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By SHARON FINK, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published September 20, 2002

AAAAAAHHHHH: We won't have to wait long for a celebrity version of Survivor after all.

ABC is so desperate to climb out of the ratings basement, it has snapped up the rights to the concept, called I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! by the British network that started it by dumping eight Z-list celebs in the Australian Outback for two weeks last month.

ABC has ordered 15 episodes. But instead of feeding our appetite for someone else's self-debasement over almost four months, it will show the series over 15 consecutive days, most likely in February, a key ratings month, the Hollywood Reporter says.

As in the British version, viewers will be the ones voting out the celebs and determining the winner. That means the series will play out while the celebs are wherever they are sent (most likely the Outback).

Casting ideas are being tossed around, ABC Entertainment exec Andrea Wong says. (Why doesn't ABC just go for broke and include that guy from The Bachelor and the woman he picked but now doesn't want to have anything to do with?)

ABC has every reason to think the show could be one of its saviors this season. Final ratings for the British version showed that the finale was watched by almost 12-million people (in a nation of about 60-million). And in this country, the summer's big ratings winner was the viewer-vote-driven American Idol.

* * *

NAME DROPPING: This is turning into Resolve All My Life Crises Year for Angelina Jolie.

She adopted a Cambodian infant. Tattoo notwithstanding, she divorced "Billy Bob Forever" Thornton (some reports say the last straw was him having sex with a therapist she made him go to for what she thought was a sex addiction). And now, after years of feuding with her father, actor Jon Voight, she has legally dropped Voight as her last name.

Father and daughter have had a rocky relationship since Voight left his then-wife and Jolie's mother, Marcheline Bertrand, when Jolie, now 27, was a child. They reconciled long enough to make Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2000, but in August of this year, Voight used TV's Access Hollywood to plead for another reconciliation and for Jolie to get help for her "serious emotional problems." Jolie responded that it was not healthy for her to be around her father.

A Los Angeles County judge granted Jolie's name-change petition, filed July 3, on Sept. 12, the Associated Press reported.

Neither Jolie nor Voight is commenting.

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