The Road to Reality

by Dianne Burnett

  The course we devised that year was the toughest yet—involving everything from kayaking to trekking across glaciers. As vice president of Eco-Challenge, I was often behind the scenes helping with every aspect of the production, as well as ensuring that all went smoothly with the sponsors, who provided our main source of funding. Making sure banners were prominently placed during the race so sponsors would see the value of their sponsorship, I was also given the entertaining “job” of entertaining them. We rented a large bus to transport VIPs to special events and pre-race parties; during the competition, we piled into the bus and traveled to checkpoints along the course.

  I was constantly promoting the show—giving away jackets bearing sponsors’ logos, making everyone feel comfortable, and arranging elaborate gift baskets for the VIPs—basically, paying close attention to everyone’s individual preferences.

  That year, the Australian Tourist Board came to British Columbia to check out the event. We were contemplating a future Eco-Challenge Down Under, and the Aussies wanted to make sure our operation was legit. Apparently we made a good impression wining and dining them and taking them to our favorite watering holes. One night at the Barefoot Bistro, we headed to the back cigar bar to talk business. The deal was finalized amid the thick blue smoke in the bar, also the site of my first and last stogie.

  By then, the Eco-Challenge crew was like a roving caravan of merrymakers. Work was fun, and Mark and I spent so much time with the crew, who were rehired year after year, that we came to regard them as family. By the time we left British Columbia, my family was growing: I was again with child.

  Having learned the ropes of pregnancy, I vowed that the birth of my second child would be different. I hired a doula, a woman who came to our house offering emotional and physical support during my pregnancy, and who would accompany me to the hospital for the delivery. I was determined to give birth without drugs this time.

  On April 26, 1996, Mark arrived home bearing boxes of Chinese food. After dinner, I crawled into bed to watch a Mel Gibson movie. As the opening credits rolled, my water broke. Mark raced me to the hospital, where the doula walked beside me as I paced the hallways, moaning in agony because I wasn’t on any drugs. The nurses shooed us back into my room because I was making too much noise. Baby Cameron was turned all around, and my back was going into spasms.

  “Breathe,” the doula instructed, timing my contractions. “Breathe!”

  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Give me the epidural!” I screamed. I was given the injection, and my lower half went numb. The doctor arrived just then.

  “Push!” he demanded.

  “I can’t!” I couldn’t feel anything from the waist down.

  “Push,” he warned, “or I will have to get the vacuum, and your baby will have a cone-shaped head!”

  That did it. I put every muscle in my body into pushing, silently chanting, I will not have a cone-headed baby! And then Cameron arrived—thankfully with a perfectly-shaped head. The physician offered Mark the opportunity to cut the umbilical cord, but my macho husband went white at the thought.

  “Give it to me,” I said. “I’ll do it!” And I cut it myself.

  When Cameron was two months old, we began preparing for Australia, locale of the fourth Eco-Challenge race. Site of the world’s oldest rain forest, Queensland is in the northeast corner of the continent—hundreds of miles north of Sydney—and is also home to some of the nastiest critters on the planet. Most people equate Australia with cuddly koalas and kangaroos, but not all the indigenous fauna is so lovable: the rivers harbor man-eating crocs, the jungles teem with deadly snakes, and even some tree sap there is so poisonous it kills on contact. The perfect place to bring a four-year-old and a baby!

  My family was concerned when I mentioned our upcoming travel plans: Cameron hadn’t been baptized, and being good Catholics, they wouldn’t hear of him making such a long trip without first being christened. With our departure approaching, I hastily arranged a ceremony, and my family rushed out. In the middle of the baptism, I noticed that the church’s stained-glass window was shaking and vibrating, looking like the panes were about to fall out. It was another earthquake, but the priest carried on.

  It took 16 hours to fly to Sydney, but both James—who was already well traveled and had spent most of his four years amid adults—and baby Cameron were well behaved, so much so that when we touched down, the other passengers commented on their angelic behavior.

  Even though Australia was part of the British Commonwealth, it certainly wasn’t like London: Aussies spoke with clipped accents, every other word was “mate,” the weather was sunny, and restaurants served up unusual fare like crocodile and wild boar. The country’s cities were sparkling and super-modern in design, but much of Australia wasn’t urban—the terrain was rugged, and much of it was untouched.

  Eco-Challenge Australia again featured a multidiscipline course, with horseback riding, Class IV whitewater rafting, canoeing, mountain biking, kayaking in open seas, canyoneering, rappelling down cliffs under waterfalls, and trekking through spear grass that sliced the skin. Originally, we’d wanted to incorporate caving through lava tubes. However, after discovering that the caverns harbored an airborne microbe causing a potentially deadly disease known as “rat catcher’s yellows,” we crossed out that event.

  Team sizes were reduced from five members to four, and unlike previous years, we air-dropped the needed gear at predetermined locations. On other races, assistants could aid them en route; that year, the competitors were alone in the wilderness for 11 days and nights. And that year, we added cash prizes, awarding $25,000 to the first team to cross the finish line.

  While Mark flew off to ready the course, I spent a lot of time alone with the kids, since we didn’t have nannies or drivers. As I maneuvered our rented Land Cruiser along bumpy dirt roads and mountain passes—simultaneously keeping an eye on my little ones in the back—kangaroos and emus often jumped out in front of me, forcing me to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting them.

  In the days leading to the race, Mark and Discovery Channel executives were busy conducting last-minute reconnaissance along the course. Mark suggested that I go off with the head executive’s wife and our kids to Dunk Island, a remote spot in the Family Islands National Park, which was a “kids’ resort” offering pirate-ship cruises. It was beautiful but isolated—with no cell-phone coverage, which for those few days, I found delightful. While there, I became fascinated with reading about aborigines. Australia’s indigenous people, the aborigines are documented telepaths; they were famous for using mental “telephones” to communicate—centuries before real phones were invented. I soon learned that I didn’t possess their abilities.

  Upon returning to civilization, the receptionist handed me several messages from my brother, Steve. They were marked “Urgent.” When I called New York, I discovered that while I was living it up on the secluded isle, my mother had undergone emergency bypass surgery. By the time I heard the news, however, she was out of the woods, and well on her road to recovery. Steve assured me there was no need to return.

  The day the races were to start, I was talking to Mark, who was about to begin the countdown to the race. “Mark,” I said, gesturing to the grass right in front of us. “Snakes!” There were lots of them, right in the field the racers were about to run into. He sent out the teams to clear the path of the deadly brown snakes, who might have struck down competitors in the first seconds of the event.

  The race was a wild success, generating hundreds of articles across the world, including long write-ups in American papers such as the The Washington Post. After the race, wherever we went, we were treated like rock stars, receiving VIP treatment. The government was fully behind the race, and everywhere we stayed during those weeks, we kicked back in the finest hotel suites. Arriving on Hayman Island for a vacation, we were picked up in a launch boat and toasted with champagne; wherever we showed up, we were greeted with fruit baskets and gifts.

  O
ne night after we’d rejoined Mark, he was behind the wheel roaring down a country road, when a wild boar suddenly jumped out. It was the size of a cow but with tusks. There was no time to avoid it; our vehicle ran over the creature, which made a sickening squish. It was awful. From then on, every time we saw wild boar on a restaurant menu, our stomachs turned, reliving that disgusting moment. Mark kept renaming entrees “Roasted Roadkill with Rosemary” or “Spaghetti with Roadkill Sauce.”

  Our final trip was a family vacation to Cooktown and Cape Tribulation in Daintree National Park. We walked around in awe, hiking through the world’s oldest rain forest, where dinosaurs once stomped. Dating back 120 million years, it was 90 million years older than the Amazon in South America. While the rain forest was wondrous to behold, it wasn’t hard to imagine why Captain Cook, whose expedition ship had dropped anchor there, had given the region its bleak name: “Tribulation.” Despite its natural beauty, it was a truly wild, inhospitable environment for humans, a place that demands that we give due respect to Mother Nature. Here, in the race for survival against modern development, nature was winning.

  Chapter Nine

  KINGMAKER

  Every man who is high up loves to think that he has done it all himself; and the wife smiles, and lets it go at that.

  — James Matthew Barrie

  WHEN WE RETURNED TO California from Australia, Mark was restless. By then, 1998, Eco-Challenge was running like a well-oiled machine. We had an experienced crew, sponsors renewed contracts, and new ones signed on every year. Mark needed a new mountain to climb—a fresh project to lift off. For months, he’d been looking for that next sign. Our friend Yolanda, who lived across the street from our Topanga Canyon home, provided just that.

  Yolanda’s friend from England had telephoned, mentioning Charlie Parsons, an English television producer who had launched a television show in Sweden called Expedition Robinson. Yolanda’s friend had recently attended a party at Charlie’s place—and the producer mentioned that he was a fan of Eco-Challenge and wanted to meet Mark. The timing of her call was fortuitous: we were in the midst of packing up our belongings in Topanga Canyon and moving to Malibu.

  As the success of Eco-Challenge had grown, and as we entertained more and more friends, family, crew, and co-workers at home, it had become obvious that we were outgrowing the Topanga Canyon house. We’d moved in six years before, when I was pregnant with James. Now we had two kids, many out-of-town guests, and a new image as successful entrepreneurs. The remoteness I’d once found charming now made me cut off from the rest of the world.

  One week when Mark was away, torrential rains caused flash floods; the creek that ran in front of our house overflowed. I looked out from my second-floor balcony to see a river rushing down the street washing away street signs, trash cans and everything else in its way. I glanced over to my neighbor Yolanda, also upstairs on her balcony, holding her baby.

  “Get out the kayaks!” she yelled over.

  “Looks like Venice!” I yelled back. “All we need are the singing boatmen.”

  We laughed, but between the nonstop natural disasters and Mark traveling so much, I felt unsafe here in the canyon with two small children. I wanted to move back to civilization. In fact, I wanted to move up in civilization—to Malibu.

  “Di, you’re joking,” Mark responded when I first broached the idea. “We’re doing quite a lot better financially, but the last time I checked our last name isn’t Spielberg.”

  “If we live rich, honey, we’ll get richer,” I said. Living in Malibu, I pointed out, would open up doors to meeting more “people in the industry.” In Topanga, we lived on a dead end street next to a preschool.

  Mark wasn’t convinced. A Malibu home wasn’t cheap; he didn’t think it was necessary.

  The next night, I whipped up lobster diavolo for dinner. I’d been working on my sales pitch all day. After dinner, and another glass of Cabernet, I presented him with a list of pros and cons of moving to Malibu. The list of cons was very short. Yes, the prices were steep. However, there were many pros. For example, James was getting carsick every time we drove up the winding road through Topanga Canyon, so moving to Malibu would mean a lot less time cleaning up vomit. And while nearer to civilization, Malibu was also near to nature—in front of the ocean, and surrounded by verdant hills. Most important, it was a good neighborhood to meet people in the entertainment industry.

  A few dinners later, my persuasiveness prevailed, and he put me in charge of finding a Malibu house—if I could find one in our price range. It took months, but I did—a lovely, three-story ocean-view home with lots of land in the back that would be perfect for a pool.

  It was very sad packing up the Topanga house, our first house, where we’d created so many memories: Mark’s mom planting rosebushes in the garden … Cameron’s and James’s first birthday parties … hellaciously fun soirees and barbeques with family and friends, and more. My emotional attachment to the place is probably why it took me years to sell that house.

  I’d hardly finished unpacking the boxes in our new Malibu home, when Mark walked into the kitchen that one evening in May while I was making eggplant parmesan, announcing that Morocco was a go. James’s encounter with the hissing camel notwithstanding, those three months we spent living in our palace in Marrakesh—with our visits to the souk, our dinners under the stars, and the thrill of seeing Eco-Challenge hit heights we’d never dreamed possible—marked the high point of my relationship with Mark. By then, it seemed as if nothing could stop us once we had an idea in our heads. We felt golden. And our marriage seemed invincible.

  On the way back from Morocco, we stopped in England and met up with Charlie Parsons. An animated intellectual with a firecracker wit, Charlie invited us to his country home, where he showed us videos of his adventure show. Over dinner, we discussed licensing the concept of Expedition Robinson and developing a new “adventure reality show.”

  As we discussed the program, Mark got that same look in his eyes that he’d had seven years before after reading the article about the Raid. The whole flight back we batted around how to make a modern-day Lord of the Flies take off as a popular show in the States. From then on, we lived, breathed, and dreamed about this new TV program that was then only on the blackboard of our minds; we went to bed talking about it, and then we woke up and talked about it some more.

  The program we envisioned took the concept of Expedition Robinson to new extremes. Contestants would be marooned on a remote, unknown island in an exotic locale, competing for food and shelter—and a prize of $1 million.

  Ideas were further refined: the contestants would be divided into two “tribes,” who would face daunting challenges and competitions over the course of 39 days—winning rewards such as matches or sandwiches, or “immunity,” which could temporarily protect them from being eliminated from the show. Each episode would close with a gathering called the “Tribal Council,” during which the losing team had to vote one of their members off the island—and their torch would be dramatically snuffed out.

  Expedition Robinson had fared well in Sweden, but for the U.S., it needed a catchier title.

  For weeks we jotted down lists of possible titles: Marooned … Stranded … Tribal Wars … Island Fever. None of them sounded quite right.

  One evening after I put the kids to bed, Mark and I were in the family room brainstorming over wine. “It’s got to be short and simple,” I said, looking at that day’s list of rejected titles. Then, I got it. “Survivor!”

  Mark’s eyes lit up. “I like it! But what about Survivors, since there are multiple contestants?”

  I stood my ground. “If there is only one person left at the end, it’s got to be singular: Survivor.”

  “You’re right, Di!” Mark smiled his little-kid grin and tipped his wineglass to mine. “Here’s to Survivor!”

  From there, we began working on the pitch. “Put more passion into it, Mark,” I’d say when he ran through a practice presentation. “Talk slowe
r. Enunciate. And lighten up, honey. It will be harder to reject it if they like you.”

  Mark tested pitches at our dinner parties, subtly working his new idea into casual conversations.

  “So what are you working on, Mark?” someone would innocently ask.

  “Well, I have an idea for a show about real-life castaways …” and he’d be off and running. Afterward, we reviewed reactions from the guests—what got them excited, what made them nod off. Finally, when Mark could recite it sideways and backward in his sleep, the pitch was perfected. We thought.

  First, Mark presented the idea for Survivor to Discovery Channel—and was shocked to have it immediately shot down. Then he hit up NBC; once again it was nixed. We went through the presentation. I worried that he was coming off too brusque, so we tried to lighten it up before he pitched ABC. Another no.

  CBS gave it a thumbs-down as well. Even Fox wouldn’t go for it. UPN at least liked the concept, but they didn’t have the budget to get it to fly. The concept was too radical and costly for studios to take a risk. Network executives laughed and rolled their eyes.

  “We need to visualize it more clearly,” I suggested. “Imagine seeing Survivor advertised on billboards and displayed on magazine covers. Imagine seeing it as an advertising banner being pulled by a plane.” I tried to stay optimistic and keep Mark’s spirits uplifted as well. But it appeared we’d hit the wall: there was no major network left to pitch to. “Something good will happen,” I said over and over. “Somebody will buy Survivor.”

  A few weeks later, Mark burst into the house, beaming. Ghen Maynard in the CBS drama division had invited Mark in for a second pitch. We entertained Ghen at our home on Deerhead; I cooked a four-course dinner, whipping up my Italian specialties. I constantly reminded Mark of the importance of building relationships.