Survivor 3 Secrets Revealed
Credit: By ALAN PARKER
Toronto Sun
They're out of Africa.
Location filming for Survivor: Africa, the third installment of the phenomenally successful reality-TV franchise, wrapped up last weekend. The final tribal council was held Saturday night on a circular stage under a giant artificial acacia tree overlooking the crocodile-haunted Ewaso Ngiro River in Kenya's Shaba National Reserve.
The newest Survivor millionaire and his/her 15 loser co-conspirators have scattered to the wind, hiding out until S3 hits the airwaves at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11. The series will reach its grand finale Jan. 10 with a two-hour episode in which the winner is chosen from the final four -- not three -- contestants.
As usual, producer Mark Burnett cast a giant cone of silence over his wilderness domain. The security brigade alone for S3 is said to be double the contingent guarding its Australian predecessor. Of course, they were watching out for local bandits armed with automatic weapons as well as more mundane threats, such as nosy lions and marauding reporters.
In spite -- or perhaps because -- of Burnett's precautions, Survivor-watching has become a growth industry. The Internet is alive with intelligence (some rock solid, most spurious) and speculation (most strange) on every nuance of the developing show.
The Shaba National Reserve is one of Kenya's most remote -- and most interesting -- nature parks, located near the equator about 250 km (156.25 miles) north of the capital, Nairobi. This description is from the source Kenyalogy: "Much of Shaba's charm lies in the splendour of its topography, which includes deep gorges and waterfalls on the river, open grasslands dotted with springs and swamps, and rocky hills and dusty plains strewn with lava boulders."
Burnett paid 18 million Kenyan shillings (about $350,000 Canadian) to close off two-thirds of the 240-square-km park from June through August.
The accompanying map is based on the work of Dan Bollinger of SurvivorMaps. His information comes from insider snitches, local observers and even classified satellite surveillance.
The most dominant feature in his tracking is the temporary metropolis set up for the huge, unseen production staff required to make Survivor a "reality."
"The camp, which contains cafeteria, editing rooms, satellite dishes, generators and equipment, is located across the road from Acacia Camp," Bollinger reported earlier this month. "Acacia Camp is a permanent Shaba National Reserve campground with electric fences to ward off animals.
"The crew is sleeping at Acacia Camp in what has become known as 'tent city.'" One of the contestants' camps is confirmed to have been set up halfway between the production camp and the Ewaso Ngiro River, site of the tribal council. The other camp is believed to be further east, near a geological formation known as the Nomad Cave. Both sites are about half a kilometre from the river.
A group of Internet Survivor stalkers known as the Ellipsiiis Brain Trust yesterday posted what they say is a complete list of S3 contestants on their Web site, www.surviiivor.com. The 16 tentatively identified cast members are:
Brandon Quinton; marathon-running dentist Carl Bilancione; Clarence Black; Diane Ogder; soccer-playing Vassar grad Ethan Zohn; Franklin Garrison of upstate New York; nursing student Jessie Camacho; Kelly Goldsmith; athletic ad-exec Lindsey Richter; Kimberly Powers; former fusionOne spokesman Lex vander Berghe; Kim Larsen Johnson; Linda Spencer; Silas Gaither; Teresa Cooper; and cattle rancher Tom Buchanan.
The only contestant previously identified was Lindsey Richter, an athletic, 27-year-old blonde who had been working for an advertising agency in Portland, Oregon. Richter was first outed by Peter Ames Carlin, a columnist for The Oregonian newspaper on Aug. 8.
Carlin did not identify her by name, but gave so much detail that Survivor's Web fanatics soon put an identity to the personality. A mountain biker and distance runner, Richter has been described by friends as "direct" with "a flair for performance."
A less-flattering posting on the survivornews.net Web site says: "Her nickname is 'Insano' among friends, at least behind her back ... She is very flirtatious and has largely male friends." Oregonian columnist Carlin reported her Survivor audition tape "included footage of a spirited romp she took with her dogs around Washington Park, in which she was apparently -- and there's no way to put this gently -- nude."
And what about oily host Jeff Probst? After being stung in the privates by a jellyfish in S1 and shocking himself by urinating on an electric fence in S2, Probst reported another mishap during S3 filming in an e-mail to Entertainment Weekly: "I got stung by a scorpion. Fortunately the bite was a bit lower on the body. He crawled right up my boot and planted one on my Achilles' tendon."
What's next?
Preparation is already well under way for Survivor 4, with a tentative TV premiere in early March, right after the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics wrap up.
Early word on location is Jordan in the Middle East. But the early word on S3's location was South America, not Africa, so who knows?
