The Broadcasting Business (1)
Ki-jo made no excuses to the agitated Hwang Tae-young.
The circumstances were more than enough for a man to believe his broadcasting business had been stolen out from under him. When Hwang shoved him in the chest and tried to drive him out, Ki-jo spoke.
"I'll give you my word. That station won't last a year before it goes under."
"What did you say?"
"A single television, at the price you're asking, costs that much — and you still think a television station can be run properly?"
The face of the man pushing him grew fiercer still.
"You snatch another man's business and then talk like that? If you had no confidence, you shouldn't have taken it on. Are you rubbing salt in the wound right in front of me?"
"If I'd had any choice, I wouldn't have taken the station on either."
"And who shoved you into running a broadcasting station?"
"Kwak Young-joo. Of the Gyeongmudae police."
The strength went out of the hands on his chest.
"Kwak Young-joo? The policeman who guards Dr. Rhee?"
"That's right. The moment I was told I had to run a station, I nearly blacked out where I stood."
Having grasped the situation well enough, Hwang Tae-young took his hands off him.
"If you run it, it'll fail. If I run it, it won't...."
In the history Ki-jo remembered, Hwang Tae-young — the very man who would run the station into the ground in less than a year — was badly overestimating himself.
"I'm sure that's so. The trouble is, Kwak Young-joo doesn't know it. He's dumped the work on me, and I don't know the first thing about television."
Once Ki-jo had laid out how wronged he felt, Hwang softened a great deal.
"So what do you mean to do?"
"Take it on, for now. Do I look like a man with the power to refuse?"
For a moment the two of them simply looked at each other.
"Come inside. Let's talk a little. I ought to hear you out."
Hwang Tae-young led him farther into the shop.
Ki-jo told him about Cheongsan's radio communications business and offered his own guess as to why the government had handed him the work, and Hwang nodded.
"I understand the fear that a television station might turn into another CBS. Even under the Japanese, the government kept a tight grip on broadcasting."
Ki-jo had already looked into the man thoroughly, and he knew the past behind him. Hwang Tae-young had been a technician at the Gyeongseong Broadcasting Station in colonial Seoul, only to be dismissed after he was caught up in the shortwave eavesdropping affair. He had not joined the independence movement outright, but he had listened to Voice of America and to the Provisional Government's shortwave broadcasts and passed what he heard along to others — resistance of an indirect kind.
After liberation he imported and sold RCA goods, and when the Korean War ended he supplied RCA equipment for the restoration of Seoul's broadcasting facilities. He was a man who had been tied to RCA since the days just after liberation, earlier than Ki-jo himself.
The moment he decided he had to found a station of his own came in 1954. The Office of Public Information, which had been watching the supplier of RCA's superior equipment, sent him to the United States on a procurement of radio gear for KBS. There, happening upon television, Hwang put a bold proposal to RCA's president: he would forgo the commission owed him for the broadcast equipment he had supplied to Korea, and in exchange he would take RCA's television equipment on credit and build a station.
The president of RCA, judging that a Korean television station would let him sell RCA sets there as well, accepted. It was not unlike the offer Chung Ju-yung would later make in Europe — give me the money to build ships, and I will build you a shipyard and the ships to go with it. Some fifteen years before Chung Ju-yung, a man named Hwang Tae-young had flung an absurd proposal onto the table and actually pulled it off.
After looking into him, Ki-jo judged him a man of patriotic feeling, enterprising and ahead of his time. But the fact that he would ruin a station within a year said something else. Technical ability he had; the commercial ability to turn a broadcasting station to profit, he did not. A classic engineer — a man better cast as chief technical officer than as chief executive.
"The reason I came looking for you is to ask you to run the station."
"You're putting the running of it in my hands?"
"Yes. Become the station's technical president — its CTO. In return, I'll take on the business of raising its revenue."
"You'll handle the profit side yourself, President?"
Hwang Tae-young seemed to suspect some hidden motive. Was Ki-jo going to wring the technical know-how out of him and then throw him away? Watching him hesitate, Ki-jo added another offer.
"The pay will be more than adequate. I'll match what RCA gives the American technicians it sends over."
"What?"
Hwang was stunned by the enormous annual salary being held out to him.
"And I'll guarantee you the technical presidency for ten years."
He was thrown by Ki-jo's particular gift: recruiting talent on terms bold enough to stagger a man. An American salary, and a ten-year term besides — compensation generous enough that handing over every technique he possessed would not feel like a loss.
"Well... the reason you're offering me terms that generous..."
"Because, through no wish of my own, I ended up with the broadcasting rights and the RCA distributorship for Korea. And your skill with broadcast equipment is the finest in the country, isn't it? I want to treat you accordingly."
"Even so..."
"President Hwang. How were you planning to run the station? What did you have in mind for the first program?"
"I... I meant to open with aak, the court music. A performance of Manpajeongsikjigok — the Melody of Ten Thousand Waves at Rest."
Ki-jo swallowed the sigh that wanted out of him. Yes. Here was a man who could ruin a station in no time. He meant to play aak, the most classical music in the traditional repertory, and to put on Manpajeongsikjigok, a royal processional. People were already used to American culture, yearning after it, their ears trained to Western music — and he would launch the station with solemn traditional music like that? It was absurd.
"And after that?"
"On a set built like a palace courtyard, an ensemble in hanbok playing aak, and a folk-dance troupe performing seungmu, the monk's dance..."
Ki-jo propped his chin on his hand and stared at him. Hwang hurried on.
"I'd bring in Park Si-chun to conduct the orchestra, and call singers like Hyun In, Nam In-su, and Baek Seol-hui for a music show..."
"Now that I like. Drop the stuffy court music and play lively Latin tunes instead. Put dancers doing the mambo and the cha-cha-cha out on the floor, and I think you've got something."
"Isn't that too American...?"
"It's a joint venture with an American company. What's wrong with American? And mambo and cha-cha-cha are already the rage in the city."
He knew the fashion well enough: the wives of wealthy houses dancing themselves breathless in the cabarets around Hwashin Department Store and up on the roof of Donghwa Department Store. If you didn't cater to the tastes of people with money, how were you going to sell even one more set?
"Hm... now that I hear it, you're right."
Hwang Tae-young nodded at the programming.
"And I think we ought to show films on television. You learned in America how they send movies out over TV, didn't you?"
"Ah — yes. I saw it done. You set a screen up in front of the camera, project the film, and transmit it just as it is."
"I'll get the film. Two hours a day, seven to nine in the evening. We have to make people lose their souls to that screen."
"That's right."
"I want the programs so entertaining that people can't help wanting to buy a television."
Before he quite knew it, Hwang Tae-young was soaking in the other man's words. Ki-jo talked through the things the station would put on the air and explained how he meant to tie them to the business, and Hwang could only marvel. Not content with bringing famous singers in for a popular-song show, he would gather good voices from all eight provinces for a contest. When Ki-jo laid out his plan to turn the radio drama he had recently made a hit — Seoul Ttoksuni — into a television drama, a conviction settled in Hwang: at this rate, the thing would succeed.
He had meant to concentrate on the broadcast itself, but listening to Ki-jo, the realization struck him hard that the heart of broadcasting was the content. If Ki-jo put his weight behind the programs and he himself sent those well-planned shows out without a hitch, the business looked as if it would work.
"I... President. Those harsh words I threw at you earlier..."
"It's all right. I came expecting I wouldn't hear anything kind. Hahaha."
When Ki-jo laughed, bright and easy, Hwang Tae-young laughed with him. Watching him, Hwang thought that youth must be the reason the ideas came fizzing out of him, and the reason he was so daring.
For three days Ki-jo came to see him and talk, and on the third day Hwang Tae-young made up his mind. Once he had signed the employment contract, he began reporting for work at HLKZ-TV in Gwancheol-dong, Jongno.
With Hwang Tae-young on the payroll, Ki-jo met Jacob and Frank at the USIS. Another American sat with them, a man he was seeing for the first time: Joseph Miller of RCA, who was to become president of KORCAD, the joint Korea-RCA company.
Ki-jo had put up half the money the station would require, yet he raised no objection to an American taking the presidency. The practical judgment was that the man would make a sturdy shield. What he did insist on was control of the programming.
"Surely a Korean knows best what programs Koreans will like."
Joseph Miller accepted the point.
Programming rights in hand, Ki-jo set about untangling the ownership. First he had RCA pay Hwang Tae-young the settlement due for canceling the Korea distributorship, together with the commission it had never handed over. At the same time he took onto himself the debt Hwang owed RCA for equipment bought on credit — no less than two hundred thousand dollars.
Two hundred thousand dollars was more than Ki-jo had earned in dollars over the whole of the previous year. Even so, he did not believe a failed station would cost him the entire sum. The broadcast equipment could be resold to KBS, or to Japan. What had come into Korea was newer than anything Japan held; sold off, he reckoned he could recover half. He would do everything in his power to bring the station into the black, but if he failed, he wanted a bankruptcy he could see coming and could bear.
If he undertook the equipment Hwang had brought in on credit, then should the station collapse he would be liable for only a hundred thousand dollars. In return, he demanded that RCA invest a matching sum in Korea. Jacob and Joseph Miller agreed. It was reasonable enough — Ki-jo was standing in for Hwang's share — and they seemed to trust the promise that he would answer in full for the gear Hwang had carried away on credit. Frank, beside them, vouched that Ki-jo ran businesses earning dollars and was well able to carry the load.
With that, even if HLKZ-TV went under, Ki-jo had his safeguard: he could lose only a fixed sum, and there would be no quarrel over who owned what. RCA agreed to spend the two hundred thousand dollars it would invest in Korea on the station's operating costs and on buying American films. Hollywood still had plenty of pictures that had never opened in Korea.
After the joint-venture contract was signed, Ki-jo drove himself even harder toward opening day. Content was his chief work. He set Cheongsan Heung-eop fully in motion and gathered entertainers at the Drama Salon in Myeongdong. The performers, playwrights, film actors, and directors who already treated the place as their haunt became assets beyond price.
For one of his flagship draws, he set out to turn Seoul Ttoksuni — the drama CBS had aired on the radio — into a television series. It would be little more than a rebroadcast, the radio scripts used as they stood, but the notion that actors who had been nothing but voices would now show their faces and perform in the flesh was a concept with real pull. Min Byeong-uk, the stage director Hwang Tae-young had already engaged, joined the television drama unit.
While that adaptation moved ahead, Ki-jo worked to lock down a second draw: comedians. He wanted Kim Hee-gap, Gu Bong-seo, Jang So-pal, and Go Chun-ja. In those days the comedians belonged to musical-theater troupes, and the troupes kept them too busy to be borrowed lightly. To pry them loose, he called on the weight of Lee Hwa-ryong and Kim Doo-han.
The troupes toured the whole country, and with quarrels flaring wherever they went, fists were never in short supply among them. Backed by Lee Hwa-ryong and Kim Doo-han, Won Tae-sik, who ran the entertainment side, brought the leaders of troupes then circling the provinces in to the Drama Salon.
Ki-jo made his offer first to the leader whose company included Jang So-pal and Go Chun-ja.
"Put your actors on television, and I'll carry your advertisements free of charge. I'll also promote the troupe through the wired-radio villages all over the country."
"But can you advertise over wired radio?"
"Of course. There's an amplifier at the antenna station. Plug a microphone into it and go on the air, and the word goes out at once."
The leader took the offer gladly. Their usual promotion was to tramp the country, crying the show aloud and pasting up posters. Use Ki-jo's method, and there would be no need to wear themselves out hawking it on foot. Take hold of a microphone at one of Cheongsan Communications' antenna stations, and a wide stretch of country could be reached in a single stroke.
The promoters saw the worth of the proposal before anyone else, and their mouths watered. One troupe leader after another accepted. Having joined hands with the companies of Kim Hee-gap and Gu Bong-seo as well, Ki-jo went on assembling the rest of his programming, piece by steady piece.