Fyre Fraud is a 2019 Hulu produced documentary about the infamous Fyre Festival, a fraudulent music festival that ended in failure.
Made as a sort-of response to Netflix's Fyre documentary due to Fyre being produced and filmed by Jerry Media - who helped in the marketing of the Fyre Festival - which the Fyre Fraud documentary argues should have suffered the consequences for their overhyping of the festival and for not doing anything to stop it.
The documentary focuses on the life of Billy McFarland, a young and ambitious entrepeneur and founder of the company Fyre, and his attempt to promote their namesake booking app with an epic music festival in the Bahamas. However, everything goes wrong and the festival is cancelled in its second day. Following the failure of the festival, many secrets about Billy are revealed, which leads to his and his two companies' downfall.
Tropes found in Fyre Fraud:
- Adorably Precocious Child: A slightly negative case, where two stories about Billy's childhood are revealed, one greedy (a classmate broke her crayon, he offered to fix it for a dollar!) and a big prank (he hacked the lock of the teacher's room so they couldn't enter it).
- Answer Cut: Billy vehemently denies lying during the interview, and demands that they name one lie he told. The documentary then cuts back to several demonstrable lies he told earlier in the movie.
- Blatant Lies:
- During one talking head interview, Billy claims that the 200+ luxury villas really did exist, with rental cars ready for the influencers to use, but the lock box containing the keys went missing. When asked why he never told anyone else that, Billy doesn't have an answer.
- A Fyre Fest attendee mentions he's received emails from the NYC VIP scam and assumes a strapped-for-cash McFarland had sold the mailing list to some similarly unethical marketer. When told that it's McFarland himself sending these emails, the interviewee looks startled, then starts laughing at the audacity of it all.
- Con Man: McFarland is lying about the entire operation, and has been running scams since he was a child.
- Description Cut: One of the lucky few influencers who actually got the villa she was promised claims that she felt bad for the other guests who only got tents. Cut to an Instagram video of her dancing in her villa.note
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Parallels are implied between McFarland and Donald Trump.
- Dueling Movies: With Netflix's Fyre.
- Hope Spot: During the first night of the festival, the lucky few who managed to board a return flight from the island were forced off the plane due to a discrepancy in the passenger manifest. They were later able to reboard the plane...only to be told the flight crew had been on duty too long and the plane would be grounded until morning.
- Karma Houdini: Ja Rule, who's even implied to be setting up another application like Fyre.
- Loan Shark: Billy takes out a loan from a mysterious businessman at an obscenely high-interest rate, which ended up being part of the reason the festival went so wrong - several people advising him to postpone the festival to give them time to set things up properly were ignored because any delays would have pushed the festival past the point when he needed to pay those loans back, which he wouldn't be able to do without the money he planned on gaining from the festival.
- Refuge in Audacity: No matter how bad things get, McFarland just keeps going bigger. He's running scams even after being arrested.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Grant Margolin was fond of extremely wordy emails and pitches that ultimately said very little. One music producer goes through an email Grant sent to the composer about the music for the original Fyre promotional video, an email over 1,000 words of ad-speak and requests for unusual musical instruments and arrangements.
- Smug Snake: Billy, who comes off in his interview as very smug and acting like he did nothing wrong and the festival's downfall was due to anything and everything except for himself.
- Take That!: The film takes a direct shot at competing documentary Fyre because one of its funders is Jerry Media, who was directly involved with the festival.
- Trauma Conga Line:
- All the people involved in the production of Fyre knew this was going to happen... and they were right.
- The patrons who went to Fyre had to not only endure the hell that was Fyre's terrible management, including an absolutely horrible time just trying to get home after everything was shut down, but they were also turned into a target of mockery by the entire world because of misreporting leading to the widespread belief that it was a festival for "stuck-up rich kids" who all spent several thousands of dollars on their tickets, even though the tickets weren't all that expensive (the average price was $1,200, not the $12,000 frequently reported) and there were also more than a few middle-class festival-goers who had won the tickets via sweepstakes or managed to buy them cheaply (as low as $500 for some "early bird" specials).
