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‘Everything on That Island Wanted to Kill You’
The very first crew of Survivor slept tent-less on a beach covered in rats and snakes because they smelled a hit TV show. And then it got worse.
In this excerpt on the birth of Survivor, Nussbaum goes back to the moments before the 16 original castaways were marooned off the sides of a ship in the South China Sea, left to swim for a beach where their game — and the production of the show — had already begun. And then, as the cameras swung around, soaking up the anarchy, the castaways raced wildly around the ship, grabbing anything that seemed useful — tarps, machetes — then jumped into the water and scrambled aboard two rafts, rowing desperately toward Pulau Tiga, against the current. A middle-class kid from Texas, he was a daredevil photojournalist who had covered heavy political stories, like a KKK march, as well as tabloid TV, “whatever I had to do to live.” Like several other members of the crew, none of whom had ever worked on a show like this, he’d fought to get this peculiar job, smelling a hit — and now, the scene on the beach confirmed his impulses.
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