#when they find ford he’s like a CHILD ARMY??? STANLEY!

[enidtendo64]

I’ve been sick and playing red dead redemption

[nataliedanovelist]

GF - Beauty Within the Fallen ch.V

Summary: Two misfit twins come across an enchanted castle, home of a mysterious beast, and slowly begin to form a strong bond that just might survive through anything. Even evil demons.

AU and artwork belong to the beautiful and very talented @artsycrapfromsai​. Go give her some love, guys!!!

ch.IV - ch.VI

~~~~~~~~~~

When the children arrived back with the master of the castle and a pig, Soos was a horrid mess and Wendy took charge. The servants of the castle helped to bring the old beast up to the West Wing and back into his bedroom. The journal watched, uncovered by glass, and listened to the children working together to take care of Stan. Mabel was soft, Dipper was strong, and they were both kind. Once Mabel made sure Stan was comfortable in his bed, Dipper accepted the large supply of bandages and washcloths with hot water and began to work on his injuries. It turned out that Stan had several bad scratches and bites on his back as well as his arm; one bite on his right shoulder was particularly nasty and probably hurt a lot.

All while the boy cleaned the wounds, the beast growled in his throat, almost like purring from an angry cat. He tried to mask his pain, but Mabel sat by his head and held his claw, telling him that if he wanted he could squeeze her hand when he was hurt. Stan gave her a funny look as Mabel petted the back of his paw, feeling the soft texture of his gray fur and smiling. “I can take care of myself.” He growled. “I’ve been doing it this long.” “We know.” Dipper said firmly, free to roll his eyes since Stan’s back was to him. “But we kinda owe you.” “You’re darn right you do.” Stan sneered. “I’ve got a long list of disgusting chores that’ll give my face a run for its money, and it’s got your names on it.” He sighed and added in a softer tone. “Guess it’s not all your fault, though.” Mabel shook her head. “It’s okay, Monsieur Stan, we shouldn’t have come into your room. We’re sorry.” Dipper nodded. “I’ll admit, I suck at knowing when to quit.” Stan snorted a laugh. “Wanna call it even?” “Deal.” Mabel accepted happily and squeezed his paw. As Dipper continued to work, Stan’s tired old body, comforted by the girl’s petting and the boy’s care, started to lose its strength again and he soon fell asleep. Mabel giggled, listening to his deep breathing, and turned to look at the journal. It was closed, so Monsieur Ford had no way to talk if he wanted to. Pitying him, Mabel got down from Stan’s bed and went to the journal. She opened it and sat it on the table, touching as little as she could. Dipper paused bandaging an injury and watched with a skeptical look. “There you go, Monsieur Ford.” Mabel said kindly. Words soon appeared on the page. Thank you, my dear. Thank you so very much for bringing my brother home. “You’re brother?!” Mabel gasped, but then covered her mouth with both hands, afraid of waking Stan, but he was too exhausted to be stirred right now. Yes. The master of this castle, my brother Stanley. “Monsieur Ford,” Dipper said, finished helping Stan, and he walked towards the journal and his sister. “You weren’t always a journal, and Stan wasn’t always a beast, right?” And he looked back at the portrait of the twin boys. That is correct. We were once human, like you, but we were cursed. “S'il vous plaît, Monsieur.” Mabel pleaded. “Will you tell us what happened?” Since you two seem to enjoy stories, I shall. You will have to help me along, reading. Ford’s tone seemed to be warm and inviting. Despite this, Mabel’s face turned red and she rubbed an arm nervously. “I don’t read very good.” “That’s not true, Mabel.” Dipper said quickly and side-hugged her. “Don’t worry, I’ll read out-loud.” I am sure a bright girl like yourself is a fine reader, Mabel. The journal wrote. </i>You remind me so much of Stanley; he too often thought little of his intelligence, but he is way smarter than others (and he) gave him credit for.</i> Mabel smiled, still red, and sat on her knees, looking up at the book. An armchair scurried up to the kids and spoke. “AH! Mi precioso, do not sit on the cold floor! Come, come! Have a seat, both of you, and relax.” Kids, this is Abuelita, as she prefers to be called by everyone. Soos’ grandmother. Ford explained as Mabel sat in the cozy chair. “Thanks!” She said to Abuelita. Dipper joined her with the journal in his hands. He laid the book on their laps and said, “We’re ready, Monsieur Ford.” Very well. Thirty years ago, shortly after our parents’ death, we became entangled in something we shouldn’t have. It was my fault. While Stanley was as strong as five men and more witty than any professor, I excelled academically and held a lot of promise. Father and so many others unfairly showed favor in me and I was ignorant to how it must have hurt my twin. I also felt out of place, alone. Notice the six-fingered hand on the cover; as a human I have six fingers on each hand. As a child I was bullied and made fun of, but Stanley was always there and told me it made me special. It became my mark as I began to investigate the strange mysteries of the woods and the wonders of the world. Intrigued, I soon met a golden triangle with one eye and formal attire. When the words slowly disappeared, they were replaced with a drawing. The kids looked to indeed find a triangle with a top hat and a bowtie and a cane, having only one eye and two stick arms and two stick legs. Bill Cipher. A dangerous demon of nightmares and a master of the mind. Ford went on. I was a fool, blinded by his flattery and games. I was falling down a very deep hole, but I was lucky to have Stanley there, like always, and he managed to con the ultimate conman. This angered Bill, and as revenge he cursed us. “How?” Dipper asked. “What exactly did he do to you?” He turned Stanley into a beast and me into a journal, and all of the servants turned as well, as we are now. I cannot walk or talk like the staff can, only communicate through writing, and I slowly lose my pages. With each page, I lose part of my memory and a part of myself. When the last page falls, I will be nothing more than an empty shell, and everyone will remain cursed forever. “This story's so sad!” Mabel exclaimed. “There’s gotta be a way to get a happy ending!” “Mabel’s right,” Dipper said. “Is there a way to undo the curse?” The journal was blank for a moment, but then these words seeped onto the page: After he cursed us, Bill only said that when Stanley loves someone and earns their love in return can the curse be undone. Mabel lit up. “Love? We can help! There’s tons of cute single ladies in our village who would love to go out with a nice, smart, strong guy like Stan!” “I dunno, Mabel,” Dipper said hesitantly. “Everyone in our town thinks we’re weirdos and make fun of us. How do you think they’ll react to Stan?” “But once they got to know him…” Your people think you are weird? The journal wrote. How come? Dipper crossed his arms over his chest. “They think we’re ‘odd’ because Mabel’s learning how to read, I don’t wanna join the army, and we like to invent things.” They make fun of you over that? I’m sorry. I think reading and inventing is no reason to be made fun of, nor is a lack in desire to fight. “Oh, I still wanna learn how to fight, I just don’t wanna be anyone’s tool.” Dipper then suddenly turned bright red. “No offense.” Ford, however, quivered ever so slightly and big capital letters spilled over the page. HAHAHAHAHA! No offense taken, my boy! Holy Moses, I haven’t… well, I wouldn’t call that laughing, but thank you for making me almost laugh for the first time in thirty years. “Thirty years.” Mabel repeated with a small moan. “Don’t you worry, Monsieur Ford, we’ll help Stan fall in love so everyone will be free.” It is not for you to worry about. “Yes it is!” Mabel insisted. “You’re our friends. We wanna help you.” “Yeah, man,” Dipper said, actually gradually siding with Mabel on this one. “Once Fiddleford finds this place we’ll go home and help find someone for Stan.” “He’s a great guy,” Mabel said. “And I’m the best matchmaker in the world! I bet together we can end this curse and kick Bill’s butt!” “Mabel,” Dipper hushed as she became overly passionate and was a bit too loud. Your enthusiasm is greatly appreciated and valued, kids, but do not fret over it. We have time. “How much time?” Dipper asked, eyeing how many pages Ford had. If I absolutely had to make a guess of how long we have left… ten years. “Oh.” Dipper said, freed from the sense of urgency. He yawned into his hand. “Still, we’ll do what we can for you guys.” The journal was blank again, like he was doing some thinking, but then he wrote, Thank you, again, but now is not the time to worry about all that. You two should get to bed. It’s late. Mabel shook her head. “Nuh, uh. What if Stan needs our help with his boo-boos? We’ll just have a sleepover right here, won’t we, Abuelita?” “Si, niña.” The armchair said and used her unusual arms to throw a blanket over the twins. Dipper took off his hat, finding Abuelita quite comfortable, and he wrapped an arm around his sister. After the scare he had earlier, he had to admit he liked the idea of sleeping by her side tonight. “Good idea, sis.” “I’m full of good ideas.” Mabel joked. “G’night, Monsieur Ford.” Goodnight, Dipper and Mabel. Sweet dreams. Mabel hugged Dipper around his waist, his arm still around her, and she smiled as she closed her eyes. She could hear his heartbeat. It was faster than it should be for sleep. Knowing just what to do, she began to quietly sing a lullaby. “Days in the sun, though your life has barely begun, not until my own life is done will I ever leave you.” Dipper chuckled, remembering the song Fiddleford and Shermie used to sing, and he muttered sleepily, “Oh, I’ll tremble again to my dear one's gorgeous refrain. You will not forever remain out of reach of my arms.” His eyes, which had been open, found Ford’s open pages spilling a poem missing it’s tune. All those days in the sun, What I'd give to give you them all, All to my love, And sing out my call. “You know that song?” Dipper asked and Mabel opened her eyes to find it on Ford’s pages. Our mother used to sing it to us when we were children, every night. Please, continue and ignore me. “You should sleep, too, Monsieur Ford.” Mabel said sleepily. She took the journal in her arms, hugged the closed book, and held him as she leaned on her brother. Ford didn’t get a chance to explain that he did not sleep, but as he could ghostly feel the girl’s warmth, he was beyond happy to be in her embrace for the night. Dipper smiled, gave Mabel a squeeze, and closed his eyes for sleep as he uttered under his breath. “Days in the sun will return, we must believe. As lovers do, that days in the sun will come shining through.” ~~~~~~~~~~ Despite the wolves, despite the darkness, despite the freezing cold and the falling snow, Fiddleford trudged on. He held his casted, broken arm close to his chest for warmth, crushing a few inches of snow with his boots. The snow was coming down hard, blinding him and making it feel like a hundred tiny knives were cutting his face, but he forced himself to keep going. The idea of his children somewhere in this snow terrified him. “Dipper!” He called out. “Mabel!” Fiddleford brought his scarf up to his nose so his breath would warm the bottom-half of his face. The familiar scents of family and love came to his schnoz. Mabel had knitted him this green scarf. In fact, she knitted him his sweater and gloves, too, but this scarf, tangled and elementary, had been Mabel’s first scarf and once Shermie’s, but when he died and left it back to Mabel, she insisted that Fiddleford have it. Every time Fiddleford went to Paris to sell the clocks and music boxes in the past, he always asked the twins what they wanted, as a way to help handle his absence better. Every time, Dipper asked for a book everyone would want to hear him read and Mabel hesitantly asked for yarn. Yarn was usually very expensive, and she knew that, but she had a raw talent for knitting and sewing. No one had taught her how to knit or sew, but the minute the materials were in her hands, as young as four, she knew what to do. She was amazing like that. Better yet, with her gift of yarn, if lucky enough to have some, she always made clothes for others before herself, knitting Dipper, Fiddleford, and Shermie sweaters and gloves and scarfs and hats to keep them warm during long winters. The first time she surprised Fiddleford with a blue sweater, she smiled at him and said, “Now you can have me wherever you go.” Fiddleford wiped his eyes dry; he couldn’t afford to cry, his tears would freeze on his face. Mabel needed him, Dipper needed him, so he continued to call out their names as the rest of the village searched behind him, much slower than the old man. ~~~~~~~~~~ Stan woke up to the sound of giggling. He opened his eyes, facing the window and Ford’s table, and he found Mabel standing there with a quill in her hand and playing tic-tac-toe with Ford. She was Xs and Ford was Os. Most of the time Mabel won, but occasionally (whether to keep her humble or because Brainiac couldn’t help himself) Ford would win, but Mabel seemed just as delighted by Ford’s wins as her own. “Yay! Good job, Monsieur Ford! Okay, you go first.” Stan smiled and slowly sat up. Dipper was by his side and smiled. “Morning, Stan. How are you feeling?” “M’fine, kid.” Stan said, popping his old back and stretching his arms. He ruffled his fur loose and gave the boy an impressed smile. “Good job fixin’ me up, I feel good as new.” “Thanks.” Dipper said. “Monsieur Stan!” Mabel called, turning away from her game with Ford for a moment. “Did you see?! IT SNOWED! We should all play outside!” “C’mon, Mabel,” Dipper said easily. “Stan’s just a hurt old man, he should take it easy.” And he gave the beast a smirk. “Old man?!” Stan barked and stood tall and strong. “That’s it, you just earned yourself a huge snowball to the face!” “And don’t worry, Monsieur Ford,” Mabel said, setting her quill down and scooting the table with Ford on it closer to the window. “This way you can watch us. If you want to.” Thank you, Mabel. The words read. Waddles oinked happily and showed his belly to Stan, lying on the floor. He glared at the animal. “And what is that?” “That’s my pet pig, Waddles!” Mabel joyfully introduced. “He found us in the woods last night.” “No,” Stan said firmly and shook his head. “No pigs allowed in this castle. They’re nothing but fat, naked jerks.” “Aw, come on,” The girl cooed and hugged her pig with big brown eyes. “Just for a few days?” Stan winced. Sacrebleu, that girl was just very manipulated. He ignored the painful reminder that the kids were only here for a little while and growled, “Fine, just make sure he doesn’t eat any of Sixer’s pages or I’m eating him for lunch.” “Don’t worry, we keep books around him all the time.” Dipper said as he petted the pig’s head. “He knows not to bother them.” Dipper and Mabel dragged Stan out by his paws and for the outdoors. Waddles climbed up on Abuelita the armchair and curled up for a nap. The kids admired the beautiful garden covered in the late autumn snow. A soft blanket coated the whole world, fluffy but not delicate. Everyone was warmly dressed and ready to play. The twins took in deep breaths and then slowly counted to three. On three, they simultaneously jumped off the short balcony and landed on their faces. Stan watched, confused, but then they both rolled on their fronts and laughed, their breath visible, and they began to make snowangels on the ground. “Come on, Stan!” Mabel called. “Yeah, c’mon, man!” Dipper shouted happily. Stan smiled mischievously, took a step back, and then launched himself into the air. He landed with his beefy arms over each kid and his head in the middle, and when he turned on his back with the kids in his hold, all three were laughing like mad. Mabel swiftly made a snowball and threw it at Dipper’s face. He scrambled up after his running sister and threw one at her. Stan sat in the snow, watching the kids play, throwing snowballs at each other and running around the yard. His tail wagged against the sparkling snow. Dipper threw one and Mabel ran around Stan, resorting to the ball hitting him right in the face. Stan shook the snow out of his eyes as Mabel laughed and Dipper paled, but wearing a kind smirk on his face, Stan gathered a snowball in his paw and threw it at Dipper, who was hit in the chest and ran. Stan scurried to his feet and ran around with the kids, throwing slightly bigger snowballs that the kids enjoyed. Stan soon made a huge snowball with his strong arms, the ball almost as big as one child, but when Mabel threw one at Stan’s face he accidentally dropped the huge ball that was held over his head and he was covered in snow. Dipper and Mabel laughed so hard they had no choice but to stop running, leaning on each other for support. Stan found their laugh more contagious than the plague and roared with joy as he shook off the snow like a dog on all fours. Mabel ran into his arms and Dipper soon followed, hugging him to warm him up and apologize without words for winning the war. Stan was surprised by their desire to hug him, but he hugged them back gently and rubbed their backs, finding their clothes soaked. “Alright, gremlins, let’s get you dry and warm.” Stan said and picked them up to go back into the castle. “We can play again later.” “Okay,” Mabel cooed as she snuggled against Stan’s chest, holding onto his gray fur. “Hm, you’re so warm.” Stan’s own face suddenly felt a little warmer. “Yeah, well, there’s some benefits to being a big ugly monster, I guess.” That didn’t sit right with the twins. From each of his arms, they exchanged looks, but an idea came to Dipper that distracted him from Stan’s comment. “Hey, can we read with Ford while we dry off? He says he’s got lots of great stories to tell.” Stan smiled down at him. “You like him, don’t you?” “Yeah, he’s pretty cool.” Dipper said, glancing away. “I thought you would. You’re both nerds.” Stan teased. Dipper shrugged in a whatcha-gonna-do-about-it style. Mabel hopped down and said, “I’ll go get him so we can read together!” And she ran up the stairs. Dipper got down from Stan’s hold, too, and was about to go to the living room, but Stan spoke and stopped him in his tracks. “Kid, wait. You really like books, right?” Dipper turned and responded with a dip of his head. “Yeah, I do. I was pretty much the only one that read the library in town, and by library I mean one bookshelf.” Stan waved a paw towards himself. “Follow me. I got something for you.” Dipper casually followed Stan down a hallway and they stopped at the double doors. The beast turned to the boy and gave him a cunning smile. “Ah, ah. Close your eyes.” Dipper crossed his arms over his chest and sneered at him with a smile. “Is this a prank?” “No, just do it.” Stan chuckled. “It’s a surprise.” Dipper gave in and closed his eyes. After testing that he truly was blind by waving a paw in front of his face, Stan opened the doors and put a hand on his back to help him walk. “Okay, okay, here we go… okay, stop.” “Can I see?” “Hold it, squirt, gimme a sec.” Stan hurried to pull back curtains and brighten the room. Candles magically came to life. “Okay, okay… open ‘em up!” Dipper opened his eyes, blinked to adjust to the newfound light, and then his jaw dropped. Towering over him, a room arguably bigger than the ballroom held thousands if not hundreds of thousands of books. Rich mahogany desks sat filled with parchment and quills and ink, globes and atlas took up some desk space, but Dipper couldn’t tear his eyes away from all of the books. Stairways and ladders could reach the books up at the very top and giant windows seeped in beautiful sunlight to ease the eyes. “Shut. Up.” Dipper said hoarsely. “I’ve never seen so many books! Look at this place!” He went to a bookshelf and gently ran a hand over the dozens of spines exposed to him. “You like it?” Stan asked, leaning by the door with his arms crossed over his chest. “I love it!” “Then it’s all yours.” Dipper’s jaw was nearly on the floor when he turned to look at the master of the castle. “You really mean it?” “Sure do, Smart Guy.” Stan smiled at him. “Go nuts.” Dipper, trembling, ran to a shelf and began to pick books to read. Mabel came in, carrying Ford carefully like he was a baby, and she gasped joyfully. “Wowie, zowie! A whole library!” She gave Ford to Stan to hold and joined her brother, helping him by holding his stack of books. Stan smiled and opened Ford to talk to him. Immediately words appeared before him. That was ingenious, Stanley. Dipper will surely make good use out of the library. “Thanks, Sixer.” Stan watched the kids from across the vast room, his smile dropping. As a twin, he knew that it was rare to have something done only for you and not you and your twin. He wanted to do something special for each of them, but each of them separately. The library was Dipper’s, though Mabel was free to use it since she obviously liked stories (Stan noticed that Dipper liked “books” and Mabel liked “stories”), but she needed something of her own. “I wanna do something for Mabel.” He whispered. “But I know nothing about what girls like. Make-up? Dolls?” My knowledge on girls is also very limited. Ford admitted. But I do know that you should consider something that sparks her interests and not something exclusively femanine. You didn’t give Dipper a gun or a sword. Stan shrugged. “Okay, good point. So, what? What does Mabel like?” Well, I can recall her saying this morning that she loves sweaters. When I asked her about it, she said she loves to knit but could rarely afford the yarn. “That’s it!” Stan closed Ford gently and held him against his chest one-armed. “Mabel, sweetie, can you come with me? I got something for you, too.” Mabel shoved the twenty-plus books in her brother’s arms and ran up to Stan. He smiled at her huge grin and walked with her down the hall. He led her to a single door. Mabel instantly took off her pink headband and tied it over her eyes so she wouldn’t be tempted to peek. “I wanna be surprised!” She squealed. Stan chuckled. “Give me your hand, kid.” Mabel did and Stan led her into the room. He opened a curtain and let go of the girl’s little hand. “Alright, you can look now.” Mabel pulled her blindfold down onto her neck and she gasped so big her lungs filled quickly. It was like a grand supply closet. There was a wall full of rolls of different patterns of fabric and silk, figurines to make clothes on, drawers full of supplies, desks full of paints and canvases and brushes, and an odd shelf of some kind, squares that held bundles of yarn, all in rainbow order. What was better yet, this room may have been only twenty feet wide, but it was forty feet tall, like a tower, and a rolling ladder helped to reach the higher fabrics and yarns. A window as tall as the room let in bright sunlight to make crafting easy. “OH MY GOSH!” Mabel cried out and looked around the room. “It’s like arts-n’-crafts heaven!” “It was Ma’s room.” Stan shared as he chuckled over Mabel’s joy. “She used to come down here and spend hours painting and drawing and making clothes. Pa used to get on her case about it. Said she didn't give the seamstresses enough to do.” “Your dad sounds like a stupid jerk.” Mabel added quickly before resuming her cheerful attitude. “This is wonderful! I love it! LOOK at all the COLORS!” “If you like it so much, then it’s yours.” Stan said. Mabel turned and Stan was clutched to find her crying. Well, not really crying, but there were tears in her eyes and one escaped each eye, rolling down her cheeks. “THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU!” Mabel cheered and ran to him. One arm busy holding Ford, Stan fell on his butt by the impact of the girl and she hugged him around his big neck, nuzzling her face into his fur. He stared ahead in astonishment and wrapped an arm around her, petting her soft brown hair and admiring her warmth. Too soon she skipped away and climbed up the ladder for some red yarn. “I’m gonna make you a sweater first! Then I’ll make Ford one, a little book-holder to keep him warm.” “I don’t think he really gets cold anymore.” Stan said as he stood again. “Well then, I’ll go ahead and make him a sweater to wear when he’s human again.” Mabel reasoned. Stan was distracted by that statement. When he was human again. When they were human again. He had lost all hope for so long of someone ever loving him that it seemed foolish to think of the curse ever being broken, but Mabel and Dipper seemed to like him, and Ford probably loved him (for some odd reason) so maybe it was possible for him to find a beautiful mademoiselle to love and have her love him back. Stan shook his train of thought away as Dipper now joined them, six books stacked in his arms and making his limbs quiver, but he didn’t seem to care. “Mabel, what’s… whoa-oh!” Dipper awed at the room. “No way! Cool art supplies.” “Thanks!” Mabel said and climbed down with red and orange yarn in her arms and she opened a drawer full of different size knitting needles and pulled out a pair she liked. “Wanna read to us by the fire?” “Sure.” In the lounge, Stan sat in front of the huge fireplace, making plenty of room for Ford to be safe. Dipper and Mabel sat in his lap, the boy at his left and the girl at his right, and Dipper opened Ford and the journal began to tell a story. Dipper read the words out-loud, occasionally having Mabel give reading a try, only needing assistance a handful of times for bigger words, but Ford seemed to purposely use smaller words when it was her turn to read. Stan, without realizing it, was purring. The children noticed, but said nothing. Mabel nuzzled closer to him, grateful for his large body and fluffy gray fur. She thought he was wonderful in every aspect and Dipper full-heartedly agreed. The biggest mystery of them all was how Dipper didn’t see this all before.

~~~~~~~~~~

Author’s Note: This… this is where, in my humble opinion, the story actually becomes worth reading. I feel like the patience we, the audience, must have with the BatB story - seeing the Beast as he is before his change of heart, seeing Belle run away and all the obstacles before them both - make the bonding scenes even better. Gives a FINALLY sort of feeling. I wanted to carry that over here, making the beginning a little slow (though I probably lost some readers that way), but making it even more rewarding for those who read on. Or maybe I’m just making an excuse for a suck-ish beginning. Who knows. Okay, so Waddles NOT being a footstool is so that it ties in more to the canon GF storyline. I didn’t want Waddles to be some pet Stan didn’t like and only tolerated for someone else’s sake or a farm-animal that was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Rather, I had him always be Mabel’s and I also left him at home in the beginning to better parallel the show’s canon (even though Waddles is in the intro, he isn’t introduced until S1E9). I also, mainly, just really wanted Stan to only allow Waddles in the castle to make Mabel happy, cuz Imma sap that’s why. Moving on, I put both Days in the Sun and a hint of Something There at the end. When writing the snow scene, I listened to Wolf Children’s Snow soundtrack; I personally thought it fit so well. Not much else to say except Mabel’s craft-room is my idea and I love love LOVE the library scene (both in this fic and in the animated BatB movie; the live-action movie RUINED the scene!) Thank you so much for reading, and I hope y’all enjoy it!

[yobaba30]

trump’s reality TV gig

Expedition: Robinson,” a Swedish reality-television program, premièred in the summer of 1997, with a tantalizing premise: sixteen strangers are deposited on a small island off the coast of Malaysia and forced to fend for themselves. To survive, they must coöperate, but they are also competing: each week, a member of the ensemble is voted off the island, and the final contestant wins a grand prize. The show’s title alluded to both “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Swiss Family Robinson,” but a more apt literary reference might have been “Lord of the Flies.” The first contestant who was kicked off was a young man named Sinisa Savija. Upon returning to Sweden, he was morose, complaining to his wife that the show’s editors would “cut away the good things I did and make me look like a fool.” Nine weeks before the show aired, he stepped in front of a speeding train.

The producers dealt with this tragedy by suggesting that Savija’s turmoil was unrelated to the series—and by editing him virtually out of the show. Even so, there was a backlash, with one critic asserting that a program based on such merciless competition was “fascist television.” But everyone watched the show anyway, and Savija was soon forgotten. “We had never seen anything like it,” Svante Stockselius, the chief of the network that produced the program, told the Los Angeles Times, in 2000. “Expedition: Robinson” offered a potent cocktail of repulsion and attraction. You felt embarrassed watching it, Stockselius said, but “you couldn’t stop.”

In 1998, a thirty-eight-year-old former British paratrooper named Mark Burnett was living in Los Angeles, producing television. “Lord of the Flies” was one of his favorite books, and after he heard about “Expedition: Robinson” he secured the rights to make an American version. Burnett had previously worked in sales and had a knack for branding. He renamed the show “Survivor.”

The first season was set in Borneo, and from the moment it aired, on CBS, in 2000, “Survivor” was a ratings juggernaut: according to the network, a hundred and twenty-five million Americans—more than a third of the population—tuned in for some portion of the season finale. The catchphrase delivered by the host, Jeff Probst, at the end of each elimination ceremony, “The tribe has spoken,” entered the lexicon. Burnett had been a marginal figure in Hollywood, but after this triumph he, too, was rebranded, as an oracle of spectacle. Les Moonves, then the chairman of CBS, arranged for the delivery of a token of thanks—a champagne-colored Mercedes. To Burnett, the meaning of this gesture was unmistakable: “I had arrived.” The only question was what he might do next.

A few years later, Burnett was in Brazil, filming “Survivor: The Amazon.” His second marriage was falling apart, and he was staying in a corporate apartment with a girlfriend. One day, they were watching TV and happened across a BBC documentary series called “Trouble at the Top,” about the corporate rat race. The girlfriend found the show boring and suggested changing the station, but Burnett was transfixed. He called his business partner in L.A. and said, “I’ve got a new idea.” Burnett would not discuss the concept over the phone—one of his rules for success was to always pitch in person—but he was certain that the premise had the contours of a hit: “Survivor” in the city. Contestants competing for a corporate job. The urban jungle!

He needed someone to play the role of heavyweight tycoon. Burnett, who tends to narrate stories from his own life in the bravura language of a Hollywood pitch, once said of the show, “It’s got to have a hook to it, right? They’ve got to be working for someone big and special and important. Cut to: I’ve rented this skating rink.”

In 2002, Burnett rented Wollman Rink, in Central Park, for a live broadcast of the Season 4 finale of “Survivor.” The property was controlled by Donald Trump, who had obtained the lease to operate the rink in 1986, and had plastered his name on it. Before the segment started, Burnett addressed fifteen hundred spectators who had been corralled for the occasion, and noticed Trump sitting with Melania Knauss, then his girlfriend, in the front row. Burnett prides himself on his ability to “read the room”: to size up the personalities in his audience, suss out what they want, and then give it to them.

“I need to show respect to Mr. Trump,” Burnett recounted, in a 2013 speech in Vancouver. “I said, ‘Welcome, everybody, to Trump Wollman skating rink. The Trump Wollman skating rink is a fine facility, built by Mr. Donald Trump. Thank you, Mr. Trump. Because the Trump Wollman skating rink is the place we are tonight and we love being at the Trump Wollman skating rink, Mr. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.” As Burnett told the story, he had scarcely got offstage before Trump was shaking his hand, proclaiming, “You’re a genius!”

Cut to: June, 2015. After starring in fourteen seasons of “The Apprentice,” all executive-produced by Burnett, Trump appeared in the gilded atrium of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, to announce that he was running for President. Only someone “really rich,” Trump declared, could “take the brand of the United States and make it great again.” He also made racist remarks about Mexicans, prompting NBC, which had broadcast “The Apprentice,” to fire him. Burnett, however, did not sever his relationship with his star. He and Trump had been equal partners in “The Apprentice,” and the show had made each of them hundreds of millions of dollars. They were also close friends: Burnett liked to tell people that when Trump married Knauss, in 2005, Burnett’s son Cameron was the ring bearer. 

Trump had been a celebrity since the eighties, his persona shaped by the best-selling book “The Art of the Deal.” But his business had foundered, and by 2003 he had become a garish figure of local interest—a punch line on Page Six. “The Apprentice” mythologized him anew, and on a much bigger scale, turning him into an icon of American success. Jay Bienstock, a longtime collaborator of Burnett’s, and the showrunner on “The Apprentice,” told me, “Mark always likes to compare his shows to great films or novels. All of Mark’s shows feel bigger than life, and this is by design.” Burnett has made many programs since “The Apprentice,” among them “Shark Tank,” a startup competition based on a Japanese show, and “The Voice,” a singing contest adapted from a Dutch program. In June, he became the chairman of M-G-M Television. But his chief legacy is to have cast a serially bankrupt carnival barker in the role of a man who might plausibly become the leader of the free world. “I don’t think any of us could have known what this would become,” Katherine Walker, a producer on the first five seasons of “The Apprentice,” told me. “But Donald would not be President had it not been for that show.”

Tony Schwartz, who wrote “The Art of the Deal,” which falsely presented Trump as its primary author, told me that he feels some responsibility for facilitating Trump’s imposture. But, he said, “Mark Burnett’s influence was vastly greater,” adding, “ ‘The Apprentice’ was the single biggest factor in putting Trump in the national spotlight.” Schwartz has publicly condemned Trump, describing him as “the monster I helped to create.” Burnett, by contrast, has refused to speak publicly about his relationship with the President or about his curious, but decisive, role in American history.

Burnett is lean and lanky, with the ageless, perpetually smiling face of Peter Pan and eyes that, in the words of one ex-wife, have “a Photoshop twinkle.” He has a high forehead and the fixed, gravity-defying hair of a nineteen-fifties film star. People often mistake Burnett for an Australian, because he has a deep tan and an outdoorsy disposition, and because his accent has been mongrelized by years of international travel. But he grew up in Dagenham, on the eastern outskirts of London, a milieu that he has recalled as “gray and grimy.” His father, Archie, was a tattooed Glaswegian who worked the night shift at a Ford automobile plant. His mother, Jean, worked there as well, pouring acid into batteries, but in Mark’s recollection she always dressed immaculately, “never letting her station in life interfere with how she presented herself.” Mark, an only child, grew up watching American television shows such as “Starsky & Hutch” and “The Rockford Files.”

At seventeen, he volunteered for the British Army’s Parachute Regiment; according to a friend who enlisted with him, he joined for “the glitz.” The Paras were an élite unit, and a soldier from his platoon, Paul Read, told me that Burnett was a particularly formidable special operator, both physically commanding and a natural leader: “He was always super keen. He always wanted to be the best, even among the best.” (Another soldier recalled that Burnett was nicknamed the Male Model, because he was reluctant to “get any dirt under his fingernails.”) Burnett served in Northern Ireland, and then in the Falklands, where he took part in the 1982 advance on Port Stanley. The experience, he later said, was “horrific, but on the other hand—in a sick way—exciting.”

When Burnett left the Army, after five years, his plan was to find work in Central America as a “weapons and tactics adviser”—not as a mercenary, he later insisted, though it is difficult to parse the distinction. Before he left, his mother told him that she’d had a premonition and implored him not to take another job that involved carrying a gun. Like Trump, Burnett trusts his impulses. “Your gut instinct is rarely wrong,” he likes to say. During a layover in Los Angeles, he decided to heed his mother’s admonition, and walked out of the airport. He later described himself as the quintessential immigrant: “I had no money, no green card, no nothing.” But the California sun was shining, and he was eager to try his luck.

Burnett is an avid raconteur, and his anecdotes about his life tend to have a three-act structure. In Act I, he is a fish out of water, guileless and naïve, with nothing but the shirt on his back and an outsized dream. Act II is the rude awakening: the world bets against him. It’s impossible! You’ll lose everything! No such thing has ever been tried! In Act III, Burnett always prevails. Not long after arriving in California, he landed his first job—as a nanny. Eyebrows were raised: a commando turned nanny? Yet Burnett thrived, working for a family in Beverly Hills, then one in Malibu. As he later observed, the experience taught him “how nice the life styles of wealthy people are.” Young, handsome, and solicitous, he discovered that successful people are often happy to talk about their path to success.

Burnett married a California woman, Kym Gold, who came from an affluent family. “Mark has always been very, very hungry,” Gold told me recently. “He’s always had a lot of drive.” For a time, he worked for Gold’s stepfather, who owned a casting agency, and for Gold, who owned an apparel business. She would buy slightly imperfect T-shirts wholesale, at two dollars apiece, and Burnett would resell them, on the Venice boardwalk, for eighteen. That was where he learned “the art of selling,” he has said. The marriage lasted only a year, by which point Burnett had obtained a green card. (Gold, who had also learned a thing or two about selling, went on to co-found the denim company True Religion, which was eventually sold for eight hundred million dollars.)

One day in the early nineties, Burnett read an article about a new kind of athletic event: a long-distance endurance race, known as the Raid Gauloises, in which teams of athletes competed in a multiday trek over harsh terrain. In 1992, Burnett organized a team and participated in a race in Oman. Noticing that he and his teammates were “walking, climbing advertisements” for gear, he signed up sponsors. He also realized that if you filmed such a race it would make for exotic and gripping viewing. Burnett launched his own race, the Eco-Challenge, which was set in such scenic locations as Utah and British Columbia, and was televised on various outlets, including the Discovery Channel. Bienstock, who first met Burnett when he worked on the “Eco-Challenge” show, in 1996, told me that Burnett was less interested in the ravishing backdrops or in the competition than he was in the intense emotional experiences of the racers: “Mark saw the drama in real people being the driving force in an unscripted show.”

By this time, Burnett had met an aspiring actress from Long Island named Dianne Minerva and married her. They became consumed with making the show a success. “When we went to bed at night, we talked about it, when we woke up in the morning, we talked about it,” Dianne Burnett told me recently. In the small world of adventure racing, Mark developed a reputation as a slick and ambitious operator. “He’s like a rattlesnake,” one of his business competitors told the New York Times in 2000. “If you’re close enough long enough, you’re going to get bit.” Mark and Dianne were doing far better than Mark’s parents ever had, but he was restless. One day, they attended a seminar by the motivational speaker Tony Robbins called “Unleash the Power Within.” A good technique for realizing your goals, Robbins counselled, was to write down what you wanted most on index cards, then deposit them around your house, as constant reminders. In a 2012 memoir, “The Road to Reality,” Dianne Burnett recalls that she wrote the word “FAMILY” on her index cards. Mark wrote “MORE MONEY.”

As a young man, Burnett occasionally found himself on a flight for business, looking at the other passengers and daydreaming: If this plane were to crash on a desert island, where would I fit into our new society? Who would lead and who would follow? “Nature strips away the veneer we show one another every day, at which point people become who they really are,” Burnett once wrote. He has long espoused a Hobbesian world view, and when he launched “Survivor” a zero-sum ethos was integral to the show. “It’s quite a mean game, just like life is kind of a mean game,” Burnett told CNN, in 2001. “Everyone’s out for themselves.”

On “Survivor,” the competitors were split into teams, or “tribes.” In this raw arena, Burnett suggested, viewers could glimpse the cruel essence of human nature. It was undeniably compelling to watch contestants of different ages, body types, and dispositions negotiate the primordial challenges of making fire, securing shelter, and foraging for food. At the same time, the scenario was extravagantly contrived: the castaways were shadowed by camera crews, and helicopters thundered around the island, gathering aerial shots.

Moreover, the contestants had been selected for their charisma and their combustibility. “It’s all about casting,” Burnett once observed. “As a producer, my job is to make the choices in who to work with and put on camera.” He was always searching for someone with the sort of personality that could “break through the clutter.” In casting sessions, Burnett sometimes goaded people, to see how they responded to conflict. Katherine Walker, the “Apprentice” producer, told me about an audition in which Burnett taunted a prospective cast member by insinuating that he was secretly gay. (The man, riled, threw the accusation back at Burnett, and was not cast that season.)

Richard Levak, a clinical psychologist who consulted for Burnett on “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” and worked on other reality-TV shows, told me that producers have often liked people he was uncomfortable with for psychological reasons. Emotional volatility makes for compelling television. But recruiting individuals for their instability and then subjecting them to the stress of a televised competition can be perilous. When Burnett was once asked about Sinisa Savija’s suicide, he contended that Savija had “previous psychological problems.” No “Survivor” or “Apprentice” contestants are known to have killed themselves, but in the past two decades several dozen reality-TV participants have. Levak eventually stopped consulting on such programs, in part because he feared that a contestant might harm himself. “I would think, Geez, if this should unravel, they’re going to look at the personality profile and there may have been a red flag,” he recalled.

Burnett excelled at the casting equation to the point where, on Season 2 of “Survivor,” which was shot in the Australian outback, his castaways spent so much time gossiping about the characters from the previous season that Burnett warned them, “The more time you spend talking about the first ‘Survivor,’ the less time you will have on television.” But Burnett’s real genius was in marketing. When he made the rounds in L.A. to pitch “Survivor,” he vowed that it would become a cultural phenomenon, and he presented executives with a mock issue of Newsweek featuring the show on the cover. (Later, “Survivor” did make the cover of the magazine.) Burnett devised a dizzying array of lucrative product-integration deals. In the first season, one of the teams won a care package that was attached to a parachute bearing the red-and-white logo of Target.

“I looked on ‘Survivor’ as much as a marketing vehicle as a television show,” Burnett once explained. He was creating an immersive, cinematic entertainment—and he was known for lush production values, and for paying handsomely to retain top producers and editors—but he was anything but precious about his art. Long before he met Trump, Burnett had developed a Panglossian confidence in the power of branding. “I believe we’re going to see something like the Microsoft Grand Canyon National Park,” he told the New York Times in 2001. “The government won’t take care of all that—companies will.”

Seven weeks before the 2016 election, Burnett, in a smart tux with a shawl collar, arrived with his third wife, the actress and producer Roma Downey, at the Microsoft Theatre, in Los Angeles, for the Emmy Awards. Both “Shark Tank” and “The Voice” won awards that night. But his triumphant evening was marred when the master of ceremonies, Jimmy Kimmel, took an unexpected turn during his opening monologue. “Television brings people together, but television can also tear us apart,” Kimmel mused. “I mean, if it wasn’t for television, would Donald Trump be running for President?” In the crowd, there was laughter. “Many have asked, ‘Who is to blame for Donald Trump?’ ” Kimmel continued. “I’ll tell you who, because he’s sitting right there. That guy.” Kimmel pointed into the audience, and the live feed cut to a closeup of Burnett, whose expression resolved itself into a rigid grin. “Thanks to Mark Burnett, we don’t have to watch reality shows anymore, because we’re living in one,” Kimmel said. Burnett was still smiling, but Kimmel wasn’t. He went on, “I’m going on the record right now. He’s responsible. If Donald Trump gets elected and he builds that wall, the first person we’re throwing over it is Mark Burnett. The tribe has spoken.”

Around this time, Burnett stopped giving interviews about Trump or “The Apprentice.” He continues to speak to the press to promote his shows, but he declined an interview with me. Before Trump’s Presidential run, however, Burnett told and retold the story of how the show originated. When he met Trump at Wollman Rink, Burnett told him an anecdote about how, as a young man selling T-shirts on the boardwalk on Venice Beach, he had been handed a copy of “The Art of the Deal,” by a passing rollerblader. Burnett said that he had read it, and that it had changed his life; he thought, What a legend this guy Trump is!

Anyone else hearing this tale might have found it a bit calculated, if not implausible. Kym Gold, Burnett’s first wife, told me that she has no recollection of him reading Trump’s book in this period. “He liked mystery books,” she said. But when Trump heard the story he was flattered.

Burnett has never liked the phrase “reality television.” For a time, he valiantly campaigned to rebrand his genre “dramality”—“a mixture of drama and reality.” The term never caught on, but it reflected Burnett’s forthright acknowledgment that what he creates is a highly structured, selective, and manipulated rendition of reality. Burnett has often boasted that, for each televised hour of “The Apprentice,” his crews shot as many as three hundred hours of footage. The real alchemy of reality television is the editing—sifting through a compost heap of clips and piecing together an absorbing story. Jonathon Braun, an editor who started working with Burnett on “Survivor” and then worked on the first six seasons of “The Apprentice,” told me, “You don’t make anything up. But you accentuate things that you see as themes.” He readily conceded how distorting this process can be. Much of reality TV consists of reaction shots: one participant says something outrageous, and the camera cuts away to another participant rolling her eyes. Often, Braun said, editors lift an eye roll from an entirely different part of the conversation.

“The Apprentice” was built around a weekly series of business challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be “fired.” But, as Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. During the making of “The Apprentice,” Burnett conceded that the stories were constructed in this way, saying, “We know each week who has been fired, and, therefore, you’re editing in reverse.” Braun noted that President Trump’s staff seems to have been similarly forced to learn the art of retroactive narrative construction, adding, “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.”

Such sleight of hand is the industry standard in reality television. But the entire premise of “The Apprentice” was also something of a con. When Trump and Burnett told the story of their partnership, both suggested that Trump was initially wary of committing to a TV show, because he was so busy running his flourishing real-estate empire. During a 2004 panel at the Museum of Television and Radio, in Los Angeles, Trump claimed that “every network” had tried to get him to do a reality show, but he wasn’t interested: “I don’t want to have cameras all over my office, dealing with contractors, politicians, mobsters, and everyone else I have to deal with in my business. You know, mobsters don’t like, as they’re talking to me, having cameras all over the room. It would play well on television, but it doesn’t play well with them.”

“The Apprentice” portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth—a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” Braun told me. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.” Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, “We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.”

Trump maximized his profits from the start. When producers were searching for office space in which to stage the show, he vetoed every suggestion, then mentioned that he had an empty floor available in Trump Tower, which he could lease at a reasonable price. (After becoming President, he offered a similar arrangement to the Secret Service.) When the production staff tried to furnish the space, they found that local venders, stiffed by Trump in the past, refused to do business with them.

More than two hundred thousand people applied for one of the sixteen spots on Season 1, and throughout the show’s early years the candidates were conspicuously credentialled and impressive. Officially, the grand prize was what the show described as “the dream job of a lifetime”—the unfathomable privilege of being mentored by Donald Trump while working as a junior executive at the Trump Organization. All the candidates paid lip service to the notion that Trump was a peerless businessman, but not all of them believed it. A standout contestant in Season 1 was Kwame Jackson, a young African-American man with an M.B.A. from Harvard, who had worked at Goldman Sachs. Jackson told me that he did the show not out of any desire for Trump’s tutelage but because he regarded the prospect of a nationally televised business competition as “a great platform” for career advancement. “At Goldman, I was in private-wealth management, so Trump was not, by any stretch, the most financially successful person I’d ever met or managed,” Jackson told me. He was quietly amused when other contestants swooned over Trump’s deal-making prowess or his elevated tastes—when they exclaimed, on tours of tacky Trump properties, “Oh, my God, this is so rich—this is, like, really rich!” Fran Lebowitz once remarked that Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person,” and Jackson was struck, when the show aired, by the extent to which Americans fell for the ruse. “Main Street America saw all those glittery things, the helicopter and the gold-plated sinks, and saw the most successful person in the universe,” he recalled. “The people I knew in the world of high finance understood that it was all a joke.”

This is an oddly common refrain among people who were involved in “The Apprentice”: that the show was camp, and that the image of Trump as an avatar of prosperity was delivered with a wink. Somehow, this interpretation eluded the audience. Jonathon Braun marvelled, “People started taking it seriously!”

When I watched several dozen episodes of the show recently, I saw no hint of deliberate irony. Admittedly, it is laughable to hear the candidates, at a fancy meal, talk about watching Trump for cues on which utensil they should use for each course, as if he were Emily Post. But the show’s reverence for its pugnacious host, however credulous it might seem now, comes across as sincere.

Did Burnett believe what he was selling? Or was Trump another two-dollar T-shirt that he pawned off for eighteen? It’s difficult to say. One person who has collaborated with Burnett likened him to Harold Hill, the travelling fraudster in “The Music Man,” saying, “There’s always an angle with Mark. He’s all about selling.” Burnett is fluent in the jargon of self-help, and he has published two memoirs, both written with Bill O’Reilly’s ghostwriter, which double as manuals on how to get rich. One of them, titled “Jump In!: Even if You Don’t Know How to Swim,” now reads like an inadvertent metaphor for the Trump Presidency. “Don’t waste time on overpreparation,” the book advises.

At the 2004 panel, Burnett made it clear that, with “The Apprentice,” he was selling an archetype. “Donald is the real current-day version of a tycoon,” he said. “Donald will say whatever Donald wants to say. He takes no prisoners. If you’re Donald’s friend, he’ll defend you all day long. If you’re not, he’s going to kill you. And that’s very American. It’s like the guys who built the West.” Like Trump, Burnett seemed to have both a jaundiced impression of the gullible essence of the American people and a brazen enthusiasm for how to exploit it. “The Apprentice” was about “what makes America great,” Burnett said. “Everybody wants one of a few things in this country. They’re willing to pay to lose weight. They’re willing to pay to grow hair. They’re willing to pay to have sex. And they’re willing to pay to learn how to get rich.”

At the start of “The Apprentice,” Burnett’s intention may have been to tell a more honest story, one that acknowledged Trump’s many stumbles. Burnett surely recognized that Trump was at a low point, but, according to Walker, “Mark sensed Trump’s potential for a comeback.” Indeed, in a voice-over introduction in the show’s pilot, Trump conceded a degree of weakness that feels shockingly self-aware when you listen to it today: “I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back, and I won, big league.”

The show was an instant hit, and Trump’s public image, and the man himself, began to change. Not long after the première, Trump suggested in an Esquire article that people now liked him, “whereas before, they viewed me as a bit of an ogre.” Jim Dowd, Trump’s former publicist, told Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, the authors of the 2016 book “Trump Revealed,” that after “The Apprentice” began airing “people on the street embraced him.” Dowd noted, “All of a sudden, there was none of the old mocking,” adding, “He was a hero.” Dowd, who died in 2016, pinpointed the public’s embrace of “The Apprentice” as “the bridge” to Trump’s Presidential run.

The show’s camera operators often shot Trump from low angles, as you would a basketball pro, or Mt. Rushmore. Trump loomed over the viewer, his face in a jowly glower, his hair darker than it is now, the metallic auburn of a new penny. (“Apprentice” employees were instructed not to fiddle with Trump’s hair, which he dyed and styled himself.) Trump’s entrances were choreographed for maximum impact, and often set to a moody accompaniment of synthesized drums and cymbals. The “boardroom”—a stage set where Trump determined which candidate should be fired—had the menacing gloom of a “Godfather” movie. In one scene, Trump ushered contestants through his rococo Trump Tower aerie, and said, “I show this apartment to very few people. Presidents. Kings.” In the tabloid ecosystem in which he had long languished, Trump was always Donald, or the Donald. On “The Apprentice,” he finally became Mr. Trump.

“We have to subscribe to our own myths,” the “Apprentice” producer Bill Pruitt told me. “Mark Burnett is a great mythmaker. He blew up that balloon and he believed in it.” Burnett, preferring to spend time pitching new ideas for shows, delegated most of the daily decisions about “The Apprentice” to his team, many of them veterans of “Survivor” and “Eco-Challenge.” But he furiously promoted the show, often with Trump at his side. According to many of Burnett’s collaborators, one of his greatest skills is his handling of talent—understanding their desires and anxieties, making them feel protected and secure. On interview tours with Trump, Burnett exhibited the studied instincts of a veteran producer: anytime the spotlight strayed in his direction, he subtly redirected it at Trump.

Burnett, who was forty-three when Season 1 aired, described the fifty-seven-year-old Trump as his “soul mate.” He expressed astonishment at Trump’s “laser-like focus and retention.” He delivered flattery in the ostentatiously obsequious register that Trump prefers. Burnett said he hoped that he might someday rise to Trump’s “level” of prestige and success, adding, “I don’t know if I’ll ever make it. But you know something? If you’re not shooting for the stars, you’re not shooting!” On one occasion, Trump invited Burnett to dinner at his Trump Tower apartment; Burnett had anticipated an elegant meal, and, according to an associate, concealed his surprise when Trump handed him a burger from McDonald’s.

Trump liked to suggest that he and Burnett had come up with the show “together”; Burnett never corrected him. When Carolyn Kepcher, a Trump Organization executive who appeared alongside Trump in early seasons of “The Apprentice,” seemed to be courting her own celebrity, Trump fired her and gave on-air roles to three of his children, Ivanka, Donald, Jr., and Eric. Burnett grasped that the best way to keep Trump satisfied was to insure that he never felt upstaged. “It’s Batman and Robin, and I’m clearly Robin,” he said.

Burnett sometimes went so far as to imply that Trump’s involvement in “The Apprentice” was a form of altruism. “This is Donald Trump giving back,” he told the Times in 2003, then offered a vague invocation of post-9/11 civic duty: “What makes the world a safe place right now? I think it’s American dollars, which come from taxes, which come because of Donald Trump.” Trump himself had been candid about his reasons for doing the show. “My jet’s going to be in every episode,” he told Jim Dowd, adding that the production would be “great for my brand.”

It was. Season 1 of “The Apprentice” flogged one Trump property after another. The contestants stayed at Trump Tower, did events at Trump National Golf Club, sold Trump Ice bottled water. “I’ve always felt that the Trump Taj Mahal should do even better,” Trump announced before sending the contestants off on a challenge to lure gamblers to his Atlantic City casino, which soon went bankrupt. The prize for the winning team was an opportunity to stay and gamble at the Taj, trailed by cameras.

“The Apprentice” was so successful that, by the time the second season launched, Trump’s lacklustre tie-in products were being edged out by blue-chip companies willing to pay handsomely to have their wares featured onscreen. In 2004, Kevin Harris, a producer who helped Burnett secure product-integration deals, sent an e-mail describing a teaser reel of Trump endorsements that would be used to attract clients: “Fast cutting of Donald—‘Crest is the biggest’ ‘I have worn Levis since I was 2’ ‘I love M&Ms’ ‘Unilever is the biggest company in the world’ all with the MONEY MONEY MONEY song over the top.”

Burnett and Trump negotiated with NBC to retain the rights to income derived from product integration, and split the fees. On set, Trump often gloated about this easy money. One producer remembered, “You’d say, ‘Hey, Donald, today we have Pepsi, and they’re paying three million to be in the show,’ and he’d say, ‘That’s great, I just made a million five!’ ”

Originally, Burnett had planned to cast a different mogul in the role of host each season. But Trump took to his part more nimbly than anyone might have predicted. He wouldn’t read a script—he stumbled over the words and got the enunciation all wrong. But off the cuff he delivered the kind of zesty banter that is the lifeblood of reality television. He barked at one contestant, “Sam, you’re sort of a disaster. Don’t take offense, but everyone hates you.” Katherine Walker told me that producers often struggled to make Trump seem coherent, editing out garbled syntax and malapropisms. “We cleaned it up so that he was his best self,” she said, adding, “I’m sure Donald thinks that he was never edited.” However, she acknowledged, he was a natural for the medium: whereas reality-TV producers generally must amp up personalities and events, to accentuate conflict and conjure intrigue, “we didn’t have to change him—he gave us stuff to work with.” Trump improvised the tagline for which “The Apprentice” became famous: “You’re fired.”

NBC executives were so enamored of their new star that they instructed Burnett and his producers to give Trump more screen time. This is when Trump’s obsession with television ratings took hold. “I didn’t know what demographics was four weeks ago,” he told Larry King. “All of a sudden, I heard we were No. 3 in demographics. Last night, we were No. 1 in demographics. And that’s the important rating.” The ratings kept rising, and the first season’s finale was the No. 1 show of the week. For Burnett, Trump’s rehabilitation was a satisfying confirmation of a populist aesthetic. “I like it when critics slam a movie and it does massive box office,” he once said. “I love it.” Whereas others had seen in Trump only a tattered celebrity of the eighties, Burnett had glimpsed a feral charisma.

On June 26, 2018, the day the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s travel ban targeting people from several predominantly Muslim countries, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sent out invitations to an event called a Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. If Pompeo registered any dissonance between such lofty rhetoric and Administration policies targeting certain religions, he didn’t mention it.

The event took place the next month, at the State Department, in Washington, D.C., and one of the featured speakers was Mark Burnett. In 2004, he had been getting his hair cut at a salon in Malibu when he noticed an attractive woman getting a pedicure. It was Roma Downey, the star of “Touched by an Angel,” a long-running inspirational drama on CBS. They fell in love, and married in 2007; together, they helped rear Burnett’s two sons from his second marriage and Downey’s daughter. Downey, who grew up in a Catholic family in Northern Ireland, is deeply religious, and eventually Burnett, too, reoriented his life around Christianity. “Faith is a major part of our marriage,” Downey said, in 2013, adding, “We pray together.”

For people who had long known Burnett, it was an unexpected turn. This was a man who had ended his second marriage during a live interview with Howard Stern. To promote “Survivor” in 2002, Burnett called in to Stern’s radio show, and Stern asked casually if he was married. When Burnett hesitated, Stern pounced. “You didn’t survive marriage?” he asked. “You don’t want your girlfriend to know you’re married?” As Burnett dissembled, Stern kept prying, and the exchange became excruciating. Finally, Stern asked if Burnett was “a single guy,” and Burnett replied, “You know? Yeah.” This was news to Dianne, Burnett’s wife of a decade. As she subsequently wrote in her memoir, “The 18-to-34 radio demographic knew where my marriage was headed before I did.”

In 2008, Burnett’s longtime business partner, a lawyer named Conrad Riggs, filed a lawsuit alleging that Burnett had stiffed him to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. According to the lawsuit, the two men had made an agreement before “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” that Riggs would own ten per cent of Burnett’s company. When Riggs got married, someone who attended the ceremony told me, Burnett was his best man, and gave a speech saying that his success would have been impossible without Riggs. Several years later, when Burnett’s company was worth half a billion dollars, he denied having made any agreement. The suit settled out of court. (Riggs declined to comment.)

Article from January 7, 2019 By Patrick Radden Keefe

Yobaba - New Yorker mag articles are LONG; I posted this mostly for my own reference so I will have a record of it; that said, I strongly urge everyone to read this. it explains a lot.

[aion-rsa]

Sean Connery and Michael Caine are Godlike in The Man Who Would Be King

https://ift.tt/3elTTC8

“I’ll stand one day before the Queen, not kneel, mind you, but stand like an equal, and she’ll say ‘I’d like you to accept the Order of the Garter as a mark of my esteem, cousin,’” Sean Connery’s ex-British soldier Daniel Dravot proclaims in the 1975 period adventure film, The Man Who Would Be King. And with those words, and the epic death scene which followed, Connery completed the saga of a long-germinating work from one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors. John Huston was Hollywood royalty. His father, Walter, was an acting icon, and his offspring have all gone on to distinguish themselves as part of the Huston Dynasty.

Connery was of course no stranger to acting royalty himself. Eventually knighted in 2000, he also got to play King Agamemnon in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits in 1981, King Richard the Lionheart in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), and King Arthur in First Knight (1995). James Bond was only a small part of Connery’s cinematic output. The Oscar-winning screen legend wasn’t always a suave, debonair, tuxedoed aficionado of the shaken martini.

He was already distancing himself from the immensely popular 007 role by the time he made Diamonds Are Forever in 1971. He wasn’t afraid to get down and dirty for parts, and he reveled in playing the occasional antihero and other less sympathetic roles.

Thus Connery got the chance to play a not-so-bright, morally flawed but timeless character in the 1975 film The Man Who Would Be King. He also fulfilled a lifelong dream for a Hollywood legend, and turned a myth into reality.

Huston had loved Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” since he was a child, according to the book The Hustons, by Lawrence Grobel. Kipling was 22 in 1888, when he wrote the short story, and had been shot at while exploring the setting. Huston’s adaptation was a dream project which had morphed into the purgatory of lost film masterpieces, like Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon, Alejandro Jodorowski’s Dune, or Orson Welles’ Heart of Darkness. Francis Ford Coppola wound up adapting the Joseph Conrad novel with a post-Vietnam War mentality. His Apocalypse Now is about a good man corrupted by absolute power. Huston took the lessons of the unpopular war in the opposite direction. The Man Who Would Be King is about bad men who are held accountable to the indigenous people they conquer.

The Man Who Would Be King is about power, greed and the manifest destiny of entitled Europeans. It lampoons the superiority of British colonialism. In a “Making of” documentary about the film, Huston says he found the “ideal” actors to capture his subversive intent. This movie was the only time Connery played with his lifelong friend Michael Caine, besides A Bridge Too Far, which had too many bridges and a platoon of stars between them. The pair met at a cast party for the first show Connery acted in, a touring company’s production of South Pacific in 1954. On July 9 of that year, Huston told Allied Artists’ Harold Mirish he wanted his next film to be the first and only on-screen pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable.

Huston originally had The Man Who Would Be King slated as his next production after he finished Moby Dick (1956). He planned to begin principal photography in India between November 1955 and January 1956 and was negotiating to film in the Todd-AO process. Huston had worked with Bogart on the very first film he directed, The Maltese Falcon in 1941, and the pair continued a string of successful and innovative films together. Though working fairly steadily, Bogart was battling esophageal cancer and ultimately succumbed to it on Jan. 14, 1957. Huston discussed the film with Gable while filming The Misfits, but the actor known as “The King of Hollywood” then also died in 1960. 

Richard Burton was set to play the role against Peter O’Toole, and Huston kept start dates ready from January 1966 to January 1967, waiting for the opportunity, but the year passed and it never came. The film almost reunited Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting’s Robert Redford and Paul Newman, who told Huston the film deserved English actors, and suggested Connery and Caine specifically.

Caine immediately jumped at the role just because his part had been written for Bogart. He’d chosen his stage name after seeing Bogart fidget with his ball-bearings as Commander Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. As for Connery, the Scottish actor captures the essence of Gable’s screen persona in the film. They both bring an amused cynicism toward their roles. Both actors furrow their brows and project a sensual gravitas.

You can imagine hearing Connery say, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” with a different accent but the same delivery as Gable’s in Gone with the Wind. Granted, it would probably be coming out of the mouth of Saturday Night Live’s Darrel Hammond as a bemused answer to Alex Trebek, but it rings true. Whether he liked it or not, Connery’s turn as Bond made him as recognizable in the public’s mind as Gable.

On screen, Caine and Connery interact easily and naturally, nailing the parts with their distinct charisma. Danny and Peachy laugh at their disasters, because there’s really nothing else to do, and they make it infectious. They really are the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid of imperialist Great Britain. Caine’s Peachy Carnahan could have been a great-great-grandparent to his Jack Carter in Get Garter; Connery’s Daniel Dravot could imaginably give sage advice to his third-generation thief grandson Matthew Broderick in Family Business (1989), or even lead a son like Indiana Jones across unexplored ancient treasures.

Together, Connery and Caine are a powerhouse. One of the great cinema pairings. They bring authentic accents, real-life camaraderie, and regional humor to the roles. Caine also bought his wife, Shakira, who plays Roxanne, the Kafiristan wife of Connery’s Daniel Dravot in the film. Christopher Plummer played Rudyard Kipling, a correspondent for “The Northern Star” newspaper, and a Freemason, a central point in the film and its symbolism.

Huston wrote the new screenplay with his long-time secretary Gladys Hill. Shooting on the final version took place in Morocco, which traded rough terrain for rampant corruption as the producers had to bribe their way through much of the filming. The locations and local extras were important to Huston to evoke the British Raj period of the movie.

The director wanted Connery and Caine to brave the “mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers” Kipling described in his story. Huston exposed Bogart to the cruel elements of location filming in The Treasure of Sierra Madre and The African Queen, and had discussed parachuting the two Hollywood icons into the Himalayas during the initial production, according to The Hustons. The two British stars faced equal peril. For the climax of the completed version, Huston let Connery plummet hundreds of feet from a rope bridge suspended over a vast valley. 

In the film, two former British Army sergeants, now clumsy gunrunners and incompetent conmen, traverse the Khyber Pass to find the isolated area of Kafiristan, located in the Hindu Kush mountains northeast of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. This is where the descendants of Alexander the Great live. The Greek emperor had conquered Afghanistan and married a Kafir princess named Roxanne, according to Kipling’s story.

Peachy and Danny plan to become the first Europeans since the ancient Greeks to penetrate the region and “loot it six ways from Sunday.” They admit this to Kipling shortly after robbing him and returning his stolen item back to him.

“In any place where they fight, a man who knows how to drill men can always be a king,” Connery’s Danny explains to Plummer’s Kipling. “We shall go to those parts and say to any king we find: ‘Do you want to vanquish your foes?’ And we will show him how to drill men, for that we know better than anything else. Then we will subvert that king and seize his throne and establish a dynasty.”

With this, Connery’s character captures the eternal dilemma of that region. No external power has ever permanently dominated Afghanistan. Britain lost control in 1919, which the country celebrates as the year of its independence. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, and continues its costly occupation with no end in sight. Kafiristan, which is now called Nuristan, is home to 15 ethnic groups speaking five different languages. No one man can be king. No single government can rule. Even O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia had to admit that. Connery’s authority, however, has a much deeper voice, and the conviction of a faithful pilgrim.

Peachy and Danny believe they can find a kingdom not yet touched by civilization which they can take over easily with their weapons, knowledge and contemporary expertise. “When we’re done with you, you’ll be able to stand up and slaughter your enemies like civilized men,” they tell their trainees. Huston allows the audience to enjoy the two soldiers of misfortune, in spite of their self-ascribed superiority and blatantly racist attitudes. When their translator asks whether to woo local high priests with claims of their divinity, Peachy says to tell them they are “not gods, [but] Englishmen. The next best thing.”

Read more

Movies

How an Overlooked British Classic Boasted Sean Connery’s Finest Performance

By Mark Allison

Movies

Sean Connery Called Brett Ratner “A Fraud?”

By David Crow

Danny is nonplussed by how easy the locals are exploited. Connery lets him indulge his moral superiority, tossing harsh judgements on native customs like offering daughters and sons up to guests for sex. When he takes an arrow in the chest and keeps on fighting, he readily assumes his mantle as the son of Alexander the Great. Connery sells that assumption realistically and believably. Peachy assumes the huge rubies in the temple are good to go. 

Caine’s Peachy Carnahan remains a Cockney through and through. Connery’s Dravot gives in to temptation almost athletically. When he finds himself worshiped as a deity, he is happy to believe it. The scene where he convinces himself is hysterical, and performed completely organically. Connery is completely surprised by himself, and Caine literally falls over laughing as he does an internal pratfall. It is as much an acting free-for-all as it is a ballet of physical comedy. The gag is the same as C3P0 telling the Ewoks he’s a deity in Return of the Jedi, which happened to be shot on the same Panaflex camera as The Man Who Would Be King.

In a highly competitive Oscar race–which included One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Barry Lyndon, and Jaws—The Man Who Would Be King was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Art Direction, Best Writing, Best Costume Design, and Best Editing. Connery was also the lead performance in the Oscar-nominated film The Wind and The Lion that same year.

The Man Who Would Be King is an adventure film, and Connery and Caine make it a wild ride with perilous curves and a harrowing but hollow finish. Like so many of Huston’s movies, their scheme doesn’t turn out the way it’s planned, but the plot finds strength in the weakness of powerful characters. By the end of the movie, all these two characters have is each other, and even that promises to be fleeting. The performances endure though. It’s acting royalty. It’s like they were destined to do it, preordained. 

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The post Sean Connery and Michael Caine are Godlike in The Man Who Would Be King appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/385W63u

[nataliedanovelist]

GF - The Treehouse

Summary: Right before Dipper and Mabel return to Gravity Falls for another summer, Stan and Ford decide to do something nice for them only for it to nip them in the butt.

Author’s Note: So if there is ONE thing I'm disappointed in the GF fandom for (besides BillDip and ANY incest shipping) is that there are NO Drake and Josh references! I can think of at least twelve episodes that would fit PERFECTLY with the silver foxes! Seriously, am I just in the dark or crazy or has no one else made that connection? Anywho, thank you so much for reading and if you liked this one-shot then you should check my fics out; I've done quite a bit of Gravity Falls that can be found on FanFiction.net. Have a great day!

https://www.fanfiction.net/story/story_tab_list.php

~~~~~~~~~~

Ford hummed a mindless tune to himself as he picked up the red toolbox and climbed up a make-shift ladder; he had made it by hammering planks of thick wood to a tree, leading up to where the Treehouse of Dreams was, or will be when he and Stan finished it.

It was so hot in the early summer afternoon that Ford had actually shed his trenchcoat and rolled up his sweater-sleeves, showcasing his less-gruesome scars. His six-fingered work gloves covered the old burn-scars on his wrists given to him by Bill, so he was comfortable freeing some skin in order to work more efficiently. While it was an adventure of a lifetime to sail with his brother on the Stan O' War II, Ford found it extremely rewarding to build something bigger than a hand-held invention and to do it for two people he loved very much.

Dipper and Mabel would be back in Gravity Falls in a few hours, and when they came back, they would find a huge "Beginning of Summer" party waiting for them at the lake and a new treehouse in the woods. Stanley first snorted and said the teenagers were too old for a treehouse, but then Ford showed him the blueprints and the old conman agreed to help.

This treehouse was located about two or three rows of trees away from the Mystery Shack, enough to give a brooding teenager privacy if wanted, and it had three sections and a small deck for fresh air. The middle section was designed to be a shared space between the twins, but then they each had their own space, Dipper's host a work-deck and a bookshelf while Mabel's had a rocking chair (made by Ford himself and decorated with birds, gnomes, pinetrees, and other things one would find in the woods, carved into the soft, polished wood) and drawers for art supplies. There were no walls separating the sections, but Ford did have curtains that could be drawn for alone-time if desired. The whole treehouse was furnished, decorated, and ready to go, except for the last wall.

Stan walked up to the old okay tree with a glass of lemonade in his hands. He gave a low whistle. "Lookin' good, Sixer."

"Stanley!" Ford scolded from the treehouse. "You were supposed to be helping me!"

"I did help you!" Stan argued. "I made the walls and got the stuff up there! Now, I've been resting, the way old men should be, which hey, have you seen Soos' new attractions? Genius! I dunno where he gets these ideas!"

Ford rolled his eyes and had a small smile on his lips. "Fine, fine, just get up here, you knucklehead, and help me with his last wall."

"You got it." Stan sat the lemonade down on the grass and climbed up in his Hawaiian shirt and tanned shorts. "Right, so what do we do?"

"I got it all set up." Ford explained. "See, it's a pulley system. We just pull on his rope and the last wall will swing up, then I'll screw it into place."

"Right, gotcha." Stan said and grabbed the thick rope hanging above him. "Okay, ready?"

Ford grabbed the rope, as well. "Alright… pull!"

The two men worked together to pull the rope and it worked just as Ford said it would; the wall with a window came up into place just in front of the small deck (the deck was only big enough for either two small people to sit or one adult). With a small creak of wood coming together, the wall was in place.

"Hold it, Stanley."

"I'm holding it." Stan growled as he pulled on the rope tightly solo.

Ford quickly grabbed the power drill and used five-inch titanium screws to secure the wall; he didn't want Steve or a Manotaur to bring this treehouse down. When all fours screws had been placed, Stan testily let go of the rope and let it hang. Ford pushed heavily against the wall and smiled proudly at his work. "Great! We're all done!"

"Hot tamales, the kids are gonna love this place!" Stan punched Ford's shoulder lightly. "Kinda envy 'em, we sure didn't have a cool treehouse like this when we were kids."

"Yes we did, it was just shaped like a boat and on the beach."

Stan laughed. "Right. So, ready for the party?"

"Yes, just let me put away the…" Ford was heading for the exit as he answered his brother, but he found there to be no exit. There was a door drawn on the wall by the window, but no door. Ford's eyes widened as he saw a dilemma that Stan had not yet seen. His temper boiling steadily, Ford turned to Stan, who was admiring the homemade rocking chair, with his hands held so he wouldn't strangle the old conman, and the old scientist asked coldly, "Stanley?"

"Yeah."

"Where's the door-hole?"

Stan looked up and pointed at the wall. "Right there, I drew it in."

Ford could feel a vein popping out of his forehead. "You were supposed to cut it out with the power saw!"

"Geez, Poindexter, relax!" Stan defended with his hands up in surrender. "I was gonna, just like I did with all the windows, but Wendy came to me and said Soos was doing something stupid and to grab a camera, so I decided I'd cut the door-hole later."

"Oh, really?"

"Yes!"

Ford nodded towards the wall. "So go do it. Right now."

"Fine, I will," Stan growled. "Moses, when did you get so bossy?" Stan stopped when he reached the wall and realized he couldn't leave to get the power saw. He tested the wall and looked around the treehouse, ignoring Ford's death glare. "I see the problem."

"Oh, DO YOU?!" Ford yelled sarcastically.

"Okay, okay, so what do we do?!" Stan asked. "The little twerps are gonna be here in three hours and we gotta be at the bus stop when that happens!"

"I know, Stanley, I know." Ford held his forehead as he tried to think. "I… oh! I'll just unscrew this wall so you can get down and cut the door-hole." He picked up the power drill and turned it on. He was just about to unscrew the first screw, when it shut off.

"What happened?" Stan asked.

"I… I have no idea." Ford clicked the tool several times, but the drill would not turn on. He looked out the small window and all Stan heard was a loud, "You have got to be KIDDING me!"

"What, lemme see!" Stan shoved Ford out of the way and looked through the little window to see a deer munching on the cord that connected the drill all the way to an outside outlet of the shack. "Oh, COME ON! Hey! Get outta here! Shoo!" And the deer scampered off.

Ford dropped the useless drill. "Great, just great, you couldn't have cut one simple exit, Stanley?!"

"Hey, you're the idiot who didn't notice there wasn't a door-hole until it was too late!"

"You didn't notice it, either! And now we're gonna miss the niblings getting back!"

"No, we are not!" Ford said stubbornly. "We're going to find a way out of here and we WILL be there on time!"

"And how are we gonna do that?!"

Ford ran a six-fingered hand through his fluffy charcoal-gray hair and seriously evaluated the situation. "Alright, this… let's see… the walls are too thick to cut through with a swiss-army knife. The drill isn't going to work. If we could either get the power saw or have the power drill working again we could get out of here."

"Right, so how do we do either of those things?" Stan asked.

Ford leaned against the wall by the window and peered outside as he thought of a good answer. His eyes widened and he shoved his head out the window. "Mr. Gleeful! Gideon!"

The white-haired chubby child stopped walking towards the Mystery Shack and looked towards the voice. He walked towards the treehouse, all dressed up in his light-blue suit and said, "Well, Stanford! Good to see you again! My, my, what a treehouse!"

"Thank you, but unfortunately, we're stuck." Ford said. "Listen, could you hand us the power saw so Stanley and I can get out of here?"

"Heavens to Betsy, no!" Gideon gasped with ah and to his heart. "Carrying a sharp saw up a tree is too dangerous for wittle ole me!"

Ford pinched the bridge of his nose. "Fair enough, but will you at least, please, plug that extra cord to the power drill and then plug it into the shack?"

Gideon smiled and pointed at the old man. "That I can certainly do, Dr. Pines."

"Good, hurry it up." Stan growled from inside the treehouse, his arms crossed over his chest.

Gideon had just picked up the dark-green extension cord when a joyful jingle met his ears. "Oo! The ice cream truck!" The kid squealed as he squished his cheeks with his hands, dropping the cord.

"Gideon!" Stan roared and made Ford move from the window so he could scowl at the kid properly. "Now you listen to me, you little troll, you better plug up the screw driver or I swear I'll…"

"Stanley," Ford said warningly, reminding him that they were actually on somewhat good terms with the demon-child.

Gideon smiled smugly. "You know, I think I'll let you cool down a bit in that nice ole treehouse. I'll be back after some ice cream." And he started to walk away.

"GIDEON!" Stan yelled. "GIDEON!"

Ford shoved Stan out of the way so he could yell out the window. "GIDEON!"

Stan shoved Ford out of the way so he could yell out the window. "GIDEON!"

"GIDEON!"

"GIDEON!"

"GIDEON!"

Stan punched the wall angrily and then yelled and shook his hand to reveal himself of the prickling pain. Ford slumped to the floor and sighed. "Guess we just have to trust he'll come back."

Stan raised an eyebrow at him. "You realize he's not coming back right?"

"I know." Ford moaned.

And so the two old men just sat around and tried to think of a way out of the treehouse. What really irked them was that this was a simple trap; this wasn't like a heavily-guarded government facility or an alien prison, both of which the Pines twins had escaped from; this was a homemade treehouse for their niece and nephew with four windows and no door and no way out. Stan eventually sat in Mabel's new rocking chair, reading a book from Dipper's bookshelf, and Ford paced between the three sections of the small shelter in the oak tree.

Stan checked his watch. "We got two hours to get outta here."

Ford growled and held his hair tightly. Then his eyes grew wide as a simple solution came to mind. "Wait! My cellular phone!" He yelled victoriously and pulled it out of his pocket. "I'll call for help!"

"You just now thought of that?!" Stan yelled.

"Well, where is your cellular phone, Stanley?!" Ford snapped back.

"It died so I left at the shack to charge."

Ford rolled his eyes and began dialing a number. "I'll call Soos and have him come help us."

"Great, let the handyman do his thing!" Stan said and watched as Ford called Soos and put it on speaker. It rang and rang, but no answer. Eventually Ford called a second time.

(None of them were aware that Soos had stepped into the shower before the big party and was now singing Disco Girl to the top of his lungs. "Dipper was right, it is catchy, dude!")

When Soos didn't answer the phone again, Ford guessed, "Maybe his phone also died."

"No, it didn't go straight to voicemail." Stan snatched the phone and said, "You probably dialed the wrong number, lemme try."

Ford took his phone back. "I think I know our handyman's phone number." He growled.

"Just lemme…"

"Stanley, back off!"

"Quit it!"

The two old men fought over the smartphone and even punched and shoved their opponents to try to get the valuable piece of technology, but then it slipped like a bar of soap out of their hands and flew out the window. Ford and Stan stared and then ran and crammed their faces together to see the phone had landed on the grass.

"Nicely done, Stanley."

"You're the one who couldn't get ahold of Soos!" Stan then lit up and asked, "Wait, what about your magnet gun?!"

"I left it in my coat." Ford said as he rolled down his sweater sleeves, no longer burning up from working so hard. "I don't even have my ray gun with me."

"What?! You always have that thing on you! You even take it in the shower!"

"Okay, one: I don't take my weapons with me in the shower, I leave them with my glasses on my towel." Ford defended, sticking a finger up, then he held up two fingers. "Two: you're always on my case about being paranoid!"

"Yeah, I don't want you to be paranoid! But I also don't want you to be an idiot!"

"This is coming from the man who couldn't cut a single door-hole."

"Okay, ya know what…!"

The pointless screaming match went on until they were both hoarse and burned out, resorting in Stan and Ford to lying on the floor of the little house and stare up at the ceiling.

Dipper smiled with his cheek pressed up against his hand as he stared out the bus-window. Mabel was bouncing in her seat, her legs swinging, and her hands gripping the seat. As each new landmark looked familiar, she squealed a little bit more.

"This is so exciting, Dipper!" Mabel cheered. "We're almost home!"

Dipper chuckled and looked at the distant mountains that were starting to appear. "We are almost home." Waddles turned over in his sleep and Dipper rubbed his belly to give him something to do alongside wonder what his great-uncles were doing right now.

"Man, I'm starving." Stan complained, lying with his brother lying opposite so they were shoulder-to-shoulder, but their bodies pointing away from each other; Stan's stomach growled loudly to prove his point.

"I have not eaten since noon." Ford looked at his own watch. "Dipper and Mabel will be here in an hour."

"And Gideon still hasn't come back." Stan growled. "Little troll probably forgot."

Ford sighed and knocked on the wooden floor. "At least we know this treehouse is secure."

Stan snorted. "Yeah, you did a good job, Genius."

Ford smiled. "Thank you. You did help and provide necessary skills, and that was very appreciated."

"Yeah, yeah." Stan waved away and then let his hand collapse on his gut. "And, hey, while were here, what made you wanna build this in the first place?"

The eldest twin shrugged (as much as one can when lying down). "I wanted to do something nice for the kids."

"I think they would much rather see you than get all this." Stan teased.

Ford chuckled nervously. "You're probably right."

"Hey, a broken clock is right twice a day."

Ford sat up and asked, "Did you hear that?"

"Relax, it's not some monster, that's just my stomach again."

"No, Stanley," Ford stood up and looked out the window on the left wall, the section of the treehouse designed for Dipper, and gasped, "Mr. Shmebulock! Mr. Shmebulock! Over here!"

Stan got up and joined his brother. Sure enough, sitting on a tree branch and munching on an acorn was an old speechless gnome. He smiled at the sight of the old Pines men and cheered, "Shmebulock!"

"Yes, hello!" Ford held out his hand and the gnome, who was about the same size as Ford's six-fingered hand, sat and allowed the human to bring him into the treehouse. "Listen, we need your help. We're trapped here and Mabel and Dipper will be back any moment now. Can you…"

"Shmebulock?" The gnome gasped with smiling eyes.

"Yes, Mabel and Dipper are returning, so we need you… hey!" The gnome had hopped off Ford's hand and then climbed down the tree and started to scamper away. "Mr. Shmebulock! Mr. Shmebulock, please!"

"Get back here you little pest!" Stan demanded, but the gnome had gone off to greet the niblings when they returned. "If you try to make my niece your queen again I'll…"

"Stanley, let it go." Ford moaned and collapsed into the chair of Dipper's desk. "What do we do now?"

Stan leaned against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. "What can we do?"

No one had an answer for either question.

Right on time, at six o'clock, the bus pulled up to the stop in Gravity Falls, Oregon. Dipper and Mabel grinned with their luggage in hand, pig at their feet, and waiting at the steps of the bus, and they were greeted by Soos, Wendy, Candy, Grenda, Gideon, and Pacifica. The twins ran off the bus and jumped into their friends' arms. Soos wrapped each twin up in a big bear-hug, cutting off the air-flow in their necks, until Mabel was pulled into a girls' hug by Candy and Grenda and Wendy traded hats back with Dipper; he had enjoyed Wendy's ushanka even in the warm California sun, but it was good to sport his pinetree cap again.

"We missed you guys SO much!" Mabel cheered.

"You talked to us, like, every day." Pacifica said as she rolled her eyes.

"Yeah, but now I can attack you with love!" And the brunette wrapped the blonde up in a tight hug before she could be stopped.

"Hey, where's Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford?" Dipper asked casually.

"Yeah, the party can't start without them!" Mabel said.

"Don't worry, dudes," Soos reassured. "They're probably already at the party."

"OH NO!" Gideon yelled, slapping his cheeks in shock, and he turned red as he began to confess a mistake he had made for the sake of ice-cream.

Stan was hitting his forehead against the back wall of the treehouse. Ford knew he sometimes did this to try to think clearly. He just sat by the drawn-door and watched, having an idea of when he should intervene his brothers possibly harmful way of coming up with a plan.

"Stanley, this treehouse won't be very appealing if you manage to get blood on the wall."

Stan stopped and looked down at his watch. It was twenty minutes after the kids were supposed to be back. "Alright, that's it!" He yelled, a new wave of adrenaline coursing through him as the idea of not seeing the kids drove him crazy. "That's it! We're finding a way outta here!"

"How?" Ford asked.

"You could try asking for help."

The men were frozen, but then fought over who could look out the window first until they resorted to sharing. Sure enough, Dipper and Mabel stood at the foot of the oak tree with their little group of friends behind them, all biting their lip and snickering.

"KIDS!"

"Wow, cool man-cave, guys!" Mabel called.

"Yeah, this gives the Manotaurs a run for their money." Dipper sneered.

"Just shut up and get us outta here so I can hug you two knuckleheads!" Stan yelled.

Mabel saluted and said, "Yes sir! C'mon, Soos you make sure the sax's plugged in, Dipper and I will go up there!"

"Hold it!" Wendy called out, then pulled out her phone and took a quick picture of the old men trapped in the treehouse. "Hehe, blackmail."

"You're fired."

"You've fired me fifteen times, Stan, and I'm still here." Wendy replied coolly.

The kids all laughed as Dipper and Mabel climbed up to the small deck, Wendy handed them the saw, Soos made sure it was plugged in, and then Dipper and Mabel called out a warning and started to cut an exit. Stan and ford backed up as the younger pair of twins carefully cut a door-shaped hole and soon a big piece of wood fell forward, freeing the older pair of twins.

Mabel blew on the saw, which was unplugged by Soos to make sure it was safe, and then she asked, "Now where's that hug we were promised?"

She ditched the saw and ran with her brother into Ford and Stan's arms as they got on their knees and were happily reunited for another summer.