I have a friend who was live and in person at Fyre Festival.

He wasn’t one of those millennials that dropped a bunch of cash on a promise undelivered.  Instead, he was there to provide one of the many basic services needed at a music fest.  And with two documentary films being dropped this week detailing the compounded missteps that led to the “see-and-be-seen” luxury musical festival spectacularly failing, I knew I had to share his stories as well.

He still can’t talk about it. 

His employer, he reports, is still involved in legal proceedings.  As such, my friend is holding to a promise to not disclose any of his first-hand knowledge of the things that went down.  Which is too bad, because I’ve heard the stories off the record…..

This sums up Fyre Festival. #fyre #fyrefestival #fyrefest pic.twitter.com/x4xcFBL8Yg

— William Needham Finley IV (@WNFIV) April 28, 2017

There is still plenty for you to digest yourself in competing documentaries released this week — which themselves have a bit of controversy spinning around them. There’s “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened” on Netflix, which has been questioned for being produced by the same social-media firm originally hired to promote Fyre Festival.  Conversely, Hulu has “Fyre Fraud,” in which the makers reportedly paid the now-convicted co-founder Billy McFarland a reported sum of $250,000 to be interviewed for it.  More on both of those stories in this write up from the Washington Post.

The question of the weekend is which of these is worth your time.  My answer is both.

The Netflix documentary comes at the Fyre Festival story as a chronicle of what happened and includes plenty of juicy interviews with those closest to the inner workings.  And while the Hulu documentary’s inclusion of McFarland brings  little more than a bunch of edited cuts of how awkward it was for him to be called to the carpet  — the discussion of how social media can drive and shape our reality in the 21st century gives you sense of why something like this could happen.

Binge each of them.  It’s worth an afternoon.  — [eric]