It’s impressive for a music festival to go from luxury offering to dystopian wasteland in a pinch, but you’ve wowed us all, Fyre Festival. Ja Rule and Billy MacFarland’s instantly infamous event set in the Bahamas has been an internet laughing stock since attendees arrived and shared their stories, but according to a person working for the event, this whole affair was a sh*tshow from beginning.
Chloe Gordon worked as a talent producer for the Fyre Festival and dished on her experience in New York Magazine’s The Cut. She notes that the Twitter punching bag was a mess pretty much from the get-go.
I was planning to spend the next two months working on the festival, but a mere four days after I arrived I was back on a plane to New York because the whole thing, as everyone now knows, was a complete disaster. I was briefly involved in the planning of the event and got a front-row seat to chaos.
Gordon was greeted by an undersized and organization operation at the festival. Ja Rule would eventually pop by for a “site visit” and his presence didn’t doing much to convince the talent manager that Fyre was turning things around. On Wednesday, she was present for an attempt at a rousing speech from the rapper. It… It wasn’t great.
That night Ja Rule gave a toast. “To living like movie stars, partying like rock stars, and f*cking like porn stars.” If Ja Rule is punished for anything perhaps it should be that.
Sounds a bit like a piece of dialogue pulled from a straight-to-video American Pie sequel, doesn’t it? According to Gordon, the bros running the festival ignored all the warning signs and this was a disaster waiting to happen.
On Wednesday, Ja Rule arrived for a “site visit.” I don’t know if he actually visited the “site” but he did spend a lot of time on a yacht, according to his Instagram. Meanwhile the event planners were holed up indoors putting together a game plan and a budget. With so little having been prepared ahead of time, the official verdict was that it would take $50 million to pull off. Planners also warned that it would be not be up to the standard they had advertised. The best idea, they said, would be to roll everyone’s tickets over to 2018 and start planning for the next year immediately. They had a meeting with the Fyre execs to deliver the news. A guy from the marketing team said, “Let’s just do it and be legends, man.”
Mission accomplished, “let’s just do it and be legends” bro. You and your Fyre cohorts are now legends for all the wrong reasons. That said, New York Magazine‘s piece is a fascinating first-hand account, really. Please give it a read if you’re working on a Ja Rule co-production in the near future. (Or if you’d like to purchase our American Pie VOD sequel idea with Eugene Levy co-starring.)
(Via The Cut)
