Andy King’s Fyre Festival story—wildly unspooled in Netflix’s new documentary, Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened—may not be one of dignity, morality, or respectability. But it is one of incomprehensible belief, loyalty, and sense of duty. King, a producer of Fyre Festival, so believed in the first-time, Ja Rule and Billy McFarland-created “music festival” that, even when all signs were pointing to “this is going to be a fiasco of epic proportions,” King was willing to degrade himself if it meant saving the festival.
During the documentary, King recounts how McFarland reached out to him after Bahamian customs, which had not been paid $175,000 in fees, detained the festival’s water supply. According to King, McFarland told him, “You’re our wonderful gay leader and we need you to go down [to customs]. Will you suck dick to fix this water problem?” On paper, this reads like a joke that isn’t particularly funny. But in the documentary, King makes it seem as though he was willing to go to this H.R.-violating length to procure hydration for a festival that couldn’t even spell “fire” properly. “I literally drove home, took a shower, I drank some mouthwash. . . . I got into my car, to drive across the island to take one for the team. And I got to [the customs officer’s] office, fully prepared to suck his dick.”
Dear readers, King did not have to. The customs officer, it turned out, “couldn’t have been nicer.” Even though King thought he saved the day by procuring the festival’s water, he . . .did not.
His courageous retelling of this story, however, has made him a kind of unsung hero on the Internet. And, this weekend, King was shocked to discover that people had actually made memes dedicated to him. He was surprised for several reasons—one, he didn’t know what a meme was; two, he doesn’t use social media; and three, he thinks it’s “mind-boggling” people care about him and the documentary as much as they do.
In a new video made and shared by Netflix, King said, “I’m blown away with the response of the documentary. . . . I’m now a noun, a verb, an adjective.”
But it’s not just his new Internet fame that delights King. It’s also the good that has come of the documentary—namely, a successful GoFundMe campaign that repaid one caterer for the life savings she used to pay out her own employees when the festival organizers reneged on her bill.
“One of our biggest goals, obviously, is paying back all the people in the Bahamas,” King revealed in the video, adding that there is now an additional GoFundMe page dedicated to paying back unpaid laborers in the Bahamas. “If I could drive positive influences and a lot of positive energy towards social and environmental impact, then I think I can utilize this moment to do a lot of good.”
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This story was originally published by Vanity Fair
via USAHint.com
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