remember back when "Survivor" debuted...everyone was watching as Richard Hatch plotted and schemed back-stabbed and finally won the game..
well another contestant, a lawyer named Stacy Stillman, claimed she was booted off the island illegally and sued CBS and Mark Burnett, the executive producer for trying to influence the other contestants....from the web:
Stillman says Burnett persuaded two other contestants to vote her off the South China Sea island where the competition took place, protecting 72-year- old Rudy Boesch, who was popular with older viewers.
CBS has denied the allegations, and contends in its lawsuit that Stillman made false accusations that have damaged the show. The studio also asserts that Stillman breached a confidentiality agreement.
Corporate trainer Richard Hatch won the contest's first $1 million prize, and CBS is broadcasting the second "Survivor" series, set in the Australian Outback.
CBS has denied the allegations, and contends in its lawsuit that Stillman made false accusations that have damaged the show. The studio also asserts that Stillman breached a confidentiality agreement.
Corporate trainer Richard Hatch won the contest's first $1 million prize, and CBS is broadcasting the second "Survivor" series, set in the Australian Outback.
In court papers filed in San Francisco, CBS lawyers said Stillman had "explicit and repeated warnings" that she was barred from filing the lawsuit anywhere but Los Angeles.
"Although the $1,000,000 grand prize on 'Survivor' eluded her, Stillman devised a plan to seek an even bigger bonanza by promoting herself, while simultaneously attacking the show and its producers, in a coast-to-coast publicity campaign," the motion to transfer the case states.
another day, another book
Millions of people tuned in to see the outcome of CBS' reality show, Survivor, which was won by a Machiavellian schemer named Richard Hatch. While the rest of America spent the summer of 2000 mesmerized by Rich's antics, Hatch spent the summer being interviewed exhaustively by five time Emmy award-winning investigative reporter and bestselling author Peter Lance.
Lance was slated to ghostwrite the tell-all book for which St. Martin's Press was willing to pay $500,000. But the book deal fell apart at the last minute because Hatch failed to disclose the full extent of the Draconian contract he had signed with CBS, although Hatch had known for days what the so-called "permission letter" really said: CBS demanded the right to edit the book line by line, and to delete anything it didn't like. Devastated by the depth of the lies he had been told, Lance began to dig a little deeper into the background of Hatch and began interviewing people about what really happened on the Island. As the former Chief Investigative Correspondent for ABC News, Lance was well-qualified for the task. What he found shocked him: evidence that might indicate that the outcome of Survivor may have been manipulated by CBS.
an Amazon review:
Seventy-one million Americans watched Richard Hatch win $1 million on the Survivor television series during the summer of 2000. He was the brilliant strategist and ruthless manipulator that viewers loved to hate. Then Hatch's $500,000 book deal to spill the inside secrets of his Survivor strategies and his life story got throttled by CBS. Trampled in the scuffle was Hatch's cowriter, five-time Emmy-winning investigative journalist Peter Lance. Hatch had led him to believe that CBS permission was in the bag, and Lance had already spent months working on the book when the deal died. So Lance went ahead and wrote his own book, full of those delectably greasy little details that Survivor fans hunger for, and including his own first-person observations. He provides a day-by-day commentary on the series, exposes several sides of Richard Hatch that we didn't see, and offers disturbing evidence that CBS manipulated events and people.....
Seventy-one million Americans watched Richard Hatch win $1 million on the Survivor television series during the summer of 2000. He was the brilliant strategist and ruthless manipulator that viewers loved to hate. Then Hatch's $500,000 book deal to spill the inside secrets of his Survivor strategies and his life story got throttled by CBS. Trampled in the scuffle was Hatch's cowriter, five-time Emmy-winning investigative journalist Peter Lance. Hatch had led him to believe that CBS permission was in the bag, and Lance had already spent months working on the book when the deal died. So Lance went ahead and wrote his own book, full of those delectably greasy little details that Survivor fans hunger for, and including his own first-person observations. He provides a day-by-day commentary on the series, exposes several sides of Richard Hatch that we didn't see, and offers disturbing evidence that CBS manipulated events and people.....
The book's organization seems hasty and haphazard at times, with topics frequently raised in one chapter and revisited in another....it is atrociously edited and hardly a page goes by without major typos and misspellings. The organization is non-existent. Mr. Lance is much given to "More on THIS later" type statements, only there never is any "more." The author constantly zings Hatch with "you knew how to win a million dollars; but you didn't know what to do after you got it." Many of the interviews in this book are second-hand, even at the time the book was printed. I gave the book a second star for the occasional insights into Hatch's character. Otherwise, a waste of time.
It is hard to judge the merits of a book in which typographical errors abound on each page. Worse, the author doesn't know the difference between "elude" and "allude", nor "effect" and "affect." His punctuation is bizarre. Sentence fragments abound.
sound familiar??and this is how Peter feels about folks who shop at K MART and eat at Denny's... and the folks he was about to make some money from!!!
Clearly, the traditional rules of prime time television are changing by the week.
Suddenly, members of the K Mart set are jockeying for a shot at stardom along side professional actors. People who eat at Denny’s are packing suitcases full of head shots and moving West to Tinseltown. In the feeding frenzy for ratings and less expensive programming, the networks are "casting" these common folk, "shooting" them and "editing" them like they were characters in a prime time drama. This without the safety nets that protect traditional performers under the hard-earned collective bargaining agreements of Guilds like SAG and AFTRA. What’s worse, in the end, the life rights of these newly minted "celebrities" are being controlled in a way no traditional "actor" would stand for.
the lawsuits peter out......
Stillman sued the Viacom Inc. network in February, alleging that "Survivor" executive producer, Mark Burnett, manipulated the outcome of the series by persuading two other contestants to vote against her on the ninth day of the contest.CBS countered with its own lawsuit, charging that Stillman, a 28-year-old corporate lawyer, violated a confidentiality agreement that she signed before joining the show. CBS lawyers also presented signed declarations from six of the eight "Tagi" teammates, some of whom slammed Stillman as being "smarmy," "sarcastic" and "bossy."
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ralph W. Dau ruled on Thursday that CBS presented sufficient evidence to show that Stillman might have acted with malice against the producers of the hit television show.
The judge denied Stillman's request to dismiss CBS' defamation and breach of contract lawsuit.
Stillman "has put forward no admissible evidence to support her manipulation claim," Dau wrote in his 12-page ruling.
The judge denied Stillman's request to dismiss CBS' defamation and breach of contract lawsuit.
Stillman "has put forward no admissible evidence to support her manipulation claim," Dau wrote in his 12-page ruling.
The judge also cited statements made by Stillman during a "Good Morning America" interview with Diane Sawyer in February. In addition, CBS produced a July 26, 2000, e-mail that Stillman allegedly sent to her former teammates jokingly encouraging them to band together to "extort" $1 million from CBS before appearing in a reunion show.
"Let's show these execs what it's like to be the target of an alliance. Ha ha," Stillman wrote in an e-mail apparently sent to Richard Hatch, the winner of the first "Survivor" contest.
digging in the dirt
and here we have the crux of Lance's writing career..books deals that fall through, and things that people "might" have done....and what "may" have happened..those two words were ever-present in the long News-Press series about his own DUI arrest...the arresting officer may have done this and might have done that..it's a writing style that strives to cast doubt on the person he has a vendetta against.... exhaustive details, mostly gossip, are red meat for the folks who crave it...
and here we have the crux of Lance's writing career..books deals that fall through, and things that people "might" have done....and what "may" have happened..those two words were ever-present in the long News-Press series about his own DUI arrest...the arresting officer may have done this and might have done that..it's a writing style that strives to cast doubt on the person he has a vendetta against.... exhaustive details, mostly gossip, are red meat for the folks who crave it...
but it seems there's always a rational explanation just below the surface.....unless you're a wannabe investigative reporter
2 comments:
Hmmm, an investigative reporter of triviality. We need more it of these days (all we really have is the News Press, the National Inquirer, Fox News, the NY Post, and the Internet.)
What the hell is 'Survivor?' I've never seen it before (although clearly that may be a good thing.) But in the end apparently I need somebody like Lance to help me develop my critical thinking skills. It's way too time consuming to do it on my own.
Poor spelling and grammatical errors can often come from drinking a bit too much and a bit too often. According to substance abuse experts, there is a strong correlation. And assuming correlations is apparently part of a skill set in 'investigative' reporting.
None of this shocks me Mick.... What the general public needs to know is that one huge reason that the prosecutors and law enforcement community didn't turn on Beutel and the SBPD is because we know just by reading some of the early statements made by Lance that he is full of crap....ergo, his already suspect credibility was further damaged. For example, let's say you wrote some wild accusations about someone in the construction business and backed your claims up with bullshit that the general public didn't really understand because its not their area of expertise? Well, some of the public might be outraged but the people in the construction industry would see the bullshit for what it was.... That's how we in the law enforcement "industry" feel about Lance's little investigation. He is simply a DUI driver who got caught and just happens to have an enormous ego and access to an unethical newspaper. This is why the DA's office, the City Attorney's office and the entire LE community has stood behind Beutel this whole time....not because there's some giant conspiracy to get Peter Lance for a misdemeanor DUI. Geez, how delusional can Lance be?
And I thought that Genis had an enormously inflated ego...
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