Return, Part 2
The first scene went like this.
Abandoned construction site / Rainy night
Yeong-ho, bleeding as he sat slumped against a pillar.
Baek Sang standing over him on the opposite side.
A line of men in black suits behind Baek Sang.
The gangsters looked down at Yeong-ho.
It was a common setup.
But in drama, that wasn’t a flaw.
An familiar opening usually helped the audience settle in comfortably.
What mattered was how you rolled it all together.
Jaekyung’s answer was flawless.
The first line, which set the tone of the opening scene, was excellent.
It entered through metaphor and threw out the central question, making it impossible not to focus on what came next.
It was immersion.
Seonghun liked this particular way Jaekyung handled things—he hammered the situation straight into your head.
Now, to Seonghun, this scene was no longer lines of text on a page.
He was a rookie, yes, but he was a director, which meant his imagination was even sharper and more exacting.
What he pictured before his eyes was a rainy abandoned construction site.
Baek Sang was speaking to Yeong-ho.
There was pity in those words.
Understanding came alive through the dialogue.
Yeong-ho is one of his men. So if he betrayed him, why does Baek Sang still sound regretful? Because he must have been exceptional—an outlier among men.
As if to confirm that thought, Yeong-ho’s reply followed.
He smiled crookedly, but his will remained unbroken.
And just like that, without showing a single cutaway shot, everything became clear.
Ah. Baek Sang sacrificed his men for profit. Yeong-ho, who led the pack, rose up against him, and now here they are.
It was coherence.
The character concept, first framed through the comparison of dogs and wolves, was completed by those lines.
A wolf. A pack leader wolf. A romantic gangster chasing loyalty, not money.
That was how much runtime had been packed in so far.
Three minutes? Five?
In that short span, the protagonist’s character was already fully built.
It’s incredibly compact. No matter how I look at it, this is the kind of thing that would work just as well as a film.
Anyway, now that the source material was in place, the question became how to use it.
Baek Sang flicked his cigarette to the ground.
Once again, the scene shifted with satisfying force.
Baek Sang turned around.
Zoom out.
The underlings all drew their knives at once.
Even though Yeong-ho was already in a wrecked state, unable to move so much as a fingertip, they couldn’t bring themselves to relax.
This was a nonverbal expression.
Their reaction and the atmosphere told you exactly how great a man Yeong-ho had been.
It was the death of a damp, solemn underworld enforcer.
Even facing death, Yeong-ho showed not the slightest fear, and that, too, fixed the character’s tone in place.
And so the wolf died.
He offered his throat to the teeth of the dogs that had once looked up at him.
Inside a scene packed this tightly with information, there was only one thing you truly had to understand.
What kind of man the protagonist had been.
That, at least, came through with absolute clarity.
And then the scene changed.
There, Seonghun let out a snort of laughter.
“So it’s Joseon.”
“A time-slip story.”
“During King Yeongjo’s reign, and the title is Sword-Bound Gentleman?”
“You know what Geomgye is, right?”
“Joseon gangsters. Not the modern kind—the real ones who used to slash people up and rob them.”
Just from the title and the story so far, the concept was already clear.
It was intuitive.
“Geomgye—the sword oath, and ilgun—one ruler. A single gentleman within Geomgye.”
So then.
“A modern gangster’s life among Joseon thugs. But qualitatively different from the lot of them.”
“A romantic noir boss, then. And the reason it’s set in Yeongjo’s era is because a Geomgye story shines best when the organization’s culture is in its twilight.”
“So the protagonist’s trajectory is a modern, corporate-style gangster?”
“Well, for now.”
He understood everything.
Only the protagonist, positioned within the rough sketch, stood out vividly.
Seonghun asked without thinking, “What happens next?”
Jaekyung grinned.
“You know it’s over the moment you ask that question, right?”
That teasing reply was the trigger.
Before he knew it, Seonghun burst out laughing.
“Kahahaha!!!”
He was right.
The heart of drama was to plant the question So what happens next? deep in the audience’s chest.
What mattered was the writer’s ability to make people instinctively hunger for the next scene.
That was why Seonghun saw the potential.
To some, this script might have seemed ordinary.
But let’s state one simple truth.
The thing is, specialness isn’t actually that important in drama.
This was commercial drama.
Before you even begin talking about artistry or literary merit, commercial work exists for one purpose: the enjoyment of the overwhelming majority.
And what, exactly, is the most important thing in that principle of “the overwhelming majority’s enjoyment”?
I can say it without hesitation.
Enjoyment comes second.
The overwhelming majority comes first.
Only when many people want it does enjoyment gain monetary value. That is commerce.
Jaekyung’s script was faithful to that value.
Seonghun admitted it.
“The genre choice was good.”
“A historical drama. A classic stronghold.”
“A genre even a ten-year-old and a seventy-year-old can watch. The baseline dislike for the genre itself is minimal.”
“Noir is the same.”
“Exactly. Combine the two, and you secure broad, almost absolute mass appeal. There’s an easy catharsis to it, too. But that combination hasn’t really been attempted all that often. At least not in Korea.”
“You just make it familiar.”
“Right. That’s the goal, isn’t it? Fuse Geomgye, which might feel unfamiliar to someone, with noir, and compress the historical understanding into something accessible.”
“You saw right through it.”
Seonghun found himself newly impressed by Jaekyung.
It wasn’t just a matter of the content being good.
He didn’t have a long career yet, but as a director he could tell there was something there.
He could see how much the scene arrangement had been designed with filming in mind, how much thought had gone into what kind of budget each scene would require and how it should be staged.
It was writing with production cost neatly folded into it.
He’s insanely smart. He hasn’t even stepped onto the commercial battlefield yet, and he already understands that instinctively.
What word other than talent could you possibly use to describe that?
Of course, the most important thing was the actual finished product.
But the writer was Han Jaekyung.
Of course he can do it. It’s Han Jaekyung, for God’s sake.
That was why you couldn’t help but like him.
If he ever had to pick a running mate for the dream, if he ever had to find someone to make the greatest work of his life with, Seonghun couldn’t think of a single person who could beat Jaekyung.
It was obvious even now.
He looked like a man worn thin by fatigue at a glance.
And yet the Jaekyung in front of him seemed more alive than ever.
He looked like a log throwing its fire high into the sky, burning hotter and brighter than anything else around it.
He almost looked like a star, so clearly did his will blaze forth: even if he had to burn every last thing he owned, he would make his creation properly.
By then, Seonghun’s anger had vanished completely.
Only a giddily pleasant feeling remained.
Clutch!
Seonghun grabbed Jaekyung’s arm.
He was beaming as he spoke.
“Yeah, I get it. I get it now.”
How could he not?
“If this is in your head, how could you possibly contract for anything else? You have no choice but to do this!”
“...Well. Let’s go with that, then. Sure.”
The answer was lukewarm, but Seonghun didn’t mind.
Of course Star Village Island People had also been a shocking drama.
It went in a different direction from the things Seonghun had seen so far, while still retaining the grammar of what made a drama fun.
But this overwhelming mass appeal was impossible to beat no matter how you looked at it.
This was genre winning outright.
His blood was boiling.
He wasn’t even directly involved in the project, and yet he was thrilled that he’d been the first to recognize the man who wrote it.
The certainty that he hadn’t made the wrong choice.
And on top of that, the public’s cheers when this work was finally released.
“Let’s take this to Director Jo! Forget manners or anything else—if he sees this, he’ll be on his knees begging us to let him do it!”
Yes, what was there to apologize for?
No, they would have to apologize later, but if you stacked an opening script like this and a treatment, then added even a synopsis on top, Director Jo wouldn’t have much room to maneuver.
If he wasn’t blind in more ways than one, he’d have no choice but to know it.
He’ll cling to it once he realizes this is the peak of his career.
Just as Seonghun’s eyes were gleaming and he was about to drag Jaekyung out with him—
Tap!
“?”
Jaekyung brushed Seonghun off.
“What are you talking about? Why would I work with that guy?”
“?”
Seonghun was left speechless.
* * *
That night, Seonghun drank himself stupid.
Why?
Jaekyung had offered an explanation, in his own way.
Part of it made sense, and part of it didn’t.
- First of all, Director Jo is good at rom-coms. He’s done some decent thriller directing, too. But noir? Historical drama? Has he ever done either of those in his career? Hell, didn’t people even say his action scenes were crap when he was doing thrillers?
- And you’re really going to swallow a project from a guy who already caused a stir once? You know how directors treat rookie writers. Guys with egos like Director Jo will wreck the framing while trying to satisfy their own directing itch. That’s an error. A huge one.
He understood that much.
Jaekyung was still a rookie writer, no matter what anyone said, but apart from that he was a man with unusually strong skills and an ironclad ego.
He wouldn’t just sit there and let someone casually touch his work and ruin it.
I get that, but...!
What the hell were the other two reasons supposed to be?
- He just gives off a bad vibe. He looks like a poisonous toad with an STD. I don’t want to shake hands with him. Feels like I’d catch something.
- I’d bet my arm he’s got some scandal blowing up within a few years. You think I’m going to force myself to partner with that guy? Try it, and I’ll quit writing altogether.
A face reading? Bad energy?
Had he received some kind of divine revelation?
If he had, he’d have gone up into the mountains or something.
In the end, the policy remained a fog.
Honestly, setting aside whether it made sense or not, the fact that Jaekyung’s reasons still felt oddly plausible was enough to make him miserable.
As a matter of common decency, you had to apologize to someone you’d offended.
In business, an insult like that had to be compensated for if you wanted it erased.
Whatever the case, Director Jo was a director with enough name value to stand on.
For a rookie writer with nothing to his name like Jaekyung, ruining his image in the industry would be child’s play.
And yet why does he have to act so calm about it...?
When it came down to it, Seonghun’s habit of worrying seriously about things that weren’t even really his problem was one of his strengths.
That it also gave him grief was another matter entirely.
What is Jaekyung even thinking?
No—maybe he wasn’t thinking at all.
Right!
Because he only thinks about writing!
Besides, among writers with low social awareness, he was practically sitting at the bottom of the barrel!
That had to be why he could stay so composed!
Grinding his teeth, Seonghun poured back another drink.
He only decided to go home once the room had started spinning.
Late at night, in a house with the lights off, Seonghun fell asleep on the living room sofa without ever letting go of the script he’d been hugging to his chest.
And then morning came.
“Ugh...”
He woke up with his head pounding like it was about to split open.
But the sight in front of him was strange.
“...Dad?”
His father was there.
And he was seriously reading the script Jaekyung had brought over the day before.
Seonghun scrambled up from the sofa.
Only then did he realize that, drunk out of his mind, he had passed out not at his studio apartment but at his parents’ house, and his face turned deathly white.
Ah...!
An intoxicated twenty-eight-year-old son who had crawled home like a dog after guzzling liquor.
If Seonghun were his own parent, he wouldn’t exactly look on him kindly...
“Seonghun.”
“Yes! Father!”
“Is this script his? The Jaekyung you keep talking about.”
“Huh?”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“I... guess so?”
“I see.”
Seonghun swallowed hard.
The authority with which his father handled the script created that tension.
His name was Park Taeja Jinja.
At home, he was simply the father Seonghun had seen all his life. Out in the world, he was different.
“Hmm...”
The head of WBS, one of the three major terrestrial broadcasters.
And not just that—he was a legend in the industry who had started as an ordinary employee and clawed his way all the way up to the executive seat on merit alone.
That man was reading Jaekyung’s script over and over, completely absorbed.