Word: cbs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...much depends on a raw cow's brain. At least it does if you are Mark Burnett, executive producer of Survivor and Survivor: The Australian Outback, with a rich deal to produce Survivors 3 and 4 for CBS and a big, fat secret to guard--the outcome of a game that drew almost 52 million viewers for its finale last August. On that secret rest millions of dollars and the fortunes of a network. So pose him an innocent question--Is it true the S2 contestants ate raw cow's brains?--and you will get a stone-faced...
...that any revelation about the cow's brain--that crucial fact!--could lead some talented detective to the solution and bring down the house of cards. ("Raw cow's brain? Yes...it all fits! The winner is Colby!") Last year rabid fans scoured video stills and images swiped from CBS computers to glean clues, some accurate, some not, about which Survivor would next get booted. But Burnett played the would-be spoilers like a baby grand, impishly editing footage and planting red-herring files at the official website to flummox them. At the S2 location, besieged by journalists spying from...
Control of information: CBS placed everyone from the new contestants to the casting director off limits to interviews and required journalists visiting the set to sign legal agreements not to reveal certain news. (TIME turned down a visit under those conditions.) Control of the cast: the Survivors can be fined $5 million if they spill the beans, and CBS has ironfisted control over their show-biz futures of a kind known to few besides boy-band recruits and '30s movie stars. Control of the spoils: the series is a brilliantly conceived marketing device used to promote the CBS schedule, from...
...Within days of a crash of the military's troubled V-22 Osprey aircraft, Wallace attempted to contact the pilot's widow. "I did what any reporter would do," Wallace said. "I made a polite, sensitive call." The officer's family and the Marines disagree. In a letter to CBS executives obtained by the Washington Post, General James Jones wrote that Wallace's "tenacity was offensive and the conversation ceased only when a family friend abruptly terminated the connection." Wallace has doubtless been hung up on before. Maybe he just thought that was how ordinary people say goodbye...
...devil's pact by joining the sitcom My Favorite Martian strictly for the cash. Though he later took other roles, he was forever branded as extraterrestrial Uncle Martin. He was so closely identified with the role that in 1996, when NASA thought it had found life on Mars, CBS News wanted to use him in a segment with two astro-scientists...