fyre festival is going well

What about her voice? Was there some kind of Lauren Bacall thing going on where she intentionally lowered it?

Yep.

Apparently it's going to made into a movie with Jennifer Lawrence playing Holmes.

Feel like what I read implies that movie has already been shot and will be finished this year.

No maybe not, just in development sorry.

Half an hour into the Hulu one, the millennialsplaining is fucking unbearable

It is over the top. I started laughing when there was a stock clip of whack a mole.

originally I was going to say that Theranos was a different type of grift, but in a way... no

there was actual capital invested in equipment and r&d but the core part of the grift was still telling people there was a product that never existed while trying to keep it rolling as long as possible without even trying to find a viable plan b

only instead of ja rule, theranos had a board with like... former high level government officials.

honestly, ja rule is probably more credible than henry kissinger though

kissinger never contributed anything as good as "holla holla" to this world

I don't think he would've gotten as far without Ja Rule.

henry kissinger has never jumped on the mic with fat joe (afaik)

Wasn't Theranos more a case of trying to dress up a pig, to continue marketing a real product that was unfortunately being proven with each successive test/trial to be less useful than hoped. Not conceived as a con, more morphed into one

I'm sure they fully expected putting on a music festival would be easy.

xp nope, they never actually had a viable product. they were literally buying existing machines and shipping samples back to use them, and then trying to shoehorn old tech into a box, and the actual product use case was "tiny vial of blood from finger stick does these tests" and it's nearly a given that the tests they were doing would never be usable with blood taken that way. like, as far as we still know, that type of sample will never give you the ability to do that type of test because the needle's too small to collect that type of sample

excuse the redundancy in that last redundant sentence

I'm still waiting for some follow-up reports on whether it's true that the recent nyc grifter Anna Delvey actually stayed at the magnises townhouse or w/e

just a perfect storm of grifterness

https://www.gofundme.com/help-fyre-festival039s-billy-mcfarland-bounce-back

"$6 of $27M goal"

Mh, is she in jail now?

xp I thought for a second that the Gofundme for Mcfardland has raised $6mil and was about to throw my phone across the room

(Obvs I didn’t intend to write “Mcfardland” but now I kinda like it)

Mcfartland even better.

going in on the Netflix doc and a few minutes I’ve got to say that the moral posturing in interviews about how Hulu was in the wrong to pay a fee for an interview was some amazing bullshit considering this is obviously made up of a lot of footage shot by the promo company

‘they captured a lot of footage that, from a marketing perspective, was second to none”
— ceo of company that shot the marketing footage

"jerry media" actually co-produced the film

that would be the much larger conflict of interest I meant to allude to

I also keep getting stuck on the fact the “maginses” logo, while probably looking like a ton of logos, is basically a curvy version of the Mission Workshop brand’s logo. Which makes sense because the white/grey create a M & W and... hell, whatever

The Theranos book by Carreyrou is extremely good.

For those interested, Alex Gibney (the guy behind the Enron doc and the HBO Scientology doc) made a Theranos doc, which probably comes out this year: https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/the-inventor-a-documentary-about-theranos-and-the-psychology-of-deception-will-premiere-at-sundance/

https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/fyre-fest-documentary-cook-fundraising-goal-782116/

The Theranos book by Carreyrou is extremely good.

Did the Hulu doc interview any artists who weren't involved in the "production" of this thing? That was something I missed in the Netflix doc -- I want to know what was promised the artists other than big bucks, if anything. I didn't mind that the Fuckjerry material was Fuckjerry material, because even when folks are doing everything they can to make stuff look sexy and desirable, dead eyes and looking away all the time are still dead eyes and looking away all the time and readable.

No artists were interviewed in either doc. The Netflix doc is much closer to the production team and there is a lot more covering the planning, booking, etc. I'm definitely of the mind that if you're interested in the story, watching both docs is worthwhile.

Netflix did interview Jillionaire of Major Lazer.

The major lazer guy is interviewed briefly in the Netflix one and that’s it as far as artists

Xp

Sorry, my miss. I stand corrected!

Fair enough about Jillionaire, and he was definitely one of the more interesting heads talking -- he didn't really get into the business end all that much, and functions in the doc a little more as "sane Caribbean voice #5" than talking about the music business end. And his interview is followed quickly by a poor put-upon Fyre droid having to deal with an annoying artist about font size -- and if you've ever been on the other side of that conversation, you don't end up with too much sympathy for the poor put-upon Fyre droid.

The Major Lazer dude actually had one of the most critical comments on "influencer" culture and hidden advertising, which the Netflix doc didn't touch too much otherwise. As for the other artists, I dunno what interviewing them would've gained? As mentioned in the doc, at least some of them were promised a significantly larger fee than they normally get from a festival date, what other explanation do you need why they chose to participate? And when their managers realised the whole festival was fucked up, they promptly cancelled. Can't imagine there's much of a story there.

If anyone has extensive experience with grifters it's band managers. As soon as the advance money doesn't show up or the required proof of a legit venue/equipment, they'll be the first to pull out.

I doubt many of the artists even thought much about it until they pulled out, just another date on the festival circuit.

what's still unclear to me is if any musical acts were still on the bill 48 hours before the start time, when attendees started traveling. Had everything been canceled or were smaller-font acts still set to perform? It didn't seem like there were any artists in the footage during the fiasco, though there was a stage.

xpost
Absolutely, there's a handful of festivals which have some cultural cache (Glastonbury/Coachella/Sonar etc) which artists will be keen to be a part of other than as a payday. Most will just be dates on a calendar.

these are the ones that fascinate me tbh: i think ILM shd crowdfund me to go on one (me and hercule poirot)

https://lastfm-img2.akamaized.net/i/u/ar0/f5a65f3ae32b35bcb1cfeb07ecdfe8fc

unrepentant mattress-pisser guy ended up being an unexpected loathsome punctuation point on the netflix doc

I found it interesting that the journalist view/occasional narrative voice contributions for *both* docs were provided by former gawker media writers Jia Tolentino and Gabrielle Bluestone (hulu and netflix, respectively)

Pitchfork claims this is the reason why no bands ended up on the island:

They also allegedly told the performers (including Migos, Major Lazer, Blink-182, and more) that the festival was canceled long before attendees were informed.

in the netflix doc, the one guy who was in charge (?) of booking at the ripe old age of 23 mentions that he went off script and cancelled the acts although it's unclear if it was right before people started arriving on the island or right after

I got the impression that everyone was arriving to the island on April 27, a Thursday, and the actual event was starting Friday. So that lines up -- people started to show, it was a disaster, and the booking guy told everyone not to show up friday/saturday

The bit that really had me hyperventilating was when people started putting thousands of dollars on those dumb electronic wristband prepay things.

got a strong vibe that many of the attendees willing to be interviewed were part of the um, less sympathetic contingent? the balding guy who was in both docs has a shtick and I'm willing to write him off due to his entire attempts at metacommentary since he has an "ironic influencer" thing going

but in the netflix doc we have the mattress-pisser guy and the ginger guy who, at one point, says "we're trapped there with who knows what kind of people" and I'm thinking.. maybe you should have thought out your phrasing there

there were a few people interviewed at the time of the festival who didn't appear in either doc who implied that they'd bought the cheapest tickets -- still expensive, but in an all-inclusive resort kind of way -- and attending was a bit of a reach. that demographic is completely absent in the doc

Demographic with just enough money not as ripe a target as demographic with too much money.

looks like part of ambiguity in the reporting about ticket prices is related to the fact they kept dropping "sold out" ticket tiers and adding increasingly more expensive ones

so at some point they had day tickets for $500. not sure what the lowest tier that involved transportation to/from the island and the crappy tent was at, but some reports put it at $1200