There’s a certain genre of documentaries that examines situations gone very, very, very wrong. It’s all chaos and schadenfreude and impossible to look away from. When filmmakers look at things like the ill-fated con that was the Fyre Festival, it makes for good TV. When filmmakers dive into an internet exploration of a man who was abusing cats and posting the videos online, we can’t look away, despite how badly we wish we could.
There’s pleasure in these documentaries that expose the fall of retail empires and entertainment companies, the fall of men who exploit women for profit, promoters that don’t follow through on their promises, and how their customers, victims, and festival-goers dealt with it all. Spoiler Alert: A large faction of Woodstock 99 attendees did not handle it well at all. That event, like the Fyre Festival, got not one but two documentaries exposing all the ways in which that festival was under prepared. With the recent release of Netflix’s masterpiece in this genre, Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 (a more polite title that was recently changed from Clusterf*ck), take a look at these documentaries about utter fiascos with complete cringe. All of them are wildly entertaining. It is what it is.
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9 Rich & Shameless: Girls Gone Wild Exposed
TNT
Joe Francis started Girls Gone Wild in 1997, and within two years he made more than $20 million. That’s just wild to contemplate, considering social media and social media marketing were not a thing back then. Heck, the internet was barely a thing back then. Francis used infomercials to sell the videos of young college-aged women exposing themselves on camera. By 2002, he had produced 83 Girls Gone Wild videos and was running 30-minute infomercials on every major network in the U.S.
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Beyond the obvious exploitation of inebriated young women taking part in wet t-shirt contests, there was an even darker side to Francis’ operation. In 2011, Francis took three women to his house and ended up being charged with three counts of false imprisonment, one count of assault causing great bodily injury, and one of dissuading a witness. He was convicted on all five charges. Over the years, Francis has also been convicted of tax evasion, bribery, and record-keeping violations. He pled no contest to charges of prostitution and child abuse. He and his wife reportedly live in Mexico while the U.S. attempts to extradite him. Rich & Shameless: Girls Gone Wild Exposed premiered on TNT on April 23, 2022
8 Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons
Hulu
Hulu’s Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons chronicles the rise and fall of mall mainstay Victoria’s Secret. The chain was owned by an Ohioan named Leslie Wexner, and he wanted to be a power player in New York City. He befriended the late Jeffrey Epstein, who then went on to tell aspiring models he was scouting for the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Epstein convinced Wexner to sign over power of attorney to him and proceeded to live the high life. Wexner claims no knowledge of Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell’s activities over the years, though there’s a clear paper trail between Wexner and the disgraced financier.
RELATED: Netflix’s Fyre Trailer Takes You Inside the Insane Music Festival Fiasco
Ultimately, Wexner was his own worst enemy, refusing to recognize the changing tide in fashion and body positivity. While other brands were becoming more inclusive, Wexner was still pushing his idea of the perfect women: tall and frighteningly thin with curves no women that thin come by naturally. Victoria’s Secret: Angels & Demons premiered on Hulu on July 14, 2022.
7 Don’t F*ck With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer
Netflix
Don’t F*ck With Cats: The Hunt for an Internet Killer is a three-part documentary series about a crowdsourced amateur investigation into finding the man behind some internet videos depicting the torture and killing of cats and kittens. In 2010, Canadian porn star Luka Magnotta posted a video called 1 boy 2 kittens on Facebook and YouTube under a pseudonym. The video showed a man killing two cats with a vacuum.
The series focuses on Deanna Thompson and John Green who started a Facebook group to gather evidence and hunt down the man in the video. They examined every facet of the video and used that information to lead them to Luka Magnotta, who was convicted of murdering a Chinese international student named Jun Lin in Canada under extremely grisly circumstances in 2012. Netflix’s Don’t F*ck With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer debuted on December 18, 2019. It was one of Netflix’s most watched documentaries of 2019.
6 The Most Hated Man on the Internet
Hunter Moore ran a pornographic website called Is Anyone Up, which posted stolen and hacked nude photos of women. He started the site in 2010, and it was largely considered to be a revenge porn site. The site allowed users to anonymously upload nude, erotic, and sexually explicit photos of women without their permission. Moore infamously didn’t care if those photos ruined anyone’s life.
RELATED: Netflix’s Clusterf**k: Woodstock ‘99 Trailer Dives Into the Chaotic Music Festival
In a November 2011 appearance on Anderson he was confronted by two women featured on the website. When they criticized him, he said, “No one put a gun to your head and made you take these pictures. It’s 2011, everything’s on the Internet.” The Most Hated Man on the Internet tells the story of a group of women who fought back to have their photos and information removed from the site and the mom who fought hard to take Hunter Moore down. The Most Hated Man on the Internet debuted on Netflix on July 27, 2022.
5 White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch
Netflix’s White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch takes a look at the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of the once ridiculously popular clothing brand. The company only hired good-looking, mostly white employees. The catalog was basically soft porn. The stores were darkly lit and smelled overwhelmingly like Abercrombie’s signature fragrance. The store peddled an all-American preppy aesthetic to its customers, but to its employees, the company served up racism and exclusivity.
The sexed-up marketing was the idea of then CEO Mike Jeffries. And boy did it work. Everyone wanted to be in Abercrombie & Fitch clothing. The brand was so popular that the band LFO released the song “Summer Girls” in 1999 that contained the line “I like girls that wear Abercrombie & Fitch, I’d take her if I had one wish.” Jeffries was also famous for explaining the lack of plus-sized clothing or overweight salespeople by saying “Some people don’t belong in our clothing.” This documentary explores all the missteps the brand made that led to its eventual downfall. White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch premiered on Netflix on April 19, 2022.
4 Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened
Netfix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened is one of the two documentaries to explore the infamous Fyre Festival and its chaotic beginning and end. This version is a blow-by-blow of the events leading up to the cancellation of the event. Entrepreneur Billy MacFarland promoted a music festival for millennials on an island in the Bahamas as an exclusive, once in a lifetime, make-everyone-you-know-jealous event.
When guests arrived expecting their luxury accommodations and gourmet meals, they were shocked to find they were put up in disaster tents and served American cheese on white bread sandwiches. There was no festival. It was all a con. Intimate interviews with Andy King, an event promoter that got sucked into the whole mess, provides the wild stories of MacFarland’s con, including the infamous line about fellating a man to get Evian delivered to the festival (he ultimately did not do that). MacFarland was sentenced to six years in prison. Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened was released on Netflix on January 18, 2019.
3 Fyre Fraud
Fyre Festival goers shelled out a minimum of $3,200 for an event they were told would include hobnobbing with models and celebrities on a beautiful beach. Some paid much, much more for certain amenities like private planes (who then were stranded on the island when it all fell apart). Instead of a luxury vacation, festival goers arrived to find a tent city and neither plumbing nor electricity, nor even a festival. Hulu’s Fyre Fraud is arguably a better film because it features an interview with the man behind the con, Billy MacFarland. As Nick Allen writes for Roger Ebert’s website, in a review that fairly encapsulates the ‘fiasco documentary’ genre:
Fyre Fraud was released on Hulu on January 14, 2019.
2 Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage
HBO
In 1999, a group of ill-prepared promoters endeavored to replicate the magic of the ‘summer of love’ and Woodstock, 30 years later. They not just failed, but flamed out in spectacular fashion. Rather than using the farmland that the original Woodstock took place on in ‘69, the promoters moved it to a decommissioned military base in Rome, New York, gave kids $500 and yellow t-shirts and called them the Peace Patrol (rather than hiring actual security), and opened the gates to 250,000 enthusiastic festival goers for a scorchingly hot three-day event.
What happened was a pack mentality of rage, sexual assault, and vandalism. The National Guard had to escort the more peaceful attendees out in the middle of day three as the site devolved into something out of Lord of the Flies. HBO’s Woodstock documentary dove more into the violence against women and sexual assaults that happened at Woodstock 99. Woodstock: Peace, Love, and Rage was released on HBO Max on July 23, 2021.
1 Trainwreck: Woodstock 99
Trainwreck: Woodstock 99 is Netflix’s version of the events that happened in Rome, New York in the summer of 1999. Netflix’s Woodstock documentary explores what went wrong in the preparation for the festival that led to its complete chaos and violence. The promoters were the same men who put on Woodstock ‘69. They didn’t perceive how the kids and young adults of 1999 were less about peace, love, and harmony through peaceful protests and more about anger, rage, and burning the whole thing down.
The festival valued profits over safety (bottles of water cost $12 by day three of the festival). There was no plan for trash removal. There was no security. The mud was actually poop mixed with mud from the overflowing, never cleaned porta-potties.They handed out candles to the crowd during the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ closing set, which led to widespread fire and vandalism by the crowd. And yet, the promoters continued to play down the chaos and even held a press conference on the Monday after the fires, vandalism, and mayhem and talked about coming back for another Woodstock. There has never been another Woodstock. Trainwreck: Woodstock 99 premiered on Netflix on August 3, 2022.
