Michael Viner

Michael Ames Viner ( ; February 27, 1944 – August 8, 2009) was an American film producer and record producer, who later shifted into book publishing and became an innovator in the audiobook field. A widely sampled percussion break in the recording of the song "Apache" by the Incredible Bongo Band, a group he assembled in the early 1970s, has been frequently integrated into many hip hop recordings.

Early life Viner was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Jeanne (née Spitzel) and Melvin Viner. Viner attended the Chadwick School in Palos Verdes, California, majored in English at Harvard University, and studied at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He worked on Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign. Viner began his entertainment industry career working summers during high school in the mail room at Twentieth Century Fox; after Kennedy's assassination, he worked for movie studios, and ran a record division called Pride for MGM.

Record producing Viner produced a record in 1970 called The Best of Marcel Marceau, a joke album produced for under $50 and consisting of nineteen minutes of silence followed by one minute of applause on each side of the record, purportedly recording performances by the famous mime artist Marcel Marceau, his name intentionally misspelled on the album for unstated reasons. The album led to a production deal with Mike Curb at MGM Records, where he helped produce a cover version of "The Candy Man", which was a chart-topping hit for Sammy Davis Jr. in 1972. He and Raffin opened Dove Books-on-Tape in 1985 in the garage of their Coldwater Canyon home. Viner had won an $8,000 bet in a backgammon game with the author Sidney Sheldon; rather than taking the money, Viner asked Sheldon to let him publish two of his books as audiobooks. Although Viner became known for publishing sensational tabloid-style books such as You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again and Faye Resnick's book about Nicole Brown Simpson, among Dove's first successes was the audiobook of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. The company grew to become a serious competitor of the more established publishers in the audiobook business.

After suffering some financial setbacks, Viner and Raffin sold Dove in 1997 and later obtained a large legal malpractice judgment against their own lawyers relating to this transaction, but after a lengthy appeals process, the judgment was overturned. They founded New Millennium Entertainment, which filed for bankruptcy after a jury ordered it to pay $2.8 million in a highly publicized lawsuit with author and editor Otto Penzler. In 2005 Viner established another company, Phoenix Books. Viner sold Phoenix to Dwight D. Opperman in 2007 but stayed on as its president. Viner died in Beverly Hills, California, at age 65 on August 8, 2009, due to cancer.