Santa Monica Airport.
It was Monday afternoon, September 18.
Nancy Brill stood with two other bodyguards who had driven over to pick someone up, waiting beside the runway.
The Gulfstream IV touched down and rolled to a stop. The cabin door opened, and Nancy immediately saw Simon coming down the stairs laughing and chatting with two beautiful women so tall she could only look up at them. One of them, wearing a crop top and denim cutoffs, clung to Simon's arm in a frankly intimate way, her long bare legs swaying so much it made your eyes dizzy.
When the three reached them, Simon looked mildly surprised to see Nancy, but he still smiled and introduced the women beside him. "Nancy, this is Elle. And this is Jerry."
Elle Macpherson studied the petite woman in towering heels with curiosity, unsure who Nancy was. She let go of Simon's arm, shook hands politely, and introduced herself. Jerry Hall stepped forward as well. After the three women exchanged a few lines, Simon said to Elle and Jerry, "I've got work. How about I have someone take you back first?"
"Sure," Elle said with a smile. She leaned in, wrapped her arms around Simon, and kissed him. "That was a wonderful weekend, Simon. I hope we get another chance next time."
"We will," Simon said.
He patted the slim waist that was ridiculously easy to hold onto, then hugged Jerry as well, and told Neil Bennett to drive the two women away.
Once they were gone, Simon and Nancy got into another car.
The black luxury Mercedes pulled out of the airport. Simon looked at Nancy, who was still eyeing him with a strange expression, and asked, "You were in such a hurry to drag me back. What exactly is going on with Arista Records?"
Nancy didn't answer right away. Instead she asked, "You… with those two women… together?"
Simon laughed and lifted a hand, drawing an imaginary line from the top of Nancy's head down to his own chest. "Jealous?"
Nancy saw he was making fun of her height and deliberately dodging the issue. She didn't hold back. "Womanizing bastard."
And she shot him a warning look while she said it.
Simon immediately "retreated," lowering his voice. "Keep it quiet. I'll give you a raise."
Nancy sniffed. "That's your private business. I'm not going to gossip. Though… Elle Macpherson is one thing, but that Jerry Hall, she looks… she looks like… who is she again?"
Simon cut off her train of thought with a grin and raised the stakes. "Double the raise."
Nancy rolled her eyes and stopped obsessing over it, but still tacked on one more line. "Shameless bastard."
Simon sobered. "All right, business. I was planning to come back tomorrow morning."
He'd gone to Jonathan's party the night before last, and afterward he left with the two women.
Having lived two lifetimes, Simon had never planned to deprive himself in that regard. He didn't care what anyone thought. If he wanted a woman and had the chance to take her, he wasn't going to let it slip.
With paparazzi riding his tail too tightly lately, he didn't want some messy scandal exploding and becoming a nuisance. So after asking around, he borrowed a vacation villa from Steve Ross, one on Hawaii's Lanai with a private beach, then flew there with the two women and spent a day and a night having a thoroughly indulgent time.
He'd been tempted to stay another day, but then Los Angeles called repeatedly, and he had no choice but to fly back early.
Simon felt that if it were only routine company matters, it wouldn't be this urgent.
There was probably a "mastermind" behind it.
Yeah.
Like a certain jealous female assistant.
Simon obviously wasn't going to tell Jennifer that, but women had instincts about this kind of thing.
Nancy stopped paying attention to his private life. She pulled a stack of documents from her bag and handed them over. "According to the contract we signed with Arista Records, revenue from The Bodyguard soundtrack is settled once every three months. The album hit shelves June 5. The first settlement should have closed on September 3. That was a Sunday. The album had been selling for exactly thirteen weeks. It hasn't launched overseas yet. Domestic sales total 12.16 million copies."
Simon flipped through the materials and asked, "And?"
"When our side asked for the settlement, Arista's president, Clive Davis, kept stalling. He also wanted to change the contract terms so settlements would be done by calendar quarters instead of every three months. He claimed it would make Arista's financial auditing easier. It's still three months either way, but he's obviously just delaying payment. I dealt with Clive personally and went back and forth for two weeks. Only on Friday, right before close of business, did Arista finally send over their revenue statement, and they said the money would take another week to be transferred."
As Nancy spoke, she leaned over and flipped a few pages for him. "This part. 12.16 million copies sold. Under our agreement, our cut should be over thirty million dollars. But Arista is only giving us $23.19 million. It's outrageous. Clive Davis basically dumped all their company expenses for the past few months into The Bodyguard soundtrack's costs."
Simon had studied the record industry long ago.
For singers trying to break out, production and distribution costs could be enormous. Some unknown artists would do almost anything to get a label to release their album.
But once an album became a smash, the profits were huge.
For a hot-selling record, the label's gross profit per unit was no less than fifty percent of the retail price. For a phenomenon like The Bodyguard soundtrack, the massive volume spread the costs so thin that the margins were even higher.
The contract Daenerys Entertainment signed with Arista was a fifty-fifty split of the soundtrack's gross profit. More precisely, shipment revenue minus production, marketing, distribution, artist royalties, and so on, then the remaining pre-tax profit split evenly between both sides.
In just three months on shelves, the domestic sales had already reached 12.16 million copies, with revenue exceeding $120 million. By industry standards, Daenerys Entertainment's expected share really shouldn't have been below $30 million.
Simon wasn't surprised at all that Arista was pulling this.
In Hollywood, it was common to see a low-budget film made for five million earn three hundred million worldwide, only for the studio to "calculate" it into a loss and refuse to pay profit participation. Padding the cost column with unrelated expenses to dilute the profit was a trick Hollywood had been playing forever.
He only skimmed a few pages before closing the statement and asking Nancy, "Did you talk to Clive Davis?"
"I went to Burbank this morning. Clive Davis insists the statement is perfectly fine. I demanded an audit, and he said if we insist on that, it might affect the soundtrack's continued distribution. Simon, he's threatening us."
The expected worldwide sales for The Bodyguard soundtrack were somewhere between forty and fifty million copies. At the current pace, North America alone still had at least another ten million copies of potential. Overseas markets, to coordinate with the film's release, basically hadn't even stocked it yet.
The film's success had been strongly boosted by the soundtrack's success, and everyone knew it. Clive Davis saying that was an unmistakable threat. Daenerys Entertainment didn't yet have the capacity to distribute a blockbuster album on its own, much less worldwide. Arista, backed by Bertelsmann's music group in Germany, had a complete global distribution network.
If the relationship broke down, Arista only needed to "drag its feet" on the album's continued rollout. That would hit not just album sales, but also The Bodyguard's overseas box office.
Clive Davis dared to swallow Daenerys Entertainment's rightful share precisely because the soundtrack's distribution depended on Arista and Bertelsmann's worldwide channels.
But Clive Davis had overlooked something. Daenerys Entertainment cared a great deal about The Bodyguard's profits, yes, but to Arista, this album was just as crucial.
After all, Arista's one truly bankable superstar right now was Whitney Houston. This phenomenon-level soundtrack, even at only half the profits, was still enough to carry a huge chunk of Arista's performance for the next year or two.
Meanwhile, for Daenerys Entertainment, even without The Bodyguard's income, plenty of other hit projects would still bring the company massive profits.
Most importantly, Daenerys Entertainment was partnering with a long list of other studios right now. If Simon backed down here, other studios would copy the move in the future.
Santa Monica Airport wasn't far from Daenerys Entertainment's headquarters. They arrived quickly.
Outside Simon's office, his female assistant sat at the outer desk, busy. When she saw Simon and Nancy, she greeted them as if nothing were wrong, though there was a faint trace of guilty caution in her eyes.
Simon also acted as if nothing were wrong. He told Jennifer to prepare two coffees, then went into his office with Nancy and sat down. "What do you want to do?"
Nancy sat opposite him at his desk. "We share the soundtrack copyright with Arista. If it were up to me, I'd immediately halt all promotion and sales worldwide until the dispute is resolved. But doing that would seriously affect the album's continued rollout and the film's overseas release. The next two months are exactly when The Bodyguard is opening overseas in dense waves. The UK, Spain, and Italy have already opened. France, East Germany, and Japan will all open next month. Those markets all need soundtrack sales to support the release. So, Simon, what to do needs to be your call."
"Then halt it," Simon said without hesitation. "And it can't end with just getting back what Arista swallowed. Whatever they took, they pay back twice. That's their punishment. If the price of wrongdoing is too low, people don't learn. They forget. Then they do it again next time."
Nancy looked at her boss, uncertain. She'd only wanted Arista to spit out the stolen share quickly. Halting sales was already a hardline tactic. She hadn't expected Simon to go even further.
Arista had swallowed at least seven million dollars this time. Now they not only had to return it, they had to pay another seven million in compensation. That was going to make Clive Davis's heart bleed. Without The Bodyguard's explosion, a small label like Arista might only net twenty or thirty million in profit in an entire year. Seven million was a huge number to them.
After a pause, Nancy pressed, "Simon, are you sure?"
"Absolutely. We're working with the Big Seven on so many projects. If we aren't hard enough this time, you can imagine how much of this we'll face in the future. This is also a warning to every other partner. If they think they can use some leverage to threaten Daenerys Entertainment, I don't mind flipping the table."
Nancy was a strong woman herself. Since her boss had made his decision, she stopped trying to persuade him and left in a hurry.
As soon as Nancy was gone, Jennifer brought in several folders. "This is the marketing plan for Batman. Mr. Rehme sent it over this morning. Preliminary budget is $25 million. And this is the list of candidates for several key supporting roles in Sleeping with the Enemy. Also, Mr. Deutchman returned from Venice yesterday afternoon. He picked three films at this year's Venice Film Festival. This is the information…"
Simon watched his assistant lay out the stack, introducing each item. He smiled, picked up the Batman marketing plan, and flipped it open. "I'm a lucky man. Without Jenny, the Westeros life would be a total mess."
Hearing that, Jennifer's strictly professional expression loosened. Her bright eyes fixed on him, and her tone carried a small, tangled edge. "Which Jenny are you talking about?"
Simon answered without blinking. "The one standing in front of me."
The assistant huffed, stopped needling him, gathered the coffee cups he and Nancy had used, and walked out of the office with her ponytail swishing.
Burbank.
Earlier that morning, after sending Nancy Brill away, Arista president Clive Davis had been thinking about how to skim even more profit from the soundtrack's overseas rollout. He hadn't expected that just a few hours later, the short woman would show up again.
Once he decided to swallow the soundtrack's share, Clive Davis no longer expected to have another chance to work with Daenerys Entertainment.
Daenerys Entertainment kept pulling miracles in film, but in the record business, a phenomenon strong enough to break into the top ten best-selling albums of all time was not something that happened casually.
Just like film, the music business was full of volatility. Even a top-tier superstar could sell twenty million copies worldwide on one album, then drop to four or five million on the next. Clive Davis wasn't lacking in long-term vision, but he was certain of one thing: an album like The Bodyguard soundtrack probably came along only once every decade or so. With an expected forty million plus worldwide, the money on the table was simply too big. Even if it meant sacrificing any future cooperation with Daenerys Entertainment, he still chose to grab this profit first.
With his mind made up, Clive Davis kept his surface manners intact. He greeted Nancy Brill into his office with a warm smile and polite words.
But this time, Nancy Brill didn't sit down, and what she said nearly made Clive Davis jump out of his chair.
"Mr. Davis, because Arista Records breached the contract first, Daenerys Entertainment has decided to suspend all worldwide promotion and sales of The Bodyguard soundtrack. We have already notified the pressing plants to halt shipments immediately. All overseas marketing and sales activities for this album will also be fully suspended until our dispute is resolved. As a co-owner of the soundtrack's copyright, Daenerys Entertainment has the authority to do this. If Arista continues to push forward with any work related to this album by force, Daenerys Entertainment will file for injunctive enforcement with the Recording Industry Association of America and the United States Federal Court in Los Angeles. In addition, Daenerys Entertainment will pursue damages for Arista's breach."