Fyre Festival founder Billy MacFarland working on prison memoir
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Billy McFarland, the concert promoter whose botched music festival spawned documentaries by Netflix and Hulu, is now working on a memoir that will talk about what happened.
McFarland is currently in federal prison in Otisville, NY, serving six years in prison for fraud and selling fake tickets to events. The saga was memorialized in the films “Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened” and “Fyre Fraud.”
New York Magazine reported that McFarland is planning to self-publish a memoir. It is tentatively titled “Promythus: The God of Fyre.”’
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The Fyre Festival will go down in concert annals as perhaps the worst-run show in history. Marketed as the ultimate luxury trip, its promotional materials were filled with celebrities and super models diving off yachts, emphasizing an appeal to join the young monied elite who will transform the world.
Instead, the event deteriorated into a Lord of the Flies horror, as the promised luxuries were never delivered and the acts booked for the show withdrew as word reached them.
Billy McFarland, the promoter of the failed Fyre Festival in the Bahamas, leaves federal court after pleading guilty to wire fraud charges in New York. A federal judge has given McFarland a six-year prison term. McFarland was sentenced Thursday, Oct. 11 in Manhattan federal court. Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald called him a “serial fraudster.” (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
Freelance editor Josh Raab told NY Magazine that McFarland’s girlfriend, Anastasia Eremenko, told him that the two documentaries had misrepresented the story. McFarland is handwriting the memoir and passing the writing along to Fremenko for typing.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}McFarland plans to use the proceeds from the self-published book to pay for the $26 million in restitution he owes from the Fyre Festival.
“Putting in terms of ‘Wolf of Wall Street,’ the Festival will not be a one and done event,” McFarland told Raab in an email. “It’s happening again, so the original story will lose the potential to be told and set the stage if it’s not done before the next events take place.”