Contest (1)

The beginning of Sword-Bound Gentleman had been simple enough.

A documentary channel was airing a program on Joseon history, and by pure chance, the segment I happened to see was about common society during King Sukjong’s reign.

It was a time when I had more than enough on my hands.

My previous project had blown up over an affair ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠scandal involving the lead actor, and I’d been holed up in misery ever since.

So leaving that channel on in the background while I drank beer wasn’t anything unusual.

Then, while idly watching the footage with a bottle in hand, it suddenly occurred to me.

This is good.

I was drawn to that society.

Calling it inspiration would have been too romantic a word; this was a thoroughly rational judgment.

The moment I linked the keywords Geomgye and gangsters, the material practically assembled itself, complete with both immediate comprehension and a jolt to the imagination.

The Geomgye, who carried swords and extorted commoners, became the Joseon equivalent of modern gangsters.

Women who ruled the market streets, acting as bankers to nearby peddlers while even local magistrates watched their power carefully, became madams.

Merchant guilds became corporations.

Officials became politicians.

People have never been all that different, whether then or now.

In the familiarity of those shared traits, the distinct flavor of the era itself was added, and the result was a source material about “Joseon’s gangster world led by twenty-first-century corporate thugs.”

What mattered here was the material’s potential for expansion, and Sword-Bound Gentleman already had that in abundance.

There are plenty of references. All I have to do is blend the sensibility of modern noir into a period piece. Tighten the narrative. Make it a little more savage.

That’s what becomes raw, primal fun.

No matter how loudly people preach morality, there is a truth that has never changed in any era.

Numbers don’t lie. History doesn’t lie either.

Violence was the sport humans had enjoyed longest.

The overwhelming majority of human beings loved violence.

Physical, mental, or material—any form would do.

Violence had always promised power and fame to whoever mastered it.

It just didn’t say so out loud.

The success of a genre was proof of the murkiness buried beneath human psychology.

Wouldn’t the violence of the material be a problem?

Of course not. Human morality is absurdly subjective.

There’s a common saying in the business.

The only crime of a commercial writer is writing something that isn’t fun.

As long as it’s entertaining, viewers will justify the narrative’s existence all on their own.

Popularity is completed only when both producer and consumer tell the same obvious lie.

A three-year-old and a seventy-year-old could watch this drama and still have to tell the same lie in service of its social legitimacy.

In other words, it needed a center that could make them deceive themselves.

That wasn’t ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hard.

All I had to do was follow the genre’s grammar.

The protagonist’s nature.

Faith.

The assignment of a core trait.

Amusingly enough, human beings feel superior when they believe themselves righteous, which is why noir protagonists always had a cause.

In the West, this was called romance; in the East, righteousness.

The protagonist was a character who followed that archetype.

A person who would gamble his life not for money, but for loyalty to the brothers who had shared drinks with him.

A person whose choices could justify violence and deliver catharsis.

Everyone would understand him easily, and imagine him just as easily.

Among Geomgye members who existed only as evil, the protagonist would seem almost impossibly noble because he moved by faith.

The protagonist would become someone worth enough for them to immerse themselves in his path and justify it.

That was how the formula for success was completed.

The work I had agonized over all my life, my greatest regret, was the writing I had poured two full years into in order to fully realize those ideas and the catharsis of those situations.

It hadn’t seen the light of day back then.

But now, with time rewound—

I can show them. I can show them what kind of thing this is.

Just thinking about it made my chest stir with excitement.

That hunger nagged at my drive every moment.

But a drama doesn’t simply spring into existence because the script was written well.

First, the environment for that script had to be created.

In other words, by the standards of this era—

Someone has to either contact a production company or get this approved by the drama department at a broadcasting station.

It would be a lie to say there wasn’t a difficult part there.

That pig-toad is definitely going to bad-mouth me behind my back, so who would take me on?

The words I had blurted out right after my regression, thinking it was a dream, had come back to bite me.

Even if I’d known at the time that this was reality, I couldn’t confidently say my attitude would have changed much—but that wasn’t much of an excuse.

There was no place in the entertainment industry where factionalism ran harder.

Two or three degrees of separation and everyone knew everyone else. At a time like this, when Director Jo was still shambling around in one piece—

That bastard would’ve trashed me no matter what came out of his mouth.

So was there really no way?

If you asked me that, my answer was immediate.

Why wouldn’t there be?

There was.

I had fifteen years of the broadcast industry’s rise and collapse inside my head.

A directory of human beings who were both landmines and treasures.

A cheat code in the form of the history of the accidents and scandals they had created.

In this industry, where success or failure was decided entirely by the variable known as people, that was an asset no amount of money could buy.

And that was the larger context behind it.

There was a reason I had chosen Sword-Bound Gentleman as my debut work, even though this was the period when it would later fetch an even higher price.

There was that incident around this time.

A scandal that would later remain a negative legend in the broadcast industry.

An accident that was practically proof of the sneering phrase people liked to use: “writer average.”

Isn’t it soon? That thing’s going to happen, isn’t it?

Just to be sure, I checked the calendar, and sure enough, it was coming up fast.

In just a few days, there would be a chance to win on script alone, without any interference from industry gossip or someone else’s reputation.

The atmosphere in the WBS drama department office was no different from a house of mourning.

At the center of it all, a man with arms as thick as an average woman’s waist slammed a fist onto the desk.

WHAM!

“So that’s what this means now?! Huh!? A production blow-up at this timing makes no sense at all!!!”

“Th-that’s…”

“Where is he! Where the hell is Writer Seo!”

“He’s… in detention.”

The most senior chief producer, Go Yeongchan, shut his eyes tight.

The kind of man who didn’t even deserve a vulgar curse—it would be a waste of breath.

And why wouldn’t it be? The writer who’d just landed in detention was the very man supposed to be writing the drama fixed for next year’s third quarter.

This wasn’t the sort of accident that could simply be cleaned up.

He had allegedly smashed a host at a host bar over the head with a liquor bottle.

If it made headlines, that was the end.

Even if it were quietly buried and passed over, what if it was dug back up later?

In this line of work, the station itself went up in flames for the sin of trying to cover it up.

Yeongchan’s fist trembled violently.

Veins stood out on his forehead.

Honestly, why were writers always like this?

If they had no name, they caused trouble because they had no name. If they became known, their shoulders shot up to the sky and they started causing every bizarre, grotesque incident imaginable.

This is why we should’ve kept them on a leash from the start!

This writer hadn’t started out this way either.

Until his first two projects succeeded, he’d been a fairly cooperative man, with no major trouble to speak of.

But people’s true nature doesn’t show itself until you crack them open.

Now that back-to-back hits had stuffed a tremendous sum of money into his bank account, his character was finally starting to leak through the seams.

The unfortunate part was that all of this was happening exactly when the budget had already been allocated and pre-production was about to begin.

In a normal drama production environment, this counted as a major disaster among major disasters.

There was no time to spare.

“What about the backlog scripts?”

“Well…”

“Forget it. We only even asked because those were too weak and we’d already approved Writer Seo’s script. And what about the production companies—did you contact any?”

“Last quarter we got wiped out so badly that what’s left is pretty poor in quality.”

“Damn it.”

Yeongchan let out a heavy sigh.

He was scratching his head furiously, nerves on edge, when junior CP Yang Miryeo spoke up cautiously.

She looked thoroughly cowed.

“Senior, shouldn’t we report this to the director first?”

“We should. I’ll go myself.”

Yeongchan’s sense of responsibility was fierce in situations like this.

Normally strict, he also had the backbone to go straight into the ugliest mess first.

The director was not the sort of man who would blink at much of anything.

But this was the kind of issue even he couldn’t just sit back and watch, so whatever happened, a dressing-down was unavoidable.

He couldn’t send a junior in after knowing that much.

Yeongchan took several deep breaths before moving.

Following the hallway brought him to the director’s office.

The tightly shut door did not feel at all like a metaphor when it looked like the gate to hell.

After knocking, Yeongchan spoke.

“Director, may I come in!”

“Yeah, come in, Chief.”

When he opened the door, a middle-aged man with a cold expression was handling his work.

The man who had written one of WBS’s greatest success stories.

A once-famous luck-drenched bastard who had even been called the People’s Thief for marrying the top actress of his era.

Director Park Taejin.

His calm expression was almost unsettling.

Had he not heard yet?

That was what Yeongchan thought, but apparently that wasn’t it.

“It’s about the production blow-up, isn’t it?”

“Y-yes. I’m sorry. I have no face to show for it.”

“There won’t be anything decent left among the scripts we already have on hand.”

“...No, sir.”

“Then is this for a closed blind contest?”

“We won’t be able to make the period very long, but I think that’s what we’ll have to do.”

By then, cold sweat was already soaking his back.

They might end up shooting with a script assembled at the last minute, but if they wanted to find something that fit the conditions and still schedule it, this was what had to happen now.

Yeongchan steeled himself for a furious reprimand and squeezed his eyes shut.

But the director’s reaction was strange.

“...Hmm. No. Let’s go public this time.”

That was it. No rebuke, just that one line.

Yeongchan’s head snapped up.

“Sir?”

“Open the contest to everyone. Keep the blind format, but make it public. No need to extend the deadline.”

It was an incomprehensible decision.

If the number of scripts increased, the review process would take that much more effort.

It would only mean more time wasted sifting through below-average work.

So why make it public?

“May I ask why, sir?”

The answer was oddly cryptic.

“...Because I think he’ll come.”

“If you mean ‘he’ll come’…”

Tok. Tok.

Taejin tapped the table with his index finger.

His expression was still composed. Yet beneath that composure lay something else—interest.

“An interesting one.”

Yeongchan tilted his head.

Of course he had no idea what script Taejin had seen just a few days earlier.

There’s a saying that’s fairly famous in the industry.

Writers are divided into two kinds of people: “writers who can write but have no social skills,” and “writers who can’t write and have no social skills.”

I agreed with that one hundred percent.

Even as a writer myself, I had no way to deny that the average writer’s social skills sat somewhere at the bottom of society.

And yet, the pity of it was this: the drama industry as a whole revolved around those very writers.

Have you heard the phrase? Drama is a writer’s game.

The ones who wrote well were the kings.

Not just kings—super-kings, the kind the director personally came out to greet and escort.

Imagine it for a second.

People whose social skills were at rock bottom, who spent every day writing dopamine-soaked stories about beating someone down, destroying someone, or cutting someone out of the picture, suddenly got their hands on power too.

People who still had not even learned how to properly understand peer relationships or hierarchy had been sent to the top before they ever learned how to function in society.

It was easy enough to predict what would happen.

Writer average.

Whenever Seonghun-hyung heard stories about the outrages committed by writers in this world, he would always deliver that exact evaluation.

He did usually tack on a little extra—

I’m proud of you, Jaekyung. Even among writers like that, you’ve managed to stand proudly at the top.

...I was in a situation that practically invited hysteria, so I felt I deserved some leeway.

Anyway.

The incident that put the finishing stroke on “writer average” happened around this time.

After enduring a fairly long career as an assistant writer and a period of anonymity, Mr. Seo—whose shoulders had risen a little, a lot, after two consecutive hits—lost his mind over the astronomical amount of money that landed in his bank account once his compensation contract ended, and went to a bar where a lineup of pretty boys was always waiting.

There he enjoyed a long, boozy, rough night, and when the host refused a second round after he was already worked up, his temper snapped.

Normally, people don’t start a riot there.

Even drunkenness has its limits.

But our Mr. Seo was riding high at the peak of life.

Surrounded by people who fawned over him with “Writer-nim, Writer-nim” every time he stepped outside, even the thin social skills he’d had in his scrubby days had been washed away clean.

Unable to contain his anger, he went bang!

And cracked the pretty boy’s skull with a bottle.

A truly drama-writer-style act of punishment that transcended legal logic.

Wasn’t the victim left with a cerebral hemorrhage?

The poor young man had spent a night with the wrong customer and ended up with seventeen stitches on the back of his head, along with a permanent disability.

WBS couldn’t bear the matter any longer and tossed Mr. Seo out.

But the contracted script had already reached the pre-production stage.

They had to fill the slot somehow, didn’t they?

And just to make things worse, at that exact moment there wasn’t a single script available that fit the scale of the budget already assigned.

That was why they held the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠closed blind contest.

A rescue sequence to collect scripts from industry people and choose one from the pile.

Blind.

Didn’t that sound rather sweet?

For me now, it was the most necessary condition imaginable.

Did I have confidence?

There was no way I didn’t.

At this point in time, there isn’t a script more strategically useful than Sword-Bound Gentleman.

A script contest isn’t held to give everyone an equal chance.

Broadcast stations aren’t charities, and what they want is “the material that can make the most efficient use of limited resources.”

Unfair?

Who in a broadcasting station at this point would even bother listening to a complaint like that?

Anyway, that was the situation.

The real issue was how to get into the blind process.

Let’s say I was an inexperienced newcomer with no career to speak of.

That was exactly when you used connections.

I called Seonghun-hyung right away.

The kind of premium connection that had already sucked dry every bit of the good luck in my life.

As the son of a broadcast station director, he should at least be able to send an anonymous script to a contest.

Click.

I hung up.

My head tilted.