Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened is a documentary film about Billy McFarland and the failed Fyre Festival of 2017, directed by Chris Smith. It was released on Netflix in Januray, 2019. The film was co-produced by Jerry Media, the social media agency responsible for promotion and covering up the Fyre Festival fraud; company’s staff approached Vice with the idea of documentary three months after the events. For anyone unaffected by the whole thing, Fyre Festival seemed to have been dreamt up as temporary respite from an interminable stream of bad news. A bunch of rich kids paying up to $12,000 for an “experience” whose only real marketing had been Kendall Jenner and her #squad uploading an orange square to Instagram, arriving to rain-soaked mattresses, disaster relief tents, shit food and crucially, no festival. If you hate rich people, this is pure feel-good viewing, until you realise the impact McFarland’s greed and delusion had on the Bahamian locals. Fyre Festival was the first endeavour of its kind to really harness the power of social media, as it sold out all its tickets in less than two days, despite being a totally new festival and offering almost no information regarding logistics, but it was also the first to meet such a viral and public demise.
