

When two movies come out on the same topic, it’s a banner day for cultural criticism. The “twin film” phenomenon—such as the recent Hollywood treatments of the opioid crisis, Ben Is Back and Beautiful Boy—suggests that a certain theme is resonating deeply with the public. It has a long history: Oscar Wilde versus The Trials of Oscar Wilde in 1960, The Conversation versus The Parallax View in 1974, Armageddon versus Deep Impact in 1998. At the dawn of 2019, our twin film obsession is Fyre Fraud versus Fyre, streaming on Hulu and Netflix, respectively. Both movies seem to channel the spirit of the times, bedeviled by grifters and cheats, all presided over by the occupant of the White House. But in the case of Netflix’s Fyre, the grift may have seeped into the production of the film itself.

Both documentaries purport to tell the “real” story behind the Fyre Festival debacle of 2017, in which the charlatan Billy McFarland ripped off customers who had bought into an Instagram-fueled dream of partying with supermodels in the Bahamas. The dream never materialized—instead of champagne and concerts and luxury villas, ticket-holders encountered FEMA tents, empty beaches, and a transportation crisis. McFarland left behind a trail of unpaid debts, notably to the residents of Great Exuma itself, and ended up in jail for wire fraud.

The initial controversy surrounding the two documentaries centered on the timing of their release: The Hulu documentary was originally supposed to be a series, but was rushed into early release in feature-length form to beat Netflix to the punch. Then there were accusations from the Netflix camp that Hulu had behaved unethically by paying McFarland to appear in its documentary. Fyre director Chris Smith said, “After spending time with so many people who had such a negative impact on their lives from their experience on Fyre, it felt particularly wrong to us for him to be benefiting” from an interview payment.

The way the movie was produced suggests that FuckJerry used the film to launder the troubled company’s reputation.

Since that mudslinging episode, however, a new source of intrigue has emerged. The two movies ended up contextualizing their stories quite differently. Hulu’s Fyre Fraud focused on social media marketing agency FuckJerry—which is trying to rebrand as Jerry Media—and its complicity in McFarland’s doomed project. But Netflix’s Fyre was mysteriously quiet on that issue, instead highlighting eye-poppingly nefarious anecdotes, like event producer Andy King’s claim that he came very close to performing fellatio on a customs official to extract a detained shipment of Evian water.

Now, documents show that the CEO of FuckJerry, Mick Purzycki, who was a producer of Fyre, also claimed to have “final cut” over the documentary while it was being put together. Though his editing authority was later “superseded by the distribution agreement where the final cut was with the director,” according to Netflix, the way the movie was produced suggests that FuckJerry used the film to launder the troubled company’s reputation. And what appeared to be a story of competing films turns out to be something else: A genuine investigative documentary struggling for attention against a shadow public relations campaign.