Two days later, Steve Kevin finally walked out of the campus gates with his project proposal in hand.
Drawing on the memories of his past life, he couldn’t help but compare his new surroundings with those he had left behind.
Unlike China’s high-pressure education system, American education appeared extremely relaxed on the surface.
Many subjects that Chinese students studied in middle and high school were not introduced until college in the United States.
T/N: Ah, the classic Chinese web novel trope.
You can take the protagonist out of China, but you can’t stop the author from randomly pausing a 1990s Hollywood story to flex about the Chinese education system.
Just roll with it and enjoy the story!
Of course, Kevin knew very well that this was only an illusion — a facade meant to pacify the lower classes.
While the middle class publicly supported a more relaxed approach to education, they were quietly spending heavily on private tutoring.
The reason was simple: to give their children a competitive edge while making it harder for others to keep up.
From this perspective, students who managed to get into the University of Southern California usually came from solid family backgrounds.
For an orphan like Kevin, there was really only one reason he had been able to enter the school: his grades.
The underlying logic was actually easy to understand.
Talents from ordinary backgrounds like Kevin served as the face of the school.
Every year, a certain quota of them would be admitted.
At the same time, those wealthy middle-class families served as the true foundation of the school.
After dropping a coin into the bus fare box and riding for several kilometers, Kevin arrived quietly outside a sleek building.
This was Creative Artists Agency, a name the general public might not immediately recognize.
But its acronym was famous worldwide.
CAA, the world’s number one talent agency.
It represented movie stars like Cruise, Hanks, Roberts, and Kidman, as well as music superstars like Madonna, Beyoncé, and Justin.
Kevin had come here to meet his agent.
That’s right — he had already signed with a CAA agent some time ago.
Carrying his materials, Kevin stepped into the CAA building.
“Hello, do you have an appointment?” the beautiful receptionist with a curvaceous figure asked politely.
Kevin nodded.
“Yes, I have an appointment with my agent, Dawson…” He glanced at his watch and continued, “At ten o’clock.”
The receptionist checked the register, then said, “Room 0306 on the third floor.
Your agent is waiting for you.”
At that moment, she seemed to want to say something more.
Her face even flushed slightly.
“Thank you.”
Kevin ignored her expression and headed quickly for the elevator to the third floor.
His primary goal for this trip was to convince his agent.
Since 1980, CAA had grown year by year, ultimately becoming an industry giant with annual revenue exceeding hundreds of millions of dollars.
And the kind of people CAA needed most right now were talented directors like him.
All of this was due to CAA’s unique business model.
CAA was committed to a model called “project packaging,” which, in simple terms, was a director-centered method of cooperation.
For a CAA director, once they proposed a film project, CAA would reach out to various film companies to negotiate cooperation.
Because of CAA’s sheer scale, they could often package actors, editors, lighting crews, and an entire logistical support team directly into the project.
Under this model, CAA could maximize the use of all its resources.
Of course, for directors, this was actually a huge advantage.
They only needed to focus on making a good film, while CAA would handle all the messy logistical issues.
The only ones who might dislike this arrangement were the film studios themselves.
But with CAA already controlling so many resources, as long as its directors had a successful track record, they rarely lacked investment.
In this dynamic, CAA had naturally become the stronger party.
“Kevin!”
As soon as he entered the room, Dawson, his agent, greeted him with a bright smile.
As a rising USC genius director, Kevin was not someone anyone would dare underestimate before he had actually failed — and failure here meant directing a movie that flopped at the box office.
Although the chances of a rookie’s success were not high, the possibility was still there.
“Dawson.”
Kevin sat across from him with a smile.
After settling in, he handed over the documents in his hand and said, “I’m here today to submit my first film project.”
Dawson nodded and took the proposal.
The reason he had been able to sign Kevin, this promising young director, was because he had made him a firm promise.
As long as Kevin could present a truly viable film proposal, Dawson would use all his resources to push the project forward.
As a low-level agent at CAA, Dawson desperately needed an opportunity like this to move up the corporate ladder.
Of course, if Kevin failed, the professional consequences for Dawson would also be serious.
Still, after spending years stuck at the bottom of CAA, he was deeply dissatisfied with his current position.
His biggest problem was the lack of high-end clients.
So he had tried every possible angle and finally managed to sign Kevin.
If Kevin could rise to prominence, Dawson would be able to leverage CAA’s packaging system to recommend his own promising actors to major production teams.
Of course, the prerequisite was that Kevin remained signed with CAA.
A high-end director client could potentially push Dawson into the ranks of CAA’s senior executives.
For a shot at that position, he was more than willing to take the gamble.
But naturally, all of this depended on whether Kevin’s proposal was actually feasible.
Thinking of this, Dawson opened the folder and began reading carefully.
“Saw?”
The first thing he saw when he opened the proposal was the title of the script.
With a thoughtful expression, Dawson read on.
Regardless of the story itself, the script had been formatted entirely according to professional Hollywood standards.
That detail alone should not be underestimated.
Many first-time screenwriters couldn’t even manage the correct formatting.
From this perspective, Kevin had at least treated the project with real seriousness and wasn’t just trying to fool him.
Since the format was flawless, Dawson naturally moved on to the content.
The script wasn’t long — only a few thin pages — and because Kevin already had a clear vision of the final product, he had drafted it efficiently.
After reading it, Dawson fell into deep thought.
A successful film always needed a few memorable characters.
If an audience could remember the characters vividly for years, or even a decade after watching the movie, then that film could be called a classic.
And in this script, Dawson could clearly see that exact potential.
In the story, the killer Jigsaw controlled everything, but he did not kill without reason.
Instead, he specifically selected people he believed were guilty or who did not treasure their own lives, then designed various traps for them based on that metric.
Every single trap left the test subject with a way out.
They could escape, but only after paying a gruesome price.
As a result, many of the survivors drastically changed their attitudes toward life, and some even felt a twisted sense of gratitude toward him.
Those who failed the test had a puzzle-piece-shaped chunk of skin carved from their bodies by Jigsaw as a final mark.