Burbank.
Arista Records' headquarters sat on Olive Avenue, just north of the Warner lot.
It was Wednesday, June 7.
Clive Davis arrived at the office early and was immediately greeted by Mark Belford, the Daenerys executive handling The Bodyguard's marketing. Belford had been personally pulled onto the Scream campaign by Simon the previous year; his strong performance on several subsequent releases had quickly earned him a vice presidency in distribution.
In the office, Clive welcomed Mark warmly but stonewalled every attempt to get Whitney Houston back from Toronto for additional promotion.
The film's reputation had collapsed almost overnight. Sensing trouble, Clive had whisked Whitney off to Canada under the guise of a vacation, hoping distance would shield her singing career from the fallout.
By pure box-office math, The Bodyguard wasn't a disaster.
A projected $50 million domestic would cover Daenerys's entire investment. The problem was the reviews, its brutal, and many aimed straight at Whitney's acting.
Arista had nearly gone under multiple times before Whitney arrived; she was Clive's lifeline. He had no intention of letting her follow Madonna's path of stubborn, repeated cinematic misfires.
As for the soundtrack, Clive had already written it off. His only hope now was that fans wouldn't abandon Whitney over one subpar album.
"Mark, Whitney's exhausted from months of promotion. The film's out, I don't see why she needs to do more."
"It's just one MTV interview, Clive. Or if she truly can't come back, we can send the MTV crew to Canada. You'd only need to coordinate locally."
MTV had always been the best platform for singers.
Clive, however, had decided Whitney needed a clean break. "I'm sorry, Mark. She's on vacation and doesn't want to be disturbed."
Mark persisted patiently, but the air grew tense. "Clive, success and failure in Hollywood are never certain. If Miss Houston pulls away just because one film got bad reviews, she'll have a hard time building a real future here."
Clive remained unmoved. "Mark, after this experience, I don't think Whitney is cut out for acting. She'll focus on music for the next few years."
Mark wasn't ready to give up when a knock interrupted. Clive's secretary peeked in, hesitant, with the head of distribution visible behind her.
Any other day Clive would have been annoyed, but today he seized the excuse. "I have another meeting, Mark. Let's talk another time."
After seeing Mark out, Clive returned with Charles Rhode, his distribution chief. Settling behind his desk, he asked casually, "Charlie, weren't you flying to New York this morning?"
Charles didn't wait for him to sit fully before handing over a folder. "Clive, something strange is happening with The Bodyguard soundtrack."
At the mention of the soundtrack, Clive frowned faintly, opened the folder, and glanced inside. "What's this?"
"Starting yesterday afternoon, we've besen getting calls from distributors. These are all the records from yesterday through now…"
A bad feeling crept in. Clive interrupted, "They want to return stock?"
He'd expected weak sales. Only Daenerys's insistence had led to a first pressing of 500,000 units, distributed through Arista's channels.
The words left his mouth before he realized, returns after two days were impossible. Even with terrible reviews, Whitney's recent popularity guaranteed those 500,000 would move eventually.
Charles shook his head at once. "No, Clive. They… they're all asking to increase their orders."
If returns seemed unlikely, this seemed downright impossible.
Increase orders?
Was he joking?
To Clive, 500,000 was already a huge number. Over ninety percent of albums never reached it. Whitney's second album, released two years ago after she'd become a star had debuted at number one on Billboard with 460,000 first-week sales after exhaustive promotion.
That was exceptional for a female artist.
Now a film universally trashed as "schmaltzy and clichéd," paired with a "thrown-together" mishmash soundtrack, was prompting distributors to request more stock after just two days.
Possible?
Or if true--what did it mean?
After a stunned stare-down with his subordinate, Clive scanned the file, spotted a familiar name, grabbed the phone, and dialed.
The call connected; Clive slipped into practiced warmth. "Hey, Jeff, good morning… oh, right, it's noon in New York, I forgot, ha… Listen, Charlie said you called yesterday about Whitney's Bodyguard soundtrack…"
He made five or six calls. When he finally set the receiver down and looked again at the long list of call logs, he was dazed.
It was real.
Retail shelves weren't empty yet, but distributors across regions reported sales far exceeding expectations. The initial 500,000 wouldn't be nearly enough--at least double that.
Double.
A million units.
Clive was fifty-seven and had been in the business over twenty years. In all that time he'd only watched enviously as other labels celebrated million-plus first weeks--achieved by a handful like Michael Jackson.
Arista, founded in 1974, had teetered on bankruptcy multiple times, changing parents from Columbia Pictures to RCA to Bertelsmann.
He'd never dreamed his career might produce a million-selling debut week.
After a moment of stunned silence, Clive snatched the phone again and dialed a Toronto hotel, urgently instructing Whitney to return to Los Angeles immediately.
Ending the call, he remembered brushing off Daenerys's distribution exec earlier. After brief hesitation, he decided not to inform them yet. Arista suddenly held serious leverage.
Then he recalled the profit-split agreement and winced.
A million first-week sales, based on twenty-plus years of experience meant global totals forty to fifty times that: forty to fifty million units. More than Whitney's first two albums combined.
Late-eighties average album price: roughly ten dollars.
Four to five hundred million dollars in revenue. Fifty percent gross margin, split fifty-fifty with Daenerys meaning $2.50 per unit for them, or $100–125 million total.
A single album clearing nine figures in profit was more than Bertelsmann Music Group Arista's freshly integrated parent often made in a year.
Mentally calculating how to claw back more profit, Clive briskly ordered Charles to summon the executive team for an emergency meeting.
First priority: secure the sales.
Daenerys didn't stay in the dark long.
Word reached their nascent music division first, then Nancy Brill, who oversaw it. Recognizing the magnitude, Nancy called Clive's office immediately, then drove from Santa Monica to Burbank.
In this era, global sales of ten or twenty million weren't rare, roughly equivalent to a hundred-million-dollar blockbuster. But forty or fifty million put an album in the E.T. or Star Wars phenomenon tier.
Neither Daenerys nor Arista had anticipated anything like this. Everyone had assumed strong film performance would drive respectable soundtrack sales, ten million worldwide would have been considered a win.
In future memory, when people thought "movie soundtrack," many jumped to Titanic.
But until Simon's rebirth, the best-selling film soundtrack of all time had always been The Bodyguard.
Titanic sold thirty million. The Bodyguard sold a staggering forty-five million enough to rank in the top five of all albums, any genre.
Now, with the film itself critically savaged, the exploding soundtrack became the unexpected lifeline pulling the movie's box office upward.
Clive Davis was a master at reading the wind.
North American soundtrack momentum was locked in, but the real money lay overseas. Replicating domestic success required coordinated international film release, the movie, however critics hated it, was the vehicle carrying the music's emotional impact.
Without the story's resonance, a seventies Dolly Parton cover like "I Will Always Love You" would never have caught fire.
So when the album took off and Daenerys quickly came knocking, Clive promptly forgot his earlier refusal to let Whitney promote further. He reopened talks on joint film-and-album marketing.
For maximum event-marketing impact, Daenerys and Arista deliberately delayed second shipments in select markets by one day. In the final days of the week, stories of The Bodyguard soundtrack selling out due to overwhelming demand hit papers in media-heavy cities like New York and Los Angeles.
Things rarely go as planned.
Dolly Parton's 1974 song had languished in obscurity for over a decade. The film itself had been shredded by critics for every cliché. Yet together they produced an alchemical reaction, like a perfectly mixed cocktail.
As the soundtrack soared and "I Will Always Love You" stormed the charts, audiences who'd dismissed the film because of reviews began to reconsider.
June 2–8: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade easily held the weekly crown with another $30.85 million, pushing its cumulative total to $86.76 million.
The Bodyguard landed second, as expected, with $23.63 million for its first full week, roughly half of Indiana Jones 3's first full week.
Yet once news spread of the soundtrack's miraculous surge, neither studios nor media still believed the film would top out at $50 million domestic.