The Survivor Scam

The television producers didn't want it made public, but it took only four days for the first castaways to flee their island and check into a hotel.

This wasn't supposed to happen. They had come to this remote island, a home to beasts but not to man, to test themselves—to confront their strengths and weaknesses, armed only with their wits, resourcefulness and the barest of essentials. Not all of them would stay the course; not everyone would emerge a survivor. But big rewards beckoned, along with that priceless modern commodity—fame—because the whole ordeal was being filmed for a television show.

They settled in for a stay of days, weeks, however long it took. Then they started to realize just how difficult their task was. It rained, their shelter was makeshift, they had to scrounge for food and some of them didn't even like one another.

So they left. After less than a week on the island, the first of them hopped onto production helicopters and boats and headed for the nearest town. The crew and network tried to cover it up—it wouldn't help if the television audience knew that these adventurers were actually staying in hotel rooms, ordering room service and hanging out in bars.

But when the news finally leaked, the network was unapologetic. "This is not a Robinson Crusoe situation." it said. "We have always been clear that these are 21st century people with 21st century concerns."

By the way, the network that admitted as much was not CBS, and these reluctant survivors-to-be were not the survivors you may have seen atop the Nielsen ratings. We're not talking about Rich, Rudy. Gervase and Jenna here, nor about the contestants on round two of the show. Survivor: The Australian Outback, which kicks off after the Super Bowl. These were three dozen English men, women and children recruited to live in hardship on the remote Scottish isle of Taransay for the BBC series Castaway 2000.

So how come Brits—the people who survived the Blitz—couldn't hack it and the yanks could, roughing it for up to five and a half weeks on the Malaysian island of Pulau Tiga with nothing but grit, desire, some rudimentary tools and the dulcet tones of Jeff Probst to keep them company and put it all in context?

Well, yeah, they had all that. That, and a few other things, courtesy of a few last-minute phone calls.

"The producers called us before they were scheduled to go out and shoot." says Ford Church, operations manager of the Boulder Outdoor Survival School, "and had a bunch of questions that honestly scared us. They were asking, 'How much food should we give these guys? What kind of gear should we make available to them?' And I'm thinking, You're leaving in three days to go shoot this thing and you don't know this stuff?"

But the Survivor producers finally figured out what to pack for their 16 castaways. Included was what survival-skills teacher Tom Brown, who runs Tom Brown's Tracker School in New Jersey, calls "a cornucopia of supplies":

• Canteens and drinking water, purified and tested every morning by the production crew.

• Medical supplies, including Band-Aids, antidiarrheal tablets, Betadine, aspirin, prescription medications, plus two doctors and a medical crew standing by to treat anything serious.

• An unlimited supply of sunscreen, bug repellent, tampons, contact lens solutionand sanitized hand wipes. Plus condoms.

• Casks of rice and a small supply of canned food (which were gone, says a crew member, inside of a week). Chewing gum too.

• Blankets, rope and string, baskets and buckets, oars, pots and pans, machetes, hatchets, fish traps, rat traps, netting, wood planks, chicken wire.

• The personal "luxury item" that each castaway was allowed to bring, which included a ukulele, a Bible, a deck of cards, a bag of craft beads and a razor (so New York neurologist Sean Keniff could indulge in that favorite pastime of true survivalists everywhere: shaving his chest).

• The rewards of various competitions: three egg-laying chickens, baskets of fruit, a loaded spice rack, a hunting knife, a mask, snorkel, fins and spear for fishing, pillows, hammocks, a can opener, matches, more canned food, chocolate. And a few lavish dinners, be they on a yacht, on a nearby island, at a "local bar" (actually a stage set filled with playacting locals, designed to be just realistic enough to fool a woman who'd been stuck on Pulau Tiga for a month) or on the beach. (The fact that the castaways who won these repasts often threw them up afterward did not diminish the zeal with which they ate.)

• Items that mysteriously showed up during the (text continued on page 134)Survivor Scam(continued from page 81) run of the show. When it rained during their second week on the island, for instance, the castaways huddled miserably in their makeshift huts, trying not to get wet. By the time it rained again on day 31, they had all been given matching yellow rain slickers.

In other words, the first Survivor wasn't exactly a show about the art of wilderness survival—and round two, set in the Australian outback, doesn't figure to be one, either. "It was a game show, not a test of survival skills," says David Alloway, a survival-skills specialist and author who teaches at David Alloway's Skills of Survival School in Presidio, Texas. "Some of the media and the general public interpreted it as a true survival situation, but it was actually contrary to most group survival situations. I call it Lord of the Flies meets Geraldo."

Some of the contestants knew that going in: San Francisco lawyer Stacey Stillman says that prior to her stint on the island, she thumbed through a couple of wilderness guides but skipped the chapters on real survival stuff, like making fire without matches. Others learned it along the way. Asked what advice she'd give to future contestants, truck driver Susan Hawk suggested "lots of books on game-playing, civil wars, the fall of the Roman Empire." And preschool teacher Gretchen Cordy, who'd actually taught survival skills in the Air Force, was incredulous and openly critical of the show's setup when she realized how much help the castaways were being given. (This according to insiders on the island. None of her comments, of course, made it into the show.)

Even Mark Burnett, the Svengali behind Survivor (as well as the Eco-Challenge endurance races), cops to it. "This is not real survivalism. The most boring show I can think of would be 16 survivalists on an island."

"I think it's important to realize that it's entertainment, and they're using survival as a spin-off for their theme," says Ford Church. "If those guys were really placed on an island with nothing, it would be an interesting show—but I also think there would have been some deaths."

Adds New Jersey survival teacher Tom Brown, "I guess it was survival to them. As far as I'm concerned, if you have a full set of clothing and a pocketknife, you're no longer in a survival situation. You're on vacation."

Everyone realizes how praiseworthy it is for a prince to honor his word and to be straightforward rather than crafty in his dealings; nonetheless, contemporary experience shows that princes who have achieved great things have been those who have given their word lightly, who have known how to trick men with their cunning, and who, in the end, have overcome those abiding by honest principles.—The Prince, Chapter XVIII

OK, they're not survivalists. So what are they? It has been suggested that the castaways' truest challenge came not in surviving the elements but in surviving a cutthroat Machiavellian game of office politics that happened to be played in a hot, sandy office 20 miles off the coast of Borneo. And when the winner turned out to be the consummately manipulative corporate trainer Rich Hatch, that simply reinforced the idea that the game was all about using corporate strategies.

"I want to think that this game's not a microcosm of society, but every person over 30 I've talked to thinks it absolutely is," says castaway and student Colleen Haskell. "They tell me, 'This is the corporate world.' So I'm staying in school another year." (First, she's going to appear in a Rob Schneider movie, which should teach her a whole new set of survival skills.)

But is this really the way office politics work, or was Survivor no more a true test of business skills than it was of survivalism? "The show was contrived, and that's not the strategy for success in the corporate world," says Joseph Fabricatore, a management consultant from Santa Monica, California. "And the strategy that won was a narcissistic, psychopathic kind of a strategy. You do find people who can be successful with that strategy up to certain levels, but eventually they get found out, or their business just goes away, because people recognize who they're dealing with, and don't want to deal with them anymore."

A prince should never join in an aggressive alliance with someone more powerful than himself, unless as a matter of necessity.—Chapter XXI

We watched them as their 39 days on Pulau Tiga played out over three months of prime-time television: 16 archetypes (the gay guy, the grizzled vet, the tough chick) fighting it out on a remote island. And we learned many things about them—and their game—along the way.

We learned that Sue felt double-crossed by runner-up Kelly Wigles-worth; that cranky ex–Navy Seal Rudy Boesch liked Rich (but not in a homosexual way, that's for sure), that the hapless innocents in the Pagong tribe somehow didn't figure out that the Tagi alliance was eliminating them one by one until it was too late.

When trouble is sensed well in advance, it can easily be remedied; if you wait for it to show itself, any medicine will be too late because the disease will have become incurable.—Chapter III

And we learned that on the island, fire represents life. We learned that once the votes are tallied, the decision is final. And we learned, above all, that when the tribe has spoken, it's time for you to go.

Which is not to say that absolutely everything about the experience was laid bare in the 13 episodes. In his book Survivor: The Ultimate Game, a diary purportedly written on the island, Mark Burnett reports on the defiant speech YMCA coach Gervase Peterson gave just before being voted off: "Someday," he wrote, "when Gervase's son is old enough to watch the videotape of his father's bold statements, he will see a model for manhood." The only snag is that the speech was edited out of the episode.

Plenty more intrigue was going on behind the scenes. None of the other participants are allowed to write about their experiences for three years (as Rich found out when he tried to sign a book deal), and even the Survivor crew members had to sign confidentiality agreements, which were aimed mostly at preventing them from revealing the winner ahead of time. Still, conversations with a few brave insiders flesh out the story:

Malaysia, the nation in which Pulau Tiga sits, was settled by the British. This doesn't mean much except when it comes to the local recipes, which tend to be an unappetizing blend of bad British cooking and Asian influences. "For us it was a lot of beans and cold eggs for breakfast, a lot of rice, a lot of stewed vegetables and what we termed mystery meat," reports one crew member. On occasion the producers would have pizza or McDonald's flown in, but such instances were rare. The third time fish heads were served for dinner, one of the four on-site editors reportedly flipped out.

(continued on page 137)Survivor Scam(continued from page 134)

The show's crew, by the way, stayed in a small compound close to the Tribal Council set. Part of the compound consisted of a modest complex that had already been on the island: 10 cabins, some meeting rooms, a soccer field that was used as a helicopter pad. Another series of cabins was built to house the 65 crew members. The first dozen or so were relatively nice, but soon workers began to skimp on materials. Most of the crew cabins were 12-by-12-foot cottages equipped with a ceiling fan, a toilet and a cold-water shower. The compound also had a restaurant and bar area. (The producers were asked to leave this compound intact when they left, the better to attract tourists in the future.)

Despite the fact that they had a better diet than the castaways, the crew did not pity their 16 subjects. "Those guys all had a shot at a million bucks," says a cameraman. "I'm a working stiff. Was I going to feel sorry for them? No. The producers negotiated a pretty hard deal, a flat rate with no overtime. I think the first woman to get voted off made more money than any of the crew members." Burnett did not give bonuses when the show became an enormous hit, which also caused a few hard feelings.

Though their task was to film everything that moved and some things that didn't, zeroing in on whatever drama they could find, the 10 camera crews had a few guidelines. For one thing, they were told not to show the castaways oiling up with the unlimited sunscreen that had been provided—though this rule was jettisoned when a two-man oiling session proved useful to illustrate the growing alliance between homosexual Richard and homophobe Rudy.

Initially, the crew tried to interact with the castaways as little as possible, to create a vérité document. As days went on, things got more relaxed, and the castaways began to ask questions of the staffers. These questions could be answered as long as they were benign, inoffensive and had no bearing on the game; particularly forbidden was revealing any information about what the opposing tribe was doing. The most frequent question the castaways asked the crew was, "What are they feeding you guys?"

At one point, a rumor raced through the staff that a camera crew had been caught giving one of the castaways a PowerBar. "Nothing was substantiated," says an insider who wasn't directly involved, "but a couple of camera crews were accused by the producers of getting too close to the contestants."

From the start, the castaways had a point drilled into them: At any time, any of you can be taken off the island if Mark Burnett feels you're not playing the game correctly.

Sometimes, though, the way the contestants played the game was subject to alterations. Just before the Tagi and Pagong tribes merged, when both groups were down to five members, each was asked to send one ambassador to a summit meeting. Reportedly, Tagi picked Kelly as its ambassador and Pagong opted for Greg—but Burnett overruled those choices and substituted Sean and single mother Jenna Lewis, feeling that the two attractive and unattached castaways had the greatest chance of adding some romantic intrigue to their overnight ambassadorial summit (which also featured a lobster dinner, four bottles of wine and a pair of comfy beds).

And speaking of sexual tension: Everyone heard the rumors that Greg and Colleen were slipping off into the jungle together for romantic trysts—but despite trying to catch them in the act, the crew never saw anything incriminating. Rumors still fly about other possible liaisons, both between castaways and between one castaway and a crewman. But according to a production staff member, the crew saw little evidence of hanky-panky. Many of them eventually decided that a consisting largely of rice seriously stifled the cast's sexual urges, although Rich admits that he enjoyed more than a few instances of underwater self-gratification. Cattier crew members took Jenna's apparent celibacy as proof of "just how flat-lined their libidos were."

Of the cast members that were voted off, Stacey and Susan took it the hardest. "Stacey felt she had been cheated," says a crew member, "but not too many people liked her anyway." Domineering real estate developer B.B. Andersen, on the other hand, was raring to get off the island. After a couple of days he decided the game was stupid, and at one point he told a camera crew that he was going to hire a helicopter to fly him out of there. (He didn't explain exactly how he'd contact the charter service from his digs on Pagong Beach.) B.B. also annoyed financial advisor Joel Klug so much that Joel later said he would have punched B.B. if the contract the castaways signed hadn't prohibited physical violence against other cast members.

After being voted off the island, the unfortunate castaway would usually remain on Pulau Tiga for the first night, sleeping in a cabin in the crew compound with a mattress and sleeping bag. They were not allowed to mingle with the crew members; instead, they were taken for psychological debriefing, then walked to a cabin away from the rest of the staff. The next day, they were taken to a luxury hotel, the Magellan Sutera, in the city of Kota Kinabalu on Borneo, where a more comfortable room and some treats (favorite food, toiletries, CDs, etc.) awaited.

This postbanishment ritual sometimes varied: Greg was taken to Borneo the night he was voted off the island, because the producers were worried he would be disruptive.

This worry was not uncommon. "Greg freaked a lot of folks out, because he liked to fuck with people," says one witness, who reports that Greg decided the game was silly after B.B.'s exit and subsequently reinvented himself as the island's jokester. He fooled around at times that were supposed to be deadly serious (the Tribal Council, for instance), he talked into a coconut as if it were a phone, and mocked the game in such a way that some cameramen asked not to be assigned to him. Mark Burnett pulled him aside for at least one talk.

On the other hand, Greg was one of two castaways that survival experts and insiders both say probably could have survived on the island without much help (Gretchen was the other). Greg's courses at Tom Brown's Tracker School obviously helped him: That's where he learned to make the rat trap he fashioned in one episode, though he didn't credit his instructor when he showed off his creation. (Brown was not surprised that Greg confused and worried people: "Greg was kind of like that in my class," admits Brown. "If they don't understand his very wry sense of humor, people tend to take him the wrong way.")

As the game went on, everybody behind the scenes got sucked into it and spent their off-hours comparing notes, dissecting the alliances and making predictions. "At one point we were talking about starting a pool, with everybody putting in five bucks," says a crew member. "But one of the producers said that wouldn't look right. It's probably good we didn't, because pretty much everybody thought Rudy was going to win."

A prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honor his word when it places him at a disadvantage and when the reasons for which he made his promise no longer exist. If all men were good, this precept would not be good; but because men are wretched creatures who would not keep their word to you, you need not keep your word to them.—Chapter XVIII

Before we go any further, a disclaimer is needed: The occupations that we have used to identify many of the Survivor cast members (neurologist, YMCA coach, student) don't really apply anymore. We should now label many of the castaways as actors, spokespeople, talk-show guests, semicelebrities. They are, you might say, professional Survivors.

Understandably, among those who make survival their profession—those who run or teach at schools devoted to wilderness survival skills—there's frequent scorn for the show, occasional grudging admiration and overall a consensus that whatever it was, it had little to do with true survival.

"I was really excited when I heard the show was coming out," says Cody Lundin of the Aboriginal Living Skills School in Prescott, Arizona. "I thought, Great, you don't need to bullshit with these skills—they're interesting, they're dynamic, this is going to be really cool. But I might have known that if anyone can fuck something up, it's Hollywood."

This is not to say that true survivalists are uniformly disdainful of the castaways themselves—under a different setup, David Alloway insists that a group of people could have survived for six weeks with much less help than the show gave them. "The producer said he didn't think any of those people could survive if he didn't give them rice, that he was the only person who would have been able to survive," says Alloway. "That's pretty much in line with Burnett's ego. But if they had restructured, they absolutely could have survived. They had fresh water, and they had a lot of resources, especially animal resources. They got away from the rat cooking pretty quick, but they could have eaten rat a long time, and done the island ecology a lot of good in the process."

He continues, laughing. "And Richard, instead of dragging one of the deadliest snakes in the world by the tail to the surf to watch it swim, could have whacked it and eaten the thing. That's something I can't wait to teach my students: to play with venomous snakes." (In actuality, the castaways were forbidden to kill and eat the island's lizards and snakes, though they were free to devour the rats.)

Survival specialists have other complaints about the castaways' behavior: They should have realized that eels and rays make better bait than they do food; they should have used the island's resources more and relied on rice less; they should never have voted off Gretchen, the castaway with the best survival skills; they should have arrived at the island better prepared.

"I think they were given the tools and the resources, but they weren't taught how to use them," says Ford Church. "If they had been given a one- or two-week course before they went out there, they could have taken away some of the luxuries they were given and had a more realistic survival situation."

But Survivor was really about a completely different survival situation: surviving the other castaways to win the million dollars. And if that meant eliminating threats and violating every rule of group survival, so be it.

"The whole premise of'last man standing' is antithetical to what I teach in group survival situations," says Alloway. "And that's basically that everybody has strong points, and you should look to those people at certain times. But that's not what this was about."

Cody Lundin agrees. "If you've studied tribal culture, you know that any tribe that acted like that would be dead," he says. "It's giving people a false impression of skills, and it's really doing a number on teamwork in general. Anyone who teaches survival, or anyone who has any common sense at all, knows that if you're in any survival situation with a group of people, you have to work together. And that's exactly what this show wasn't about. It was a classic 21st century case of 'I want to screw you so I can get some cash.' "

Not coincidentally, management consultants have a similar take on the show. "The situation was structured to be what is called a zero-sum game, which means somebody has to lose in order for me to win," says Joseph Fabricatore. "In most corporations, that is not the mentality that's followed today. What's followed is a win-win, or non-zero-sum game, in which everybody gets the opportunity to participate in the positive outcome. That's the motivation for performing. Survivor has a contrived and primitive mentality."

This is not to say that the basis of Rich's strategy—building an alliance to secure his position—was a bad one. "Consensus building and alliance building does go on, and that can be good," says John Challenger, president and chief executive officer of the Chicago-based outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. "One of the primary reasons mergers and acquisitions aren't successful is the failure to build alliances. The Machiavellian side of it only works for so long before people start seeing through it. It can catch up with you."

Business consultant Neal Lenarsky, who runs Strategic Transitions, Inc. in southern California, says Rich's strategy identified him as a type known as "the corporate terrorist." Lenarsky identifies three common types: the terrorist who relies on intimidation, the loyalist who cares for his co-workers, and the benign saboteur who tries not to offend anyone but will walk away when colleagues need them. (Sean, with his alphabetical voting strategy, is the classic benign saboteur.)

"We all know assholes who survive for long periods of time," concedes Lenarsky, "but their success is usually short-lived. It's just a fact of nature: If someone pisses off enough people, irritates enough people or alienates enough people, he's going to get killed. And on the show, because of the limited amount of time and how people are voted off, this guy managed to win and be a terrorist at the same time."

But, then, we're not talking about the real world here—we're talking about a hit television show, where what worked the first time around will most likely be trotted out again in the outback. A friend of Cody Lundin was a finalist for Survivor: The Australian Outback. The man, who was part Native American and had taught survival skills for years, was flown to Los Angeles for the last round of interviews. "He walked into the hotel where they were doing it, took a look around and walked out," says Lundin. "I talked to him afterward and he said, 'I could tell from the vibe that it wouldn't flatter me to be a part of this organization." Basically, he said there were lots of blondes there—they seemed to be going after chicks with big tits—and he didn't want any part of it."

For the next go-around, Lundin has a modest proposal—one that he knows no network would ever have the nerve to implement. "If they want to be cutting edge," he says flatly, "they should make it for real. Have people sign a big-ass waiver—and, you know, maybe people would die."

Then he laughs; you can't be a modern survivor, even in the Arizona desert, without knowing how to face the facts. "They could have had a neat show," he says, "but you can't argue with ratings. That's their bread and butter, that's all they care about. It may have been a joke as far as survival skills go, but they got 50 million Americans. How can I knock that?"

Private citizens who become princes purely by good fortune do so with little exertion on their own part; but subsequently they maintain their position only by considerable exertion. They make the journey as if they had wings; their problems start when they alight.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter VII

16 People

We'd like to see on Survivor 2

Emeril Lagasse

He could make even kangaroo meat taste good.

Cher

Is she the ultimate survivor or what?

Deepak Chopra

He's used to fasting; he won't get greedy with the rice.

Keith Richards

He's been on borrowed time for decades; clearly he has a foolproof survival scheme.

Judge Judy

She won't take shit from anyone.

Carson Daly

Just because we'd enjoy seeing him voted off.

Dr. Kevorkian

(a) He's a doctor. (b) He might come in handy if someone gets too annoying.

Angelina Jolie

If she can sleep with Billy Bob, having rats crawl over her won't be a problem.

Bobby knight

To liven things up.

Chyna

Somebody has to do the heavy lifting.

Anne Heche

Already skilled at wandering aimlessly through sparsely populated terrain.

Bill Clinton

He needs a project.

Pam Anderson

Visual motivation for the rest of the team; she survived marriage to Tommy Lee.

Ted Nugent

At least he knows how to hunt.

Rupert Everett

You got to have a gay guy.

Rudy Boesch

Because he was the best thing about Survivor I.

Actual Survival in the wild

Follow the "Sacred Order": shelter, then water, then fire, then food.

Protect yourself from the elements.

Find a way to gather and carry water.

Build a fire.

Fish for food.

Eat bugs to live.

Set traps to attract prey.

Beware of hypothermia.

If necessary, make clothes out of bark and leaves.

Remember to cover up during the hottest part of the day.

Identify the tribe's leaders and benefit from their knowledge.

Rely heavily on the advice of the doctor in the group.

Avoid the beach when sand fleas are most active.

Fashion an SOS symbol.

Pray for a rescue.

Fake Survival on TV

Follow the "Survivor motto": outwit, outplay, outlast.

Protect yourself from Jeff Probst.

Don't forget the canteens they gave you.

Build a secret alliance.

Fish for leverage.

Eat bugs to win the immunity challenge.

Shave your chest to attract an agent.

Beware of Rudy when he's cranky.

Make tough wardrobe decisions: the black sports bra or the red tankini?

Remember not to hog the free sunscreen.

Identify the tribe's leaders and vote them off the island.

Make fun of the doctor for his stupid alphabetical voting system.

Avoid the beach when Rich is naked.

Call for help on Greg's coconut phone.

Pray for a 40 share.

How to really prepare for Survivor 2

Books:

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Movies:

Alive

Lord of the Flies

All About Eve

Games:

Risk

Sim City 3000

Chess

"If those guys were really placed on an island with nothing, there would have been some deaths."

B.B. Andersen told a camera crew he was going to hire a helicopter to fly him out.