Fyre Festival Employees Peel Back The Curtain And Reveal ‘Incompetence On An Almost Inconceivable Scale’

It’s been nearly a week since the full scale of the debacle known as Fyre Festival took over the Internet, as as the lawsuits continue to roll in, new details about the size and scope of the mess are continuing to roll in. Recently, Variety spoke to a couple of production employees about how it all went so wrong. Describing the event as, “incompetence on an almost inconceivable scale,” the Fyre Festival professionals went into unflinching detail about all the missteps along the way.

The two employees, who wished to remain anonymous, only decided to go on the record after reading organizer Billy McFarland’s comments about everyone involved being naive about what it took to put on an event of this nature. “It’s so gross to me that [McFarland] says they were naïve — they had been told at every point that it was impossible and they ignored it.” Adding, “I think the statement they released is a slap in the face to the people on the island and the production company that did end up working with them.”

They then went on to describe all of the ways that the people in charge directly caused the fiasco. “There were so many red flags,” they said. “We all said to them, ‘It takes at least eight months to a year to produce a festival, you have to push the date’ — we stressed that and said that over and over. And they were like ‘It’ll be fine, it’s not that big of a deal.’ They kept making it seem like we were exaggerating. It was like they didn’t care.”

“We said, ‘What you’ve promised [in statements and advertising promoting the festival] as opposed to what we’re even maybe capable of delivering in this amount of time is not the same. You’re going to destroy your brand if you try to have it on this date and don’t deliver what you promised. If you push the date a year, people will be upset. But once you deliver what you promised, they’ll get over it.’ But it was like they didn’t care: They literally kept saying, ‘We’re gonna be legends.’”

At the end of the day, the employees echoed the sentiment that many people shared online that the organizers were totally clueless about what it took to stage this event. “I think they were just rich guys who had always been able to pay their way through things and pull them off somehow, and they just didn’t understand that the timeline was too short and they didn’t want to hear it. I think their friends and the people they wanted to have a good time — the VIPs — would be staying at [nearby] villas and resorts and on yachts and be safe, they didn’t worry as much about infrastructure and the everyday ticket-buyer.”

You can read their entire depiction over on Variety.

×