Suddenly Misunderstood (2)
"Haaah...."
His workshop was thick with a haze of stale cigarette smoke. Writer Kim Myeonghwan let out a deep sigh and dragged a hand down his dry face. Just then, the smartphone sitting in the corner of his desk lit up with a short buzz.
The sender was PD Ji Seoyun of Studio Miracle. When Kim Myeonghwan read her message, a deep furrow carved itself between his brows.
"...Like anyone's holding it back on purpose. The next part won't come to me. What am I supposed to do about that?"
Chewing on his lip, he turned his gaze to the monitor. On the screen sat the files 'Part 1_Final Revision.hwp' and 'Part 2_Final Revision.hwp', and in the folder beside them, the original file: Untitled_REALREALREAL Final.hwp.
With trembling hands, Kim Myeonghwan opened the Untitled file. A plot that seized your attention from the very first page, characters who breathed, dialogue with real weight. It was a certifiably insane script that drew gasps of admiration no matter how many times he reread it. But this script was not his writing.
"Damn it.... Like anyone can't write this kind of thing."
Kim Myeonghwan was mired in a brutal slump. There had been a time when he'd churned out hit after hit and the network had practically carried him on their shoulders, but that was all ancient history. His recent works had flopped one after another, and his name in the industry had plummeted into the gutter. And just as he was bitterly feeling the rust on his own pen, the call had come from PD Ji Seoyun.
He'd sent over discarded scraps — abandoned drafts he'd given up on midway. He'd naturally assumed she'd dismiss them for their low quality and never give them a second glance, but she had fallen hard for the mystery script.
The script titled Untitled.
The trouble was, he had never written anything under that title. Most likely, while organizing a pile of files, someone else's script had gotten mixed in with his. So he'd opened the 'Untitled' file she'd sent back, just to check — and read it.
This is insane. This is a guaranteed smash hit.
No — beyond a smash hit, a gut certainty seized him that this would become the best drama of the year. Who on earth wrote this? Who were they? Admiration and jealousy toward the unknown writer of these pages surged up in him like madness. But that feeling didn't last long, before the devil's whisper began in his head.
What if.... I'm the one who writes the continuation of this?
This one script could restore his former glory. Maybe even more than that. Swept along by that sweet temptation, it didn't take long for the lie to leave his mouth.
But once he'd taken the plunge, a cold wave of fear washed over him. He had no idea who the true owner of this script was. What if the drama went into production and the real original author appeared, raising accusations of plagiarism? His career as a writer would end that very day.
So Kim Myeonghwan got clever. He took a massive pair of shears to the existing Parts 1 and 2 and forced through heavy revisions.
He quietly twisted the characters' settings and the direction of the plot, shuffled the order of the episodes, and slapped on tired old clichés in the name of adding "his own color." All with the scheme that if the original author ever surfaced, he could wave it off as a coincidental overlap of subject matter. But the real problem was that the Part 1 and 2 scripts he'd torn apart and rebuilt had become agonizingly unfunny.
"Ah, damn it.... Why has the writing gotten so stiff and childish?"
The original's springy tension and propulsive momentum had evaporated, leaving nothing but an air of artifice floating around. It was like taking a premium A-grade beef ribeye, grinding it up in a blender, and mushing it into a cheap hamburger steak.
On top of that, the greatest obstacle was that from Part 3 onward, he had to create entirely new content from scratch.
"Fucking hell.... The original author just threw this out without even thinking. How the hell am I supposed to continue the plot from here?"
If he submitted it as is, exposure was only a matter of time. Should he come clean to PD Ji even now? Admit that the nameless script was never his to begin with?
"...."
No. Absolutely not. The water was already spilled, and his petty pride would never allow it.
"Whew. Okay. I can do this. Who am I, after all? I'm Kim Myeonghwan."
Granted, he was off his game and in a slump at the moment, but he had decades of writing experience under his belt. If he could just get the skeleton in place and dress it up with veteran craft, the baseline quality would be guaranteed.
I'll write it somehow. Grit my teeth and finish it no matter what.
He placed his hands back on the keyboard. The clatter of typing — a blend of unease, anxiety, and seething greed — began to fill the darkened workshop. Of course, it was only a matter of time before the sandcastle he was building came crashing down.
"BWAHAHA! You son of a gun! See? I told you it was a sure thing!"
"...."
"Wooo! The Grand Prize! Hey hey, Yeonwoo. Honestly, this is basically the same as me making you into a writer. You know that, right? Treat me well from now on~"
Yoon Dongwoo's voice was bubbling over as hot as the gukbap steaming away in its pot. Whether or not he had any clue about the tangled mess inside my head, the guy was desperate to keep cranking up the energy. But there was no way I could keep up with his rhythm.
"Haaah...."
"What's with the barometric pressure drop, huh? You sure you're the guy who won the Grand Prize?"
"...That's exactly why I'm going out of my mind right now."
Winning the Grand Prize meant my script would be confirmed for drama production. That wretched, catastrophic piece of garbage script.
"I genuinely don't get it. Does tvM have money to burn? Why would they make THAT into a drama?"
"There you go again. How many times do I have to tell you to fix that 'my writing sucks' thing or whatever it's called?"
"It's not a syndrome, it's a fact. I ground away as a drama department PD in this industry for years — you think I can't tell a hit from a train wreck?"
It was the classic generic mass-market fantasy: a conflict with zero setup, zero payoff, and coherence eaten alive. And the dialogue — God, the dialogue was so cringe-inducing that even though I'd written it myself, I could barely look at it with my eyes open. Why else would I have hit wall after wall and thrown it away midway?
Well, fine. Let's say, giving it the benefit of the doubt a hundred times over, that the script had enough spark to win the prize.
But dramas of that ilk do exist.
Scripts that are only fun on the page.
The pleasure of reading text and the pleasure of watching moving images are completely separate realms. There are countless scripts that have everyone roaring with laughter at the table read, only to draw nothing but groans once they're actually rendered on screen. And my script fell squarely into that category. Of course, by my standards it didn't even have the fun of reading going for it — and if this got translated to the screen, those horrendous flaws would be magnified several times over in raw, unfiltered clarity. I'd stake my life on the ratings being a total disaster.
"Haah.... Might pull in ratings on par with the national anthem broadcast."
At my gloomy musing, Yoon Dongwoo bit down on a radish cube with a crunch and pushed back.
"What's so bad about flopping? Everyone starts out that way."
"Hey. You know exactly what our family holidays look like, and you're saying that? Half my relatives are in showbiz. If my drama tanks, I won't be able to show my face at a single holiday gathering ever again."
This would be a nationwide, museum-quality embarrassment, preserved for posterity. And the genre just had to be rom-com, doubling the cringe — I could already foresee the relatives' whispers and the viewers' mockery in vivid detail.
But above all, the most terrifying thing of all was Han Kanghee and Park Junhyung, those absolute bastards. I didn't need to watch it to know how much they'd be snickering behind my back over my flop of a drama.
BWAHAHA! He got kicked out of the network, and all he managed to churn out with his little pen was THAT piece of garbage?
Good lord, the guy had no sense even as a PD, and now look at his writing. That's not a drama, that's a waste of broadcast spectrum.
Ugh. Just imagining those guys clutching their stomachs laughing had stomach acid crawling up my throat already. It was a humiliation my pride simply could not permit.
"You really do worry about everything, don't you?"
"Is this trivial to you? You don't know what kind of history I have with those bastards, that's why?"
"Then just decline the award."
"Are you insane? The prize money is a hundred million won!"
"Son of a— what am I supposed to do with you...."
Money or honor. Between the massive rope of one hundred million won about to land in my bank account and a nationwide, museum-quality embarrassment, my reason was thrashing around like a lunatic. Unable to bear the sight, Yoon Dongwoo clicked his tongue and leaned toward me.
"Aigoo. Worrying is fate, I guess. Hey, don't freak out. There's something you're not seeing."
"?"
"A rookie writer's debut work gets the same mediocre treatment across the board, no matter who it is. You've been a PD, you know how this works. You think those network lunatics would dump money into an unvetted rookie's script?"
Yoon Dongwoo began laying out his logic at length, and it sounded plausible.
"They'll squeeze out the bare minimum production budget, and the scheduling will get buried somewhere people don't watch — a weekday late-night slot or a weekend morning, something like that. Don't even get me started on casting. Whatever idol some agency shoves at them as a package deal will get plugged into the lead role."
"...."
"And then even if it flops completely, everyone just shrugs and accepts it. And honestly, do the masses pay any real attention to a rookie writer's debut? Worst case, tvM never even puts your drama up front and center or markets it aggressively."
"...You think so?"
"Yep. So even if it flops, it's whatever. As long as you keep your mouth shut, Han Kanghee and Park Junhyung and those bastards won't even know it's airing. People just don't give a damn about you anywhere near as much as you worry they do."
The moment I heard Yoon Dongwoo's tirade, it felt like the congestion clogging my chest finally dissolved.
Now that I think about it... he's dead right.
The marketing would be perfunctory at best, for show, and the scheduling would get dumped into a dead timeslot like tossing out the trash.
It would quietly end its run without a trace, and there was a high probability Bureau Chief Han Kanghee would pass by without ever knowing my drama had even seen the light of day. In other words, swallow the hundred-million-won prize money, bury the embarrassing history where neither a mouse nor a bird could find it, and that would be that. Once the reasoning arrived at that conclusion, I could finally shake off the anxiety that had been crushing me.
"Heh heh heh. Now that I think it through, you're right. A hundred million won for free. What a steal."
"You lunatic. Your mood swings back and forth like a pendulum. You got bipolar disorder or something?"
The tvM Drama Bureau conference room. The department heads of each team and Bureau Chief Tae Sanhyuk sat packed around an enormous table, its surface strewn haphazardly with proposals and photocopied documents.
"There's no denying it — genuinely remarkable. Hands down the best script I've read in years."
"Same here. We expected from the start that this wouldn't be some middling rookie, but I never imagined they'd be a heavyweight of this caliber."
"But didn't you all feel it too? That aura of Writer Seo Eunhye peeking through in the character build-up?"
"Haha. Either way, it's good news for us, isn't it? The protégé of that oh-so-haughty Seo Eunhye walked right into our hands on her own two feet."
The conference room was nothing short of a festival. It wasn't what anyone had intended, but the fact remained crystal clear: tvM had taken in that monster of a writer. Drunk on the taste of victory, they were busy painting rosy futures for themselves. But that heated atmosphere froze solid at one weighty remark from Bureau Chief Ha Doun.
"That said... will that writer really stay with us to the end?"
Naturally, every gaze in the room converged on him at once. Of course, none of them were blind to the spine of the question he'd raised.
This was the person who had kicked aside a contract worth hundreds of millions of won and the main-writer seat on a thirty-billion-won tentpole, choosing instead to declare she would go through this tedious contest procedure by the book, all the way. And the Parts 3 and 4 scripts she had tossed them in return were nothing short of flawless. But as PD Woo Youngtaek had reported, this was closer to a kind of showcase. He'd stake his life on the same script already sitting on the desks of rival broadcasters' executives, and unless they were blind in both eyes, they'd be hammering their calculators like mad, preparing a bidding war.
"...Ahem."
"Hmm, hm...."
The minds of Bureau Chief Ha Doun and the other executives began to tangle into knots.
In their heads, Ji Yeonwoo was no longer a mere rookie writer. He had transformed into a terrifying strategist and heavyweight who held the networks' leash in hand while rolling the chessboard forward.
...Just what you'd expect from a protégé who trained under Writer Seo Eunhye. The scale of this is no joke.
Why do I feel like we're being swept along at that writer's pace....
No one dared put forward a hasty solution. If the writer declared tomorrow morning that she was displeased and wanted her scripts returned, they would simply have to let go of the rope and watch disaster unfold with their own eyes.
"Given the stakes... if what happened with Writer Seong repeats itself, I genuinely don't know what we'd do...."
"And that Han Kanghee fellow certainly won't sit still, either."
Everyone around the table tossed out their own concerns in turn. Meanwhile, Bureau Chief Tae Sanhyuk — who had maintained unbroken silence throughout the entire meeting, absorbed in a close reading of the Part 4 script — finally spoke, low and quiet, still not lifting his eyes from the pages.
"She really did rip Seo Eunhye straight out of her mold."
"Ah, yes. Indeed."
"As far as the Part 4 script goes, I'd actually say she's surpassed her teacher. She's even perfectly patched the sagging back half that's Seo Eunhye's signature flaw—"
"No."
At that moment, Tae Sanhyuk slowly lifted his gaze from the script and swept it across the room.
"Forget the writing. I'm saying the way she plays the game is exactly like that woman."
Back in the day, as a field PD, Tae Sanhyuk had more than once had the chance to work on projects with Writer Seo Eunhye. But every single time, she would dangle a verbal agreement, hint at a deal — and then slip away entirely to another network with better terms.
Played again and again by Seo Eunhye's foxlike push-and-pull, forced to swallow his own blood and tears. Only after paying that tuition in full did Tae Sanhyuk learn how to tame those haughty geniuses.
"Doun-ah. What budget figure are you holding at?"
"Yes, Bureau Chief. As long as there's no sweeping script revision or added locations, we're looking at roughly 1.5 billion won per episode. For a sixteen-episode run, I'm treating around 30 billion won total as our final line."
"Spend more."
"...!!"
"I-I beg your pardon?!"
The executives' eyes went wide as lamps at the bombshell directive. Tae Sanhyuk's sharp gaze settled once more on the cover of the script.
"Thirty billion and you think that's enough? If she flexes and we act stingy, she'll bolt. Only when we burn at least fifty will our dear writer take the bait and bite down happily."
"F-Fifty billion...?"
"Bureau Chief. As much as I hate to say it, that's far too reckless for a script that hasn't even been vetted...."
Naturally, producing a single drama burns through astronomical sums. Actors' fees, large-scale locations, set construction costs. Toss in rental fees for top-of-the-line camera equipment and post-production CG work, and hundreds of billions of won was practically routine in today's broadcast landscape. And yet even with every one of those fat line items factored in, burning fifty billion from the very start looked like plain recklessness — a gamble, pure and simple.
"What, not enough? If we're still short, should I go pull the variety department's budget?"
"N-No, sir!"
Everyone in that room wore deep skepticism toward the absurd, common-sense-defying sum of fifty billion won. But Tae Sanhyuk too had once been like them — punching away at a calculator, trying to save a few pennies — and more than once he'd let big fish like Writer Seo Eunhye slip right through his fingers because of it. And what happened then? The competitors' ratings exploded, and the regret was beyond measure. Built on the foundation of that bitter experience, this was the choice he had made.
"Then go make it lavish. Exactly the way that writer wants it."