fyre festival is going well

Let’s go!

https://www.stereogum.com/2233698/somehow-fyre-festival-2-tickets-are-for-sale-now/news/

If you got a spare $500, hey.

Can't stop the press from overanalyzing
It wasn't fuckin fraud, it was false advertising
All of you critics are the people I'm despising
Billy Mac's back, baby, and back to enterprising

White Star Line announces Titanic 2

from here on out it's Fyre Fest 2
starting today and tomorrow's anew
and I'm still loco enough
to serve you a sandwich that's covered in poo

Lol Neanderthal

I don't know that public shaming is always the best solution these days but, I don't know, I kind of feel like anyone who willingly purchases a ticket to this thing deserves what they get

Let's Be Legends...Again!

people will go to this thing because people like to promote their brand and they know if this thing goes ass-up again, they might get to be in a huge documentary that's all over Netflix that shows them as gigantic douches and promote whatever NFTs they want to trade.

plus so they can brag to everyone that they went to this pile of shit and survived

well except that the festival won't actually even kick off this time because nobody will let Billy Mac host it.

I am surprised that the terms of his early release didn't stipulate that he is not allowed to "pre-sell" $500 tickets for a speculative future event (or anything like that).

seriously!

like Snoop was told he couldn't hire ex-gang members after one stint in jail, but Billy is allowed to resume doing the thing that landed him in there?

that's more my point, the odds of people's ticket money at this point just completely vanishing into the ether, never to be seen again, are pretty high.

lineup includes

Firehouse
After the Rain (Nelson tribute band)
Paul Carrack (One Good Reason album in its entirety)
Joe Piscopo (stand-up and Sinatra song set)
a karate demonstration

karate demonstration actually just nth generation dub of scenes cherry-picked from Kickboxer, Karate Kid, and Ghost World viewed on Billy McFarland’s rehomed iPad, over his shoulder

Paul Carrack? Seriously?

Oh. Well-played.

An increasing number of people seem to have viewed Charlie Sheen's extended manic episode/public meltdown as aspirational and a valid business model.

Sadly I can’t find an Artie Lange “fiiiii-yah” gif through Google right now

lol anyone who saw the documentaries had to know this is exactly what he'd try to do after getting out

Credit this Fyre huckster this, at least he knows the value of brand recognition.

Paul Carrack has too much class

I’m hating living in this timeline

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/willy-wonka-event-uk-chocolate-experience-meth-lab-1235837133/

An “immersive experience” that promised to transport Willy Wonka fans into a “magical realm” has turned out to be such an epic letdown that customers called the police and compared the attraction to a meth lab.

The U.K. event was titled Willy’s Chocolate Experience and charged customers $44 each (photos below). The attraction was not affiliated with the Warner Bros. movie Wonka, though the event’s marketing came as close as possible to suggesting it was based on author Roald Dahl’s creation. The ad copy invited fans to journey to “a universe where confectionary dreams are brought to life” that included “mind-expanding projections, optical marvels and exhibits that transport you into the realm of creativity” and “wondrous creations and enchanting surprises at every turn!”

The event organizers apparently used artificial intelligence to generate promotional images that suggested a very high-quality attraction, which looked just like the immersive and trippy Wonka-esque world that the ad copy promised. But the result was somewhat different, and ticket buyers needed pure imagination to think it looked anything like a fantastical chocolate factory.

As reported by The Guardian, customers showed up in Glasgow to find “a sparsely decorated warehouse with a scattering of plastic props, a small bouncy castle and some backdrops pinned against the walls.” Scotland police were even called to the scene, the event shut down and parents said their children were in tears.

apparently this was sold as a live Willy Wonka Experience but they used all AI images on the website to sell tickets and then people showed up and saw this and it got so bad people called the cops lmao pic.twitter.com/tfkyg0G0WG

— Chris Alsikkan (@AlsikkanTV) February 26, 2024

haha I saw that yesterday. I love how they are playing it off as if "things just went haywire at the 11th hour"

lol

oh my god https://t.co/cgvK31eQCZ

— Chris Alsikkan (@AlsikkanTV) February 27, 2024

i think that i vibe with that oompa loompa so so much?!

and it looks like, praise jesus, we finally got ourselves another billy mcfarland in this billy coull fella:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/willy-wonka-event-glasgow-billy-coull-ai-vaccine-conspiracy-books-1234976876/

fyre festival could never: "santa's dead, ticketholders were told. elves had their faces slapped as tempers flared"

BAH HUMBUG! List things that suck about Christmas in 2016

this has got to be an On Cinema bit

Their most recent FB posting has an amazing last sentence:

I understand that the cancellation of Willys Chocolate Experience something that was supposed to be an artist rendition of a well known novel has caused disappointment , frustration and anger and the money you spent.
The process of giving your money back has already started as a number of people can confirm.
Some hurtful things have been said about people who where just helping out at the event, including personal attacks and sharing private information. Understandably your upset, and you have all made that clear. Hurting people online is no way acceptable and urge you to stop.
The intention was to genuinely create something special for you that didn’t work out.

hahaha

"You people. We tried to create something that was going to fail and all you do is complain!"

I want a detailed behind-the-scenes oral history on this Willy Wonka fiasco and I want it now.

An Oompa-Loompa actress at the centre of a widely criticised Willy Wonka chocolate factory experience has spoken of the “complete and utter shambles” of the event.

Kirsty Paterson broke her silence after a photograph of her in a ”science lab” conducting supposed experiments for paying customers at Willy’s Chocolate Experience went viral on social media.

She was one of several actresses and performers who were hired for the event organised by House of Illuminati at Hubbox on Saturday.

Ms Paterson told MailOnline she had not yet been paid for the role she was not properly briefed on before the event.

“The whole thing’s just been a complete and utter shambles. It was shocking honestly,” she said.

“I was angry at the time because I felt like this is embarrassing for me, and I felt bad for the people coming in as well.

“I actually ended up shouting at the guy. I just said to him he’s a joke and this is like embarrassing, and how can we basically live with himself, doing this to people.

“This is really embarrassing for me. My job is teaching kids yoga and I go into schools and stuff and I do kids’ entertainment.”

Ms Paterson said she was supposed to hand out jelly beans as she carried out experiments from the “science lab”. But after running out of beans, she said: “I was just trying to make slightly exciting for the kids.”

“Then I walked off scene because I was so embarrassed,” she added.

“I went mental about the guy and feel awful about the whole thing, like I really honestly do, and I walked off because I was just like feeling so shit for the kids. The whole thing has just been awful.”

The Wonka-esque impersonator Paul Connell, 31, spoke to The Independent about how he got the gig and how the chaos unfolded.

“I’m constantly applying for more acting jobs and comedy work, then I got a phone call on Thursday saying, ‘Congratulations you are going to play Willy Wonka, we will send you over the script and dress rehearsal is tomorrow’,” Mr Connell said. “The script was 15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing these mad things.

“The bit that got me was where I had to say, ‘There is a man we don’t know his name. We know him as the Unknown. This Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls.’

“It was terrifying for the kids. Is he an evil man who makes chocolate or is the chocolate itself evil?

“They even misspelt my contract but I do have a legally binding ‘Coontract’. But I stayed up all night learning it, thinking this would make sense in the dress rehearsal when I see all the tech.”

amazing

But at the Friday evening dress rehearsal hours before opening, he turned up to find the “immersive and enchanting” Willy Wonka experience was, in fact, an empty warehouse with a few plastic mushrooms.

“In some ways, it was a world of imagination, like imagine that there is a whole chocolate factory here,” he said. “I spoke to the people running it and thought, surely by the morning it won’t look like this, and then I turned up in the morning and it absolutely did.

“At the end of my monologue, I was supposed to suck up the Unknown Man with a vacuum cleaner. I asked them if they had a vacuum cleaner and they said, ‘yeah, we haven’t really got there yet, so just improvise’.

“So I started to cut things out, thinking that would be silly.

“All the actors were lovely people. We gathered together in the morning and said, ‘We’re probably not going to get paid for this but kids are still going to come up. Let’s make this as magic as possible for them’.

“I was making jokes but we were told to give them one jelly bean and a quarter cup of lemonade,” he continued. “No chocolate at the chocolate experience. There was supposed to be a chocolate fountain somewhere but I never saw it.

tbf i feel like this is all p true to the spirit of the book -- except the kids dragged to it are still alive i guess

“I was told I would get a 15-minute break every 45 minutes after each group went through.

“But I ended up playing Willy Wonka for three and a half hours straight. I didn’t know where I ended and Wonka began. I was losing my mind by that point.

“The organiser came up to me, saying, ‘You’re spending too much time with the kids, we need to get them through as quickly as possible’.

“By this point, I was visibly angry. I was like, now there’s going to be a lot of disappointed kids.”

The actor said he finally managed to get a lunch break, deciding to spend it sitting in his car staring at the floor trying to avoid the sight of crying children being turned away by security.

“When I came back, that’s when everything kicked off,” he explained. “There was an angry mob at the door not being let in. I had to wedge my way through.

“I was Wonka and it’s my face everywhere. But I am just a last-minute actor, really, I didn’t organise anything.

“People were shouting, people who put on the event were crying. There were arguments, people running around everywhere – the set had been trashed.”

He called another huddle of the two other Willy Wonkas and the nearest Oompa Loompas, adding: “We decided to just walk away.

“It was actually getting quite dangerous for us. But it was heartbreaking, to be honest.

“There were kids in costume better than ours, crying. I used to be a teacher and that was triggering for me.

“One thing I want to make clear is everyone has been so nice to the actors in person and on the day, the people who were there understand we did our best.

“We didn’t take any abuse but we gave abuse to the people running it. The whole thing was disrespectful to the families and us as promising actors.

“There were three Willy Wonkas but I was the most unlucky because I went first and stayed for three and a half hours doing it through either commitment or stupidity.”

lol, amazing. I imagine we're going to see a whole, whole lot more bullshit like this in the coming years. AI and con artists go together like peanut butter and jelly.

My job is teaching kids yoga

Is it churlish of me to wonder if he got hold of her through his anti-vaxx network?

I didn’t know where I ended and Wonka began.

Quote of 2024 so far

Just WTF at all of this

it is always bullshit like THIS that overconfident idea-people fuck up. they go out in public and see these small pop-up immersive exhibits like going to a live action Alice in Wonderland experience that they had here for a weekend last year, and figure man that isn't hard, get a bunch of talented actors, setmakers, and you and I can bang out a script, and hey you can get this up and going in two weeks!

also be amazed if creator doesn't get sued from an IP standpoint

He called another huddle of the two other Willy Wonkas and the nearest Oompa Loompas

As you do.

God this is the gift that keeps on

I don't know about anywhere else but this kind of thing is an almost annual occurrence in the UK. The AI aspect is what makes this one different, although surely this will be the norm in future.

Billy Coull is another major difference.