The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Houston’s estate plans hologram tour
Album, other projects in works for late singer’s material.
Since Whitney Houston died in 2012, her estate has been pitched every kind of entertainment deal, from jukebox musicals to a traveling museum.
Pat Houston, the executor, has turned them all down.
But now the estate is open for business. It has lined up an extensive list of potential projects — including a touring hologram, a possible Broadway musical, branding deals and an album of unreleased tracks — intended to awaken the commercial potential of a dormant megacelebrity brand.
“Everything is about timing for me,” Pat Houston, the performer’s sister-in-law and former manager, said in an interview. “It’s been quite emotional for the past seven years. But now it’s about being strategic.”
Last week, the estate signed a deal with Primary Wave Music Publishing, a boutique music and marketing company in New York, to rebuild Whitney Houston’s business. As part of the agreement, Primary Wave will acquire 50% of the estate’s assets, which include the singer’s royalties from music and film, merchandising, and the right to exploit her name and likeness. The deal values the estate at $14 million, according to two people familiar with the arrangement.
At her peak, Houston was a pop-culture juggernaut, with a golden voice and fashion-model looks. She had 11 No.1 hits, sold tens of millions of albums around the world, and with the blockbuster 1992 film “The Bodyguard” joined an elite category of stars with equal success in music and the movies.
But to some extent, the estate is looking to resuscitate her reputation.
When she died at age 48 in Beverly Hills, California, Houston’s career as a hitmaker was long behind her and a public struggle with drugs had made her a tabloid fixture. A documentary last year, “Whitney,” which was authorized by the estate, looked unflinchingly at her downfall and included the accusation that she had been molested as a child.
“Before she passed, there was so much negativity around the name. It wasn’t about the music anymore,” Pat Houston said over lunch recently, before heading to Primary Wave’s office to listen to some unreleased music. “People had forgotten how great she was. They let all the personal things about her life outweigh why they fell in love with her in the first place.”
As Larry Mestel, Primary Wave’s founder, put it, “Whitney was America’s sweetheart, and the idea now is to remind people that that is what her legacy is.”
Mestel said he was already in discussions with Broadway producers about a musical and a Vegas-style spectacle. Unused tracks from her 1985 debut album, “Whitney Houston,” are likely to be part of a new album.
To do that, the estate and Primary Wave — which specializes in marketing classic song catalogs — would need to work with Sony, which owns Houston’s recordings.
The estate’s first project is the hologram, which would join a growing list of laser-generated posthumous singers who have gone on tour, including Maria Callas, Roy Orbison and Frank Zappa. The Whitney hologram, already under development, will perform hits like “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and “The Greatest Love of All” backed by her original band and backup singers — including her brother Gary, Pat Houston’s husband.
“The hologram has taken precedence over everything,” Pat Houston said.
Pat Houston, the sole executor of the estate — whose beneficiaries are Whitney Houston’s mother, gospel singer Cissy Houston, and her two brothers, Gary and Michael — has had a long association with her sisterin-law’s business, having managed her career since the early 2000s. And she knows the kinds of details that only family members were privy to: Whitney did not want to be on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Pat said, because “she didn’t want people walking on her name.”
She also sought to correct what she called popular misconceptions about the state of Houston’s finances upon her death.
“She had money when she died,” Pat Houston said. “It wasn’t multimillions, like everyone thought, but she wasn’t broke.”
In her heyday, Houston sang in commercials for Diet Coke and AT&T, but mostly avoided lending her name or face to products. That may change as Primary Wave pursues new deals, but Mestel said a line had already been drawn at what was appropriate.
“For Whitney Houston, who had an elegant voice and an elegant way about her, we wouldn’t do a fastfood brand relationship, for example,” he said.
As an example of the mem- ories that she wants to conjure, Pat Houston recalled first going on tour with her sister-in-law two decades ago.
“I watched a woman go onstage,” she said, “and was just absolutely flawless.”