Superstar From Age 0

Chapter 538

Oh Seong-tae answered the phone.

He tried to hide his uneasiness with a calm face and said yes, continuing the conversation. The students, Hwang Do-yoon, and Hwang Ji-yoon, who had just finished talking on the phone, looked at him.

As he put down his phone, someone asked him.

“Seong-tae, what was that call about?”

“Oh, Cocoa Entertainment wants to meet me tomorrow. They probably want to write a contract.”

Oh Seong-tae added that they might want to write a contract after saying they wanted to meet him tomorrow.

If he hadn’t added that, everyone would have been busy guessing why he was going to Cocoa Entertainment.

‘They must have brought up the plagiarism issue.’

Fortunately, the voice of the Cocoa Entertainment’s second team staff on the other side of the phone sounded normal. He didn’t know why they called Hwang Ji-yoon, but it seemed like they didn’t catch the plagiarism.

It made sense if he thought about it.

There was no way Cocoa Entertainment knew about the fact that Hwang Ji-yoon was the owner of the script, which he had just found out a while ago. Besides, he had no evidence to show to Hwang Ji-yoon, the owner, let alone Cocoa Entertainment, who had nothing to do with it.

“Wow!”

“They said contract. Contract!”

“Are you meeting Lee Seo-jun in person?”

Oh Seong-tae’s ears were filled with the students’ exclamations as he tried to suppress his anxiety.

“Then why did they call Hwang Ji-yoon?”

“He’s preparing for an independent film, right? Maybe he sent his script to Cocoa Entertainment.”

“Oh, I see. Cocoa Entertainment said they were signing new actors, maybe they wanted to introduce them to him.”

“It’s the second team, and Cocoa Entertainment only has one actor team, so that must be it.”

The students made their own conclusions as they speculated.

They were envious that Cocoa Entertainment contacted him, but they didn’t care much unless it was Lee Seo-jun.

There was no chance that a popular actor would star in a college student’s film, so the ones who got cast would probably be rookies or unknown actors.

“Right, Ji-yoon?”

With a sneer in his voice, his classmate asked Hwang Ji-yoon, who had regained his composure.

“What do you care?”

His snappy answer made the students frown.

“Fine. I don’t need to know. But you should apologize to Seong-tae.”

“How could you accuse him of plagiarism without checking? He must have been shocked by your misunderstanding!”

“That’s right. And I’m sorry for swearing at you earlier. And for insisting that you plagiarized until now.”

The students’ words became more heated as they heard that he might sign a contract tomorrow.

If Lee Seo-jun starred in it, it would be a hit, and that would be a great experience. It would be even better if they could join Lee Seo-jun’s group with Oh Seong-tae.

So they had to impress Oh Seong-tae.

Despite the noisy students’ reactions, Hwang Ji-yoon shrugged his shoulders and snorted. His brother, Hwang Do-yoon, chuckled at his expression that seemed to say, where did this dog come from?

“You’ll see.”

The students snickered at Hwang Ji-yoon’s words.

“You need to study your lines more. You’ll see? Even a villain extra wouldn’t say that.”

“Right. Are you attending classes these days? Oh, you must be too busy picking a fight with Seong-tae.”

“Are you trying to get Seong-tae’s attention by doing this?”

“What did you say, you bastard?”

“How dare you swear at our heavenly senior?”

A fierce glare went back and forth between the film students and Hwang Ji-yoon.

It was a tense atmosphere that seemed like someone could die at any moment.

“Uh… um…”

Some of the acting students who were hovering around Oh Seong-tae, hoping to get a cameo in Lee Seo-jun’s work, swallowed their saliva at the fierce scene.

“Film students are scary.”

“Yeah.”

The acting students who were rolling their eyes found the acting student president Hwang Do-yoon waving at them and quietly walked over to him.

They looked like ducklings following their mother duck.

The next day.

Hwang Ji-yoon gulped at the sight of the building in front of him. The neatly remodeled 10-story building was Cocoa Entertainment’s new office. There were a lot of people coming and going because they were in the middle of moving.

“Hwang Ji-yoon, the writer?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

Hwang Ji-yoon quickly turned his head at the sound of his name. A man who introduced himself as a second team staff led Hwang Ji-yoon inside.

He passed the lobby where boxes were piled up and entered a conference room on the first floor. Hwang Ji-yoon peeked his head out and looked around.

‘Oh Seong-tae said he was coming today…’

He wanted to mock him when he saw him, but he couldn’t find him.

As he entered the conference room, someone got up from his seat and greeted Hwang Ji-yoon.

“I’m Ahn Da-ho, the second team leader of Cocoa Entertainment.”

Ahn Da-ho came in person because it was related to Lee Seo-jun and the plagiarism issue.

“Hwang, Hwang Ji-yoon.”

Ahn Da-ho told Hwang Ji-yoon to sit down and opened his mouth.

“First of all, I’ll confirm it again. You said you didn’t sell your script, right?”

“Yes. It’s my work.”

Hwang Ji-yoon was momentarily flustered by the word team leader, but he soon regained his composure.

“And you didn’t publish it anywhere, right?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm. Then do you know how your script got leaked?”

“I think Oh Seong-tae, who is in the same department as me, took it from my laptop.”

He was from Han-ye University’s film department.

Ahn Da-ho nodded.

“I see. Did you see the plagiarized script?”

“No. I only saw the synopsis.”

“As you know, if it’s this similar, it will cause a plagiarism controversy as soon as it’s made into a movie. I don’t know if Oh Seong-tae is shameless or stupid.”

Ahn Da-ho spoke coldly, feeling resentful towards Oh Seong-tae, who almost dragged Lee Seo-jun into such a trouble.

Hwang Ji-yoon blinked.

Oh Seong-tae, who had skillfully plagiarized, was stupid?

“Excuse me? Uh… Oh Seong-tae modified it in his own way, so it shouldn’t be that similar, right?”

“He changed the sentences, but the flow is almost the same… But,”

Ahn Da-ho thought that something was wrong with Hwang Ji-yoon’s expression. So he decided to get to the point.

“Let’s look at this first.”

Ahn Da-ho handed him two scripts.

[Love Room Painter] and [Unknown Painter].

“I marked the similar parts in Love Room Painter and Unknown Painter.”

Hwang Ji-yoon opened the first page of the two scripts.

In the beginning, a carriage coming from afar and a young boy watching it, a pale face seen through the carriage window, a carriage stopping in front of a tile-roofed house.

“…??”

Hwang Ji-yoon was not surprised by the identical introduction, as expected, but rather puzzled by it.

“…This is your work, right, Director?”

Seeing her expression, Ahn Da-ho wondered for a moment if this was a different Hwang Ji-yoon.

“Yes, yes. It’s mine…”

Hwang Ji-yoon handed over two scripts with a nervous look.

On each page, similar parts were marked with a yellow highlighter. Some parts had no marks at all, but others were so similar that they were circled in big circles.

“…I haven’t read this script in almost seven years, so it feels like I’m reading it for the first time.”

Hwang Ji-yoon remembered that the motif was ‘The Guest and the Mother in the Love Room’ and that the observer was a child, but she didn’t remember the details.

She had made a lot of changes over the past seven years.

She added and removed minor events, introduced new characters, and cut out some others. The overall structure remained the same, but many parts had changed.

“That’s how I made ‘Hwa’.”

Oh.

Hwang Ji-yoon continued, unaware of Ahn Da-ho’s eyes sparkling.

‘Hwa’.

It was the work that Hwang Ji-yoon was planning to shoot this year.

“Oh Seong-tae must have stolen it…”

It was the original script that Oh Seong-tae had stolen.

“But why is it so similar to this?”

Oh Seong-tae bit his lip as he held two scripts in his hand.

They were ‘The Painter in the Love Room’ and ‘The Unknown Painter’, stained with yellow highlighters.

Ahn Da-ho spoke in a cold voice, looking at Oh Seong-tae’s trembling hand.

“Even if, by chance, you two happened to write similar stories, Director Hwang Ji-yoon, who came up with the idea first, would have priority.”

“…”

“But if they’re this similar, I don’t think that’s possible.”

Oh Seong-tae couldn’t hear the voice of the man who introduced himself as the team leader of Cocoa Entertainment’s second team.

‘…Shit. What is this?’

Oh Seong-tae recalled Hwang Ji-yoon’s work, ‘Hwa’, that he had stolen.

The main characters, the painter and the observer, were ‘adults’, and the setting was ‘a Western-style mansion’. The painter arrived in a ‘car’.

Oh Seong-tae changed it.

He kept the painter as an adult, but made the observer a ‘child’.

He changed the Western-style mansion to a ‘tiled house’.

He changed the car that the painter rode in to a ‘carriage’.

He also changed some other settings here and there.

But, this script with the strange title, ‘The Painter in the Love Room’, was exactly the same as the one Oh Seong-tae had modified, ‘The Unknown Painter’. From the child observer, the tiled house, and the carriage, to the cute misunderstandings and some situations that arose because the observer was a child.

It was obvious plagiarism.

‘What the hell…!’

It was absurd.

The settings that he had changed to avoid plagiarism suspicion had become the evidence of plagiarism.

If it had been a dispute between ‘Hwa’ and ‘The Unknown Painter’, he might have had some excuses. Oh Seong-tae had prepared well by collecting similar works.

But a script that he had never expected suddenly appeared and strangled Oh Seong-tae.

“Are you saying that Hwang Ji-yoon really wrote this?”

“Yes. Seven years ago.”

Ahn Da-ho said with a cold smile.

“I heard that Director Hwang was in eighth grade then.”

Oh Seong-tae felt like biting his tongue.

It sounded as if he was on the same level as Hwang Ji-yoon in eighth grade.

He was confident that he could make a better work than anyone else with the same material, even though he lacked unique ideas.

There was nothing more humiliating for Oh Seong-tae.

***

“Wow… They’re really similar.”

Seo Jun, who had heard from Ahn Da-ho what had happened yesterday and today, looked at ‘The Painter in the Love Room’ and ‘The Unknown Painter’ alternately and exclaimed without realizing it. He couldn’t believe how they could be so similar.

Let’s take ‘Over the Rainbow’ as an example.

Young Director A came up with ‘Over the Rainbow’.

Three child characters, violin, America.

Later, when Director A grew up, he revised the script.

Three adult characters, piano, Korea.

The plagiarist changed the script to avoid plagiarism.

Adult → child, piano → violin, Korea → America.

As a result.

Surprisingly, the script was similar to the one that Director A had come up with when he was young.

“People’s imagination seems to have no limits, but it also seems to be similar.”

“Exactly.”

Seo Jun nodded at Ahn Da-ho’s words.

He finally understood why he had been troubled by ‘The Unknown Painter’.

He had wasted time wondering whether the main character was mentally ill or in a dream world, looking at the parts he liked and disliked.

‘There were two writers for one script. And not co-writers, but plagiarists.’

Ha. Ha. Ha.

He couldn’t have imagined it.

He laughed as if he had given up, and looked at Ahn Da-ho.

“So what happened?”

“We didn’t sign a contract, so there was no problem and we just left. The rest is up to them. We agreed to help if Director Hwang Ji-yoon sues.”

Seo Jun nodded, saying, “I see.” He saw Ahn Da-ho smiling softly, but inside, he was burning with anger.

‘How dare he offer my actor a plagiarized work.’

Regardless of the lawsuit, if Oh Seong-tae stayed in the film industry (or even the broadcasting industry), Ahn Da-ho and the second team were determined to make his path a thorny one.

“I’m sorry, Seo Jun. I should have done more research…”

Ahn Da-ho apologized with a sorry expression, and Seo Jun smiled and said.

“It’s okay. You were busy with the company move, and it’s too much to ask to investigate a college student. You said he had good reviews on the set.”

“He was a typical weak-strong-weak-strong. If it wasn’t for Tae-woo, we would have been in big trouble.”

“That’s true.”

Seo Jun laughed at Ahn Da-ho’s words that the second team staff clapped their hands every time they saw Choi Tae-woo.

‘Was it Parvita’s ability that Da-ho hyung chose Choi Tae-woo?’

Did ‘The Golden Mermaid Parvita’s Compass’ know about this plagiarism incident and choose Choi Tae-woo, who had an embezzlement problem?

‘I don’t know, because it’s not a clear, obvious ability.’

Maybe it was just a coincidence.

“But it’s a shame. It was a work that I liked half of it…”

‘The Unknown Painter’ was a plagiarized work, and ‘The Painter in the Love Room’ was an unfinished work.

Unfortunately, there was no work that Seo Jun could do.

Seo Jun’s face fell. He looked like a puppy with drooping ears and tail, and Ahn Da-ho smiled brightly.

“So, Seo Jun.”

“Yes?”

“Director Hwang Ji-yoon is writing a new work, do you want to read it? She said she lost the file and had to rewrite it, but it’s finished enough to start shooting this year. And the plot is similar to ‘The Painter in the Love Room’, so you’ll like it.”

Wow!

That’s my manager!

Ahn Da-ho took out a script from his bag and spoke, and Seo Jun smiled broadly.