An Endless Offroad Riddled with Potholes
Congratulations. May you bring honor to your school's name.
“Yes, thank you.”
So my final words ended up being an imitation of Woo Woongbae.
And after I hung up the phone and turned to tell Woo Woongbae, he was already racing down the stairs. Thunder cracked.
“I'm the top student of the Film Production department!”
Then came a triumphant roar.
“Lee Heeyoon's the top of the Acting department too!”
He was saying everything normally when he talked to his parents, so apparently that bizarre medieval way of talking with me was just a bit he was doing.
Thunder crashed three more times, and then Woo Woongbae and his parents came sprinting back up. The three of them surrounded me, wrapped me in a hug, and started bouncing up and down.
“We've got a future film director and actor in our house!”
I had absolutely no idea what was going on. It was the first time in my life I'd ever done anything like this.
Somehow, though, bouncing around like that melted the awkwardness between me and Woo Woongbae completely naturally.
Human beings were a total mystery.
I thought about the lifespan I had left.
A little over fifteen years.
Back in the day, even that had felt too long, but thinking about it now, I finally understood why time seemed to stretch on.
Some people spent it doing pointless, meaningless things like this — hugging each other, rejoicing, jumping around like the house was about to collapse.
Sharing friendship, loving each other, wailing and falling apart. That was apparently what people spent their time on.
Seen that way, fifteen years didn't feel quite so long anymore.
Who knew — maybe one day it would even start to feel short.
Anyway, after bouncing around with Woo Woongbae's family, I decided to go back to the movie the two of us had been watching alone.
But before hitting play, Woo Woongbae — already serious-faced by default — got even more serious.
“Lee Heeyoon. I have a favor to ask.”
“Sure, whatever it is.”
“……How do you know what it is?”
“You want me to act in the first movie you ever make. There, done deal.”
Woo Woongbae nodded, then opened his mouth again.
“Well, about that. 'First movie' is wrong. I've actually made three films since elementary school.”
“And you never showed me any of them? Hey, I thought we were friends.”
Since I now knew we were friends even after a little fighting, I said it half-teasing, and Woo Woongbae flinched.
“Y-your eye for cinema has gotten rather, ah, discerning……. My apologies. I shall show them to you at once.”
“Hurry up. I have to get home.”
“As you wish.”
Woo Woongbae promptly played all three films back to back.
Two of them were less movies than a compilation of footage he'd shot nonstop from the moment a camera first landed in his hands — but the last one was, unmistakably, a film.
He'd made it with his middle school film club. Three years of Woo Woongbae were packed into it, he said.
After watching, I asked him.
“So what do you want to make — film or movies?”
“Movies. Massive, spectacular movies. Tentpoles! Though I suppose school will teach me how to make films.”
“Anything's fine. Shoot whatever comes your way. As long as you're at this school, I'll act in every single movie you ask me to.”
“Ha, throwing promises around that recklessly — no wonder you ended up with a demon and….”
“You in or out?”
“Absolutely in. Don't you dare take it back.”
“You don't take it back. And actually make something. Three whole years in a film club and you made one film? And watch more movies. Lay off the anime already.”
“Wow, you really know how to poke where it hurts.”
“What did I even poke?”
“An otaku's heart.”
“You absolute lunatic.”
“Start with the Naoki Urasawa stuff. I refuse to share a table with anyone who hasn't read that author.”
“Short?”
“Insanely long.”
Apparently I wasn't the only one who came away confirming that a little squabble wouldn't put a scratch on our friendship. Even so, we kept bickering on and off.
Then we binge-watched dramas again, and it wasn't until I was about to head home that I belatedly remembered something and turned to Woo Woongbae.
“About commercial films.”
“Yeah?”
“Make your debut before you turn thirty-two. I mean it.”
“In international age?”
“No, Korean age.”
“Genius or not, that's a tall order.”
“Then try harder. In exchange, you've got until the end of the year for the final shoot.”
Give a deadline, and suddenly everything becomes possible.
Woo Woongbae did keep making films. The name Woo Woongbae lingered faintly in my memory. We'd never worked together, though; he'd spent his whole career as an assistant director and finally released a film of his own in December of the year I died.
I remember standing in a theater, torn between his movie and another one, and picking the one that seemed less likely to hit streaming. If I hadn't been drinking myself into a wreck every night, I'd have seen both.
What would the debut film of thirty-seven-year-old Woo Woongbae have been like?
I'd only seen what he made when he was young, but this much I could guarantee.
That man was destined for the ranks of the great masters.
With even Park Seonyoung in the hospital, the married couple's house was, for all practical purposes, mine alone to look after.
And that was the house the people from Leader Actors came to visit — to celebrate my passing the pre-screening audition.
“If you all want to drink, just drink. Why use me as the excuse?”
When I gave the Leader Actors crew, who'd set up a barbecue and drinking party in the garden, a piece of my mind, CEO Gam Seongbeom shouted back, utterly wasted.
“We never got a chance to have a company dinner! An opportunity like this can't be passed up!”
At that, the very man responsible for there being no company dinners — Jang Choongwon, whose last two dramas had both wrapped in the single-digit ratings range — declared with a stretched-out face:
“That's right, my dramas pulled in one percent, so nobody got a chance to celebrate…… It's all my fault!”
Jang Choongwon was clearly aiming for cheerful, but the mood turned funeral-solemn. That was when I heard Do Jaeyeon grumbling.
“That's what happens when you ignore the Vice President practically begging you not to do it……”
“Aigoo, Jaeyeon's drunk.”
Bae Ise, our agency's only female actress and still barely more than a nobody, desperately cut Do Jaeyeon off.
Jang Choongwon's face had gone from drunk to thoroughly inflamed, but since Do Jaeyeon wasn't wrong, he swallowed whatever he wanted to say. Then, in the end, he couldn't hold it in.
“Well, you're not acting anymore anyway.”
Bae Ise registered that stopping Do Jaeyeon was now a physical impossibility and put on the face of someone who had accepted her fate. Sure enough, Do Jaeyeon's voice exploded across the yard.
“You're saying that NOW?!”
“Yeah, I said it! And if that's not speech, is it a fish?!”
“Ugh, fish this, fish that, FISH! This is supposed to be an actors' agency, but all I smell every day is fish!”
“You fail at everything in a row and see how long you survive without fishing!”
They say people get romanticized once they're dead, and it seemed I'd been remembering the Leader Actors crew in a wildly flattering light.
How on earth had I forgotten that these people, in their youth, were this immature, this fond of drinking, and fought literally every single day?
And yet, absurdly enough, watching it all made it feel undeniably real — everyone had really come back.
The others were drunk and snickering at the Jang Choongwon–Do Jaeyeon brawl, and only Vice President Gam Soohan was desperately trying to break it up, but two stone-drunk adults were beyond him.
In the end, I — the only sober one — tried to help, wedged my way in between them, and took an elbow from an agitated Jang Choongwon square in the face.
It didn't feel like I'd been hit that hard, but something was trickling down, and when I checked, I was bleeding from the nose.
I grabbed the nearest tissue within arm's reach and jammed it up my nostril. Everyone was watching me, so I figured this was my moment and spoke up.
“Fight all you want — just make sure you make up too.”
“…….”
“This is the only place I've got to go, so don't wreck it.”
But it seemed that alone wasn't enough to stop the Downfall of Leader Actors. There was no happy news of the pace slowing or anything of the sort.
“Heeyoon.”
“I'm turning in.”
Leaving behind Vice President Gam Soohan calling after me, I went into my room.
Lying on my bed, I racked my brain.
If I didn't save Leader Actors, my regression meant nothing. To save this place, I had to work more. There was no other way. By any means necessary, I had to put a fortune in Leader Actors' hands.
I'd just take whatever work came. At my age, the roles coming in would all be low-paying jobs. But if I worked without rest, somehow……
I was in the middle of worrying alone when it happened.
Through the thin hanji door, I could faintly hear six of the agency's actors and five staff members — everyone except me and Gam Ihyun — murmuring outside.
“So why on earth did you fight at the party for the youngest?”
“And Choongwon-hyung's the one who hit him, too.”
“Uuu, trash.”
“No, you're right that he's trash, but…… Heeyoon's reaction was strange too. Normally you'd get angry or sulk. What kind of kid reacts like that? And I'd already pulled a trashy move, so it made me look even worse.”
“It really did look that way.”
“Aigoo……. The guilty party will just have to endure it.”
They were making far too much noise about me outside, so I slid the door open with a creak. Eleven pairs of Leader Actors grown-ups' eyes all turned to me.
The smell of alcohol absolutely wafted off them.
“What are you doing?”
At my question, Jang Choongwon answered sheepishly.
“Sorry. Here, hit me back.”
“No thanks.”
“Kid's got firm opinions, I'll give him that. Big brother will personally take you fishing!”
“I want that even less.”
“Wow, you really are completely lacking in manners, huh.”
Jang Choongwon nodded along to his own words. Beside him, CEO Gam Seongbeom — equally the worse for wear — chimed in.
“I'm just praying this is nothing but puberty.”
“Feels more like just his personality.”
“We're in trouble.”
Gam Seongbeom made a show of sighing, then burst into laughter gone completely loose with drink and said to me:
“But once you're one of ours, you're one of ours forever! Until the day you walk out of here on your own two feet, I will take very, very good care of you!”
“Even trash like me?”
“Aigo, you little punk. Just be moved, would you?”
“Considering I'm the only sober person here, it's just funny—”
Before I could finish, Gam Seongbeom and Jang Choongwon, then every last actor and staff member, threw their arms around my shoulders. They ran out of room on the wooden porch and gradually spilled down into the inner courtyard. Twelve of us, me included, stood in a circle with arms over shoulders, and CEO Gam Seongbeom declared:
“We are not dying! Leader Actors is going to grow, and it's going to blow up big. Trust me. I'm staking my life on this place. From here on out, the only way left for us is UP!”
Sober, it was nothing but drunken rambling — but to the drunk, it apparently sounded deeply moving.
Except for Jang Choongwon, they were all rookies or no-name actors. A tiny company where a single successful audition was cause for a festival.
In that kind of company, CEO Gam Seongbeom made grand speeches, and somehow everyone got swept up in them.
Fortunately, I knew. Leader Actors would hold on, and it would grow.
Mostly thanks to me. Which meant I still had to keep delivering. As long as I did well, somehow it would—
work out.
“Oh? Heeyoon's smiling!”
The least-drunk of the bunch, Vice President Gam Soohan, was the first to catch my expression, and Bae Ise — who until moments ago had still been sober enough to restrain Do Jaeyeon — pinched my cheek.
“Aww, he's adorable. It's actually unreal. If he weren't the boss's son, why would a kid this cute have come to our company?”
“Ise, you're drunk.”
“Look how soft his cheeks are. I've been dying to get a proper look and never once could. So what if he's a little short on manners — look how cute he is.”
This time it was Do Jaeyeon who dragged Bae Ise away by the collar. The pinched cheek throbbed. Quick on the uptake, Vice President Gam Soohan fashioned an ice pack and held it to my face.
It was an absolute train wreck, and somehow the grown-ups trying so hard to make me laugh through it were, more or less, actually funny.
“Once more — congratulations on placing first! The future superstar of Leader Actors!”
CEO Gam Seongbeom gave the toast, and I raised my cup of soda among the grown-ups.
I was just thinking that company dinners could actually be kind of fun, when—
From beyond the clinking glasses, the Demon spoke up.
WARNING
WARNING
WARNING
[Top placement has accelerated the Downfall of Leader Actors]
Exercise caution.
Human life, when you got right down to it, was one endless offroad — a road riddled, pothole after pothole, with bottomless pits to fall into.