To My Eyes, It Looks Like a Noble Person
Nine Entertainment.
Entertainment agencies—whether you call them entertainment companies or management firms—can be split, broadly and roughly, into two types.
Those built around singers.
And those built around actors.
Of course, mixed companies exist these days, but the difference in expertise still shows. Anyway. Among them, Nine Entertainment. This place, commonly shortened to Nine, was a typical actor-centric agency.
There was a time when it enjoyed a golden age as the home of Shin Chaeyoon, the industry's top of the top. That stature, however, had long since faded. For one thing, Shin Chaeyoon—the company's face, and a top star of South Korea—had been in a provisional retirement for three years now.
What drove the Queen of Cannes into retirement was neither childcare nor a wish to stand behind her husband.
That actress, so beautiful it almost hurt to look at her, wept and poured out curses without the slightest regard for who was watching. Shin Chaeyoon came to the hospital and cried for days on end—first in front of the operating room, then in front of the recovery room. The grief was so raw, so piercing, that even the news outlets racing to report on Shin Chaeyoon's tears eventually reined themselves in.
The real reason they held back, of course, was that Shin Chaeyoon's husband was a high-flying executive at a major conglomerate—and that the conglomerate's CEO was a madman who would stop at nothing for that husband's sake.
Anyway.
After visiting the hospital whenever she could for nearly a year, Shin Chaeyoon one day simply stopped crying and abruptly left Korea.
"He's not dead, is he? He probably just couldn't sleep from following me around. ...I should've sent him on vacation more often. If I'd known he was going to take it all in one lump like this."
"I heard in some Arab country, someone recovered after decades. And where else? In America, someone woke up after ten years. Perfectly fine, too. So take good care of our Taewoo. I'll keep paying the hospital bills, so don't worry about the money."
"Ah. And don't contact me. That bastard Taewoo. Only get in touch when he opens his eyes. Got it, Yoona?"
It might have been because the living have to go on living. It might have been an escape—unable to bear watching someone she knew wither away a little more each day, kept alive only by machines. Or it might have been that she genuinely believed her manager would, by some miracle, open his eyes.
The reason didn't matter.
What mattered was the result: Shin Chaeyoon—who was Nine Entertainment itself, who accounted for an overwhelming share of the respect the company commanded in the industry—had left.
A desk doesn't become unusable only when it's smashed to pieces. If one of its four legs shortens, or snaps—and if you still have no choice but to keep using that desk—then the remaining legs will inevitably take on the overload, and a secondary collapse is bound to follow.
One month after Shin Chaeyoon left, Choi Chil-goo, the CEO of Nine Entertainment, wracked with a guilt that had nowhere to go, bought a camper van and began wandering the country.
Fishing. Drinking. Then falling asleep.
The only news that trickled in from time to time was that he would show his face at the hospital where Director Kim Taewoo lay, once every couple of months.
In the end, two of the four legs supporting Nine Entertainment had been pulled out.
No... Taewoo's been lying there for years too.
That made three of the four legs gone. Of course, these three weren't the only people who had kept Nine Entertainment fed. But there was no question that the company's core had been blown out.
Director Choi Yoona of Nine Entertainment tore at her hair.
If you traced the chain of events, you could conclude that it all started with Director Kim Taewoo's accident. But that wasn't the right conclusion. If that were the answer, it would mean sitting under a persimmon tree waiting for the fruit to drop—doing nothing but waiting for Director Kim Taewoo to wake up.
The company grew, but our capabilities couldn't keep up.
They were good people—but that was all they were. Their business acumen had been lacking. In this industry, it was a common enough verdict.
A top star. A company CEO with years of standing in the business. A Management Team Leader who, over long years of work, had naturally forged relationships with everyone in the industry.
How many organizations don't run on the strength of key people? But the entertainment industry was especially that way. And then those key people vanished overnight, with no system in place to fill the void.
No matter how much cash you'd piled up, a storehouse you only take from and never refill will eventually run dry. They burned through what they'd earned, and the scale shrank.
Because their good-natured CEO had left no safety clauses in the actors' contracts, when the pillars shook, rival agencies moved in to pry the actors loose. Not a few of them. A lot of them. Nine Entertainment was easy prey. Like snatching candy from a child's hand, competing firms smiled as they poached Nine's actors one by one.
And it wasn't as if the actors' positions were hard to understand. The company's foundation was shaking. Its systems were teetering. To stay out of simple loyalty, when the very people to whom that loyalty was owed were gone...
As the number of actors dwindled and the bigger names started leaving first, even the so-called bundling power—the ability to package lesser-known talent alongside bigger names—grew weak. Which made it even harder for rookie actors to grow. And as the company lost its strength, signing new actors became a pipe dream.
Not rolling forward, but rolling backward. Unlike most vehicles, life picks up speed when it's rolling in reverse.
That stretch of time was now entering its third year, and both the company's scale and its industry reputation had become thoroughly, utterly unimpressive. Choi Yoona, daughter of CEO Choi Chil-goo and Director of Nine Entertainment, felt her already complicated head was about to split.
Thanks to the blow they'd taken at dawn, the agency's remaining family—now shrunk to a mere dozen or so—had all come to work without even washing their faces, scrambling to deal with the fallout. In the CEO's office... now Director Choi Yoona's office, Choi Yoona shoved her chair back and stood. The employees' workspace came into view at a glance.
"Did you catch the one who ran?"
"Not yet. His phone's off. Even if it were on, we're not a private investigation firm—it's not like we'd have a way to track him down. We just can't get ahold of him at all."
"Haha..."
Choi Yoona let out a hollow laugh. She'd thought she'd been through every trial imaginable over the past three years as the company shrank by the day. The world, it turned out, was not that kind. The moment you got cocky and thought, I've gotten better at this, life slapped a bigger mess in your face and said, Here, try this one too.
Ha Eun-yul's Road Manager had gone into hiding. And at dawn, Ha Eun-yul's scandal had broken.
The order in which they'd learned of it had actually been the reverse. Ha Eun-yul's scandal had exploded, they'd frantically tried to reach her manager, and found his phone off and the man himself underwater. Thinking maybe he was just asleep, they'd started looking into the scandal—only to discover that the person who'd leaked the photos was the road manager himself.
"Um... even if we catch him, is there anything we can actually do?"
"We either threaten him with a lawsuit or pay him off so he can't spread any more nonsense—we have to do one or the other, don't we? No, before that—it isn't even true, so we should make him tell the truth!"
At Choi Yoona's words, Baek Sungwook, the Team Leader in charge of Ha Eun-yul, snorted.
"Come on, Director. A lawsuit? Even if we tried, you know what the CEO would say. 'Heh heh. How long did that kid work with us? Just let him go. He was probably just trying to survive.' And besides. If he were the type to tell the truth, he wouldn't have pulled this in the first place."
"...The CEO still isn't answering, is he?"
"If you can't reach him, Director, then nobody can. Wonder where he's gone this time. The East Sea, maybe."
"Haa..."
Choi Yoona clutched at her hair with both hands, as if trying to hold her head together.
There had been glory days, once. Didn't they say even a rich man takes three years to go broke? It had been exactly three years since Nine Entertainment started rolling backward. If this kept up, they were genuinely going to go under.
And then—
"Hello. I'm here for an interview."
In the midst of the chaos, a voice so peaceful it was almost jarring made Choi Yoona look toward the office entrance.
An interview?
Having deposited the man who'd just arrived in the conference room for the time being, Choi Yoona let out a sigh outside the door.
"Auntie. What's this about an interview?"
"It's not Auntie, it's General Manager Kim Misook, Director."
"That's not what I'm trying to argue about right now."
At Choi Yoona's whine, General Manager Kim Misook shrugged.
"The manager posting is always up. We finally got an application. And as it happens, Actor Bong Tae-soo's manager position is vacant, and he's resuming activities. So we have an opening, and we have an applicant. What's the problem?"
"Auntieeee... you know perfectly well this is not the time to be interviewing people."
"I told you, it's not Auntie? If people hear you, they'll think we're actually family. And it should be unnie, anyway. I'm still in my prime."
Unable to find a proper retort to General Manager Kim Misook's pointless banter, Choi Yoona shook her head. That was when Team Leader Baek Sungwook, standing a few steps away, opened his mouth in a rather loud voice.
"Director. I'll be heading out."
"Heading out where?"
At Choi Yoona's question, Team Leader Baek Sungwook waggled the phone in his hand.
"Got to get the set under control. There's a shoot today, and apparently reporters have already swarmed the place. The director's calling, and it's a mess."
She was about to say she understood—then her mind snapped into focus. Yes, there was a shoot today. Yes, their side needed to handle the set. Ha Eun-yul wasn't even the lead—make a racket and they'd just get chewed out for it. But with the road manager in the wind, if the Management Team Leader ran off to the set first?
"If you go to the set, Team Leader, who's going to pick up Actor Ha Eun-yul?"
"No idea. Calls keep coming in, so I'm going to go handle things first."
"Hey! Team Leader Baek!"
Choi Yoona shouted, but she failed to stop Team Leader Baek Sungwook.
It was a disaster. A complete mess. She might be young, and she might have come in as a half-parachute hire at an unlisted company, but still—when the person in charge of the company called you. To bolt from the office on the pretext of damage control.
What made it even more infuriating was that she had no grounds to get angry or hold him accountable. Because he wasn't wrong. Getting the set under control came first.
If you stuck the Team Leader in as a road manager just because the road manager slot had a hole in it? Then who'd fill the hole when the Team Leader couldn't handle the set?
The truly galling part was that he'd used the emergency as an excuse to leave without even finding a replacement road manager. More precisely, he'd dumped it on Choi Yoona—as if to say, you figure it out. Maybe it was his way of telling her to stop sitting around giving orders and actually get out in the field.
Angry and frustrated in equal measure, Choi Yoona felt General Manager Kim Misook bump her shoulder against hers.
"...?"
Then, to Choi Yoona's questioning look, she pointed her chin toward the inside of the conference room.
"There's your alternative, right there."
"What?"
"Come on. It's a given we can't find a fill-in for Ha Eun-yul's road manager right this second. And look—an interviewee showed up at the perfect time. So that's that. Right?"
Choi Yoona's gaze traveled through the conference room glass to the applicant on the other side.
"Ah..."
She didn't like him. That strangely calm demeanor didn't look like composure so much as a vacant dullness, as if there were no thoughts behind his eyes at all.
"...Did you just see him muttering to himself?"
And now he was suddenly talking to himself.
"He's probably just loosening up his mouth because he's nervous. And Director Choi. Let me tell you something—if you start taking a dislike to people for no reason, there's no end to it. Look at the situation. Do you have another option?"
"Auntie, even so, someone we met for the first time today..."
As Choi Yoona tried to continue, General Manager Kim Misook pressed a thin folder of documents into her hand.
"Here's the resume."
"Oh, honestly..."
"There are people who sell frozen water at the top of a mountain. It's expensive, though. You know why?"
"..."
"Your throat's parched, and if there's no water, that's the only place you can buy it. Climbing all the way back down the mountain just to get a drink doesn't make any sense."
It wasn't a wrong thing to say. She just didn't like the man visible through the conference room glass.
"He's been talking to himself this whole time. What is that even?"
"I told you, he's loosening up. Doesn't the head of an entertainment company know that? I'll find a manager for Actor Bong somehow, so just put out the fire in front of you first. To my eyes, he looks like a benefactor."
At General Manager Kim Misook's words, Choi Yoona drew a long, steadying breath, then headed into the conference room.