them were as fascinating and unreal as what is now known as the Fyre Festival fiasco. The first trailer for the upcoming Netflix documentary, FYRE: THE GREATEST FESTIVAL THAT NEVER WAS, goes behind the scenes of the disastrous music festival that became more akin to “Lord of the Flies” than anything else. Most memorable for its pictures of cheese and bread, the doc will allow viewers to go behind the scenes of one the most fascinating (and slightly hilarious) disasters in recent memory.
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For those who may be drawing a blank as to what the Fyre Festival was, let me break it down for you. In 2017, famous rapper Ja Rule and his business partner Billy McFarland decided to take Pablo Escobar’s island in the Bahamas and make it the home base of what was to be the most “epic” music festival ever. There were to be luxury cabanas, delectable food, and one can assume, tropical birds doubling as bartenders – all against a scenic view and Blink 182. But upon arrival at Fyre, the rich kids who could afford the tickets discovered only Hell awaited them, with the cabanas being more like FEMA tents, the food reduced to cheese sandwiches and garbage salad, and with the birds apparently on strike for union-related reasons. The chaos was documented on social media, and the rest of us on the mainland couldn’t get enough.
From director Chris Smith (JIM & ANDY: THE GREAT BEYOND), the documentary uses behind the scenes footage from production company Matte (who were in charge of shooting the promotional video), social media videos, and interviews with attendees and those involved with Fyre to give a whole portrait of what the hell happened. In fact, Smith had so much content he thought of turning it into a docuseries (via EW)
“We actually were going back and forth between the two and I was really interested in exploring it. As we worked on it and kept working with the material, there were a million stories that were all interesting about the build-up to the festival and there was all this footage of the promotional video being made and all these stories that took place on the island. But in terms of moving a narrative forward, a lot of the times they felt similar but different. We actually were cutting a [docu]series and a feature at the same time. We were cutting a parallel edit. In the end, we just felt that the feature was stronger, that the story and this event and the character study all felt very contained.”
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The doc appears on Netflix January 18, and I couldn’t be more interested in checking it out. Not only was this a monumental disaster that I’m desperate to know more about, but there’s also something amusing about seeing all these rich kids in “peril.” Ultimately, it’s not like this couldn’t have been a good idea, and Smith says the doc will show just how hard some people worked to make it all happen, which makes it all the more interesting to find out how it all went to shit.