4 Ways to Hold the Douchiest Wedding of All Time
You probably know Sean Parker as the guy Justin Timberlake played in The Social Network. Remember him? He helped make Napster and was a huge dick to Spider-Man.
Anyway, to demonstrate that he has zero interest in distancing himself from that douchetastic image, Parker got married last week in an elaborate Lord of the Rings-style enchanted forest wedding of his own design that cost more money than any of us will ever even see.
The wedding ended up illegally trampling a national park in the process, proving once and for all that fairy tales only come true for the tooliest toolbags in the Tooliverse. Here are the sordid details.
All hail the Duke and Duchess of Douchton Abbey.
He Spent a Million Dollars to Put Extra Plants in a Forest
In order for Parker and his bride to get married in the Shire, he threw down $600,000 for the wedding gate, $350,000 for the outdoor dance floors, and a whopping $1 million for the freaking flowers.
Then he shelled out nearly $10 million to build an artificial pond, a stone bridge, elevated floors, and castle ruins and plant 125 imported trees and flowers. Keep in mind, the service took place in California's Redwood National Forest, which is where they filmed Return of the Jedi -- Parker planted extra trees on the forest moon of Endor because it wasn't quite woodsy enough for his big day.
All of the Ewoks were forcefully relocated to an unventilated shipping container outside of Fresno.
All the Guests Looked Perfect (Because They Were Forced To)
Instead of leaving guests an acceptable attire list on the RSVP, Parker hired Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings costume designer Ngila Dickson to make costumes for every one of his 300 guests to fit in with the arboreal surroundings.
Although nobody was literally walking around in a wizard hat or a mithril cape, the outfits were "based on modern suits and dresses with some elements of Victorian flair and whimsy." This is as good a time as any to point out that Sting was on the guest list, because Sting himself is based on modern suits with elements of Victorian flair and whimsy.
Pictured here moments before being carried away by pixies.
The guests had absolutely no choice in the matter -- no one was permitted to enter unless they were wearing their Tolkiened-up duds.
He Flagrantly Ignored the Law Because He Was "Following His Dream"
According to Parker, he and his wife had "always dreamed of getting married in Big Sur, one of the most magical places on earth." And if you have the net worth of Scrooge McDuck to make your dreams come true, why shouldn't you go for it?
"The natural beauty of an unspoiled forest is fine, but draping shit all over everything is where it's really at."
Well, because the California Coastal Commission is pretty serious about their redwood forests, considering that they've been declared a World Heritage Site, alongside the pyramids and the Taj Mahal. In all his whimsical million-dollar-flower buying, Parker never bothered to actually get a permit to have his wedding in the forest, because despite being a self-proclaimed master of law, it didn't occur to him that bumbling around a conservation site to set up bridges for his LARP wedding might be breaking a few regulations.
Those Porta-Potties just blend right in.
In the end, he had to pay an additional $2.5 million in fines, which is meaningless to him since he is a billionaire. Anyway, it's not like he did any permanent damage to the forest, right?
He Completely Destroyed the Forest in the Process
The irony of building your own enchanted forest in the middle of a pre-existing forest is that you have to get the original forest out of the way. With bulldozers.
"Mystical bulldozers."
That's from the California Coastal Commission's report on the wedding, which found that not only did Parker not have a single permit to build any of that fantasy bullshit for his wedding, including the artificial pond and bridge, but he took zero erosion prevention measures during construction, which caused sedimentation and runoff to spill into a nearby creek. That may sound nitpicky, but the redwood forest is an ecological china shop full of endangered plants and animals -- that creek is home to a threatened species of fish. Not to mention the fact that Parker built several structures directly into the fucking redwood trees, which are protected by law.
"We had to shoot, like, six Loraxes. But it was worth it."
You aren't supposed to build anything at all in a national park, and it doesn't take an encyclopedic knowledge of the American legal system to figure that out. But it does take a billion dollars and a cosmically inflated sense of self-importance to ignore all of that for the sake of your fairy tale wedding. There's probably a moral in here somewhere, but we're pretty sure that sucks, too.
