Burbank.
Arista Records' headquarters sat on Oliver Avenue, just north of Warner Bros. Studios.
It was already Wednesday, June 7.
Clive Davis, Arista's president, had barely stepped into the office at dawn when he was greeted by Mark Belford, the Daenerys Entertainment executive supervising the bodyguard's publicity. After Simon personally moved him to the scream campaign last year, Belford's standout work on several subsequent releases had quickly earned him a vice-presidency at Daenerys Distribution.
Inside his office Clive greeted Mark warmly, yet he sidestepped every request to bring Whitney Houston back from Toronto to finish promoting the bodyguard.
The film's word-of-mouth had collapsed overnight; sensing disaster, Davis had promptly packed Whitney off to Canada on "vacation", hoping the cold-storage treatment would shield her singing career from the movie's failure.
Strictly by box-office math, the bodyguard wasn't a flop, its projected $50 million domestic haul would let Daenerys recoup its budget, but the reviews were brutal, and critics singled out Whitney's acting for scorn.
Arista had waited years for a superstar; Whitney Houston was Clive Davis's lifeline, and he had no intention of letting his flagship artist pull a Madonna-style string of Hollywood misfires.
As for the soundtrack, Davis had written it off, praying fans wouldn't abandon Whitney because of one lacklustre album.
"Mark, Whitney's exhausted after months of promotion. Now that the picture's out, I don't see why she needs to keep pushing".
"It's just an MTV special, Clive. If she can't fly back, we'll send the crew to Toronto, you only need to have someone there to coordinate".
MTV had once been a singer's best platform.
But Davis was determined to sever Whitney from the bodyguard and insisted, "Sorry, Mark, Whitney's on holiday and doesn't want to be disturbed".
Belford kept trying until the air stiffened. "Clive, in Hollywood you never know what'll click. If she hides because one film tanked, she'll never get far here".
Davis wouldn't budge. "After this, I think Whitney should stick to music for the next few years, acting isn't her lane".
Before Mark could push again, the door cracked open; Davis's secretary hovered, half-swallowing her words, the distribution manager hovering behind her.
Any other day Davis would have been irritated, but now he seized the chance. "I've other business, Mark. Let's pick this up later".
After seeing Belford out, Davis waved his distribution chief, Charles Rod, inside. "Charlie, weren't you supposed to be in New York this morning?"
Rod didn't wait for him to sit. "Clive, something odd's happening with the bodyguard soundtrack".
Davis frowned at the mention, flipping the folder open once he'd settled behind his desk. "What am I looking at?"
"Starting yesterday afternoon, distributors have been calling nonstop. These are the logs since then…"
A bad premonition flashed through Davis. "They want to return stock?"
He'd expected poor sales; only Daenerys's insistence had forced a first pressing of half a million units, shipped through Arista's pipeline.
The words were barely out before he caught himself, records had been on sale two days; returns were impossible. Even with toxic reviews, Whitney's star power could move 500,000 copies.
Rod shook his head. "No, Clive—they're all asking for more".
If returns had sounded unlikely, additional orders sounded absurd.
More?
Come on.
Five hundred thousand was already huge, over ninety percent of albums never reach that lifetime total. Whitney's second LP, after a year of promotion, had debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 460,000 first-week sales.
That had been a record for a female artist.
Now a critically derided "clichéd" romance and its patchwork soundtrack were flying off shelves after two days, and distributors wanted double the stock.
Could that even happen?
And if it did, what would it mean?
They stared at each other until Davis glanced down, spotted a familiar name, and snatched the phone.
"Morning, Jeff… oh, right, it's almost noon in New York, forgot. listen, Charlie says you called about Whitney's soundtrack…"
Six calls later Davis set the receiver down and stared at the log sheet.
It was real.
Retail shelves hadn't emptied yet, but every regional distributor reported the same thing: sales were far hotter than expected; the first 500,000 wouldn't last, they needed at least another half-million.
Double the run.
That would be a million units.
At 57 this year, Clive Davis has spent more than twenty years in the record business. In all that time, he's only ever watched other labels' singers pull off feats like a million-copy first week; Michael Jackson and a handful of others were the only ones who ever managed it.
Arista Records launched in 1974; fifteen years later it had teetered on bankruptcy several times, its parent company passing from Columbia Pictures to RCA and now to Bertelsmann.
Clive Davis never imagined that, late in his career, he might actually create an album that could sell a million copies in its first week.
After a moment's daze, Davis snatched up the phone again and dialled a Toronto hotel, urgently telling Whitney Houston to get back to Los Angeles as fast as possible.
When the call ended, Davis, remembering he'd just brushed off a senior exec from Daenerys Entertainment's distribution arm, hesitated only a second before deciding not to share the news yet. Arista still held most of the cards.
But the moment he thought of the royalty split he'd signed with Daenerys Entertainment, Davis winced in pain.
An album that debuts with a million-copy week. By Davis's twenty-plus years of experience, that meant the bodyguard soundtrack should finish its global run at forty to fifty times that, 40 to 50 million units, outpacing the combined worldwide sales of Whitney Houston's first two albums.
In the late '80s, vinyl or cassette, the average retail price was about ten dollars a disc. Forty to fifty million in global sales equals four to five hundred million dollars gross. Figuring fifty per cent gross margin, Daenerys's fifty per cent split means $2.50 a unit, $100 to $125 million in total.
A single record pulling in more than a hundred million dollars, Bertelsmann Music Group, freshly formed, might not clear that much profit in an entire year.
While his mind raced over how to siphon off more of that cash, Davis briskly ordered Charles Rod to summon an emergency board meeting. First priority: keep the album selling.
Clive Davis didn't immediately report the surprise smash, but word still reached Daenerys Entertainment fast.
A Daenerys staffer heard the rumour and passed it to Nancy Brill, head of the company's recorded-music division. Realizing its weight, Nancy Bri;l phoned Davis's office at once, then drove from Santa Monica to Burbank.
In this era a worldwide tally of ten or twenty million for an album isn't rare, roughly the music-biz equivalent of a hundred-million-dollar blockbuster. But forty or fifty million? That's 'E.t. the extra-terrestrial' or 'Star Wars' territory.
Apart from Simon, no one at either Daenerys Entertainment or Arista had expected the bodyguard soundtrack to explode. Everyone assumed the film's box-office muscle would push soundtrack sales; ten million units worldwide would already be a triumph.
To later generations, the phrase "movie soundtrack" might first bring 'Titanic' to mind.
Yet up to the moment Simon was reborn, the best-selling film soundtrack in history remained 'The Bodyguard'. 'Titanic's album moved thirty million; 'The bodyguard's passed forty-five. Even on the all-time list of any kind of album, it ranks in the top five.
Now, with the film's reviews tepid, the unexpectedly hot album has become the lever to pull the movie's own box office back up.
Clive Davis was never shy about trimming his sails to the wind.
The North American boom for the bodyguard soundtrack was set, but the real prize, overseas, would only follow if the film played along. Critics might dislike the picture, yet it was still the delivery system for the music. Without the story's emotional current, a seventies leftover like 'I Will Always Love You' could never have caught fire.
So the moment the record took off, Davis forgot he'd earlier blocked Whitney Houston from further promotion and proactively coordinated fresh marketing for both movie and album with Daenerys.
To engineer maximum "event-marketing" buzz, Daenerys Entertainment and Arista deliberately held back second-wave shipments in selected regions for a single day. By week's end, New York and Los Angeles, media capitals, were reporting sell-outs of the bodyguard soundtrack.
Events rarely unfold as planned.
Dolly Parton's 1974 single had languished in obscurity for a decade and a half; the film's melodramatic plot had been savaged by critics. Yet the two combined like a perfectly mixed cocktail, producing a kind of alchemy.
As the soundtrack flew off shelves and 'I Will Always Love You' blared from every radio, audiences who'd dismissed the movie on critics' advice gave it a second look.
From 2–8 June, 'Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade' held the top spot with ease, adding $30.85 million for an $86.76 million total. 'The Bodyguard's first seven days tallied $23.63 million, barely half of Indy's prior week.
Yet once word of the soundtrack's miraculous take-off spread, neither studios nor press still pegged the bodyguard's domestic ceiling at a mere fifty million.