‘SURVIVOR’ JENNA TO BARE IT ALL
Jenna Morasca, the swimsuit model who won $1 million last month on “Survivor: Amazon,” won’t need the swimsuit in her next photo spread.
Jenna, 21, is taking it all off for the August issue of Playboy – to show viewers what they couldn’t see last season when she and fellow contestant Heidi Strobel went topless for one of the challanges.
Heidi, 24, a phys-ed teacher from Missouri, will also appear in the Playboy feature.
It was something of a first when CBS showed the two women shirtless – albeit with their breasts obscured by video scrambling – on network TV.
“To my mind that was a classic moment of primetime television,” Playboy editorial director James Kaminsky told The Post.
Playboy claims it is another first to get the big-money winner of a reality show – not a runner-up- to pose.
Jenna could earn another $1 million or more – depending on sales of the magazine – with the Playboy cover feature.
The photo session took place in a Brooklyn studio last month, the morning after Jenna was crowned the winner on a live telecast on May 11.
“Jenna actually went from her appearance on the Letterman show directly to our studio,” Kaminsky said.
The sexy pictorial got the green light from “Survivor” executive producer Mark Burnett and CBS – both could have blocked the girls from posing nude. Under the contract “Survivor” contestants must sign, CBS has final say when and where participants may appear and who they may give interviews to for up to a year after the show airs.
Last month, CBS blocked Jenna from posing in an anti-fur ad for the animal rights group, PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The network has since reversed that decision.
“CBS was not the group that engineered this – but they had no problem with it,” Kaminsky said.
“The girls signed off on it. I suppose CBS could have stopped it but they did not,” he said. “And as soon as Mark Burnett found out that we were making these overtures to the girls, he thought that this was a great thing and supported it.”
This latest version of “Survivor,” the fifth since the series debuted two years ago, began as a battle of sexes.
The traditional two teams were divided by gender – which gave the show a new feel and allowed contestants to be less reserved since there was no one of the opposite sex around to object or be offended.
There may have been one hitch, say insiders.
Shortly after the shoot, one or both of the girls were said to have had second thoughts about posing nude and tried to pull out of the deal, a source told The Post.
But Kaminsky said to his knowledge everything went easily.
“As far as I know there was no problem.,” he said. “Everything went as smooth as you hope these shoots go.”
This will also be the fastest Playboy has ever turned around a photo project. The magazine’s editors typically spend months working the photo shoots into each issue.
The “Survivor” project will go from photo session to print in the less than 90 days.
“It’s about as fast as we’re capable of doing it,” Kaminsky said. “I’d love to think that we can use this as a model for the future because we often spend an awful lot of time on the photo shoots, it’s just sort of the process.”
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