EGN NEWS DESK
Jac Venza, a shoemaker’s son who nearly single-handedly delivered to the proverbial “huge wasteland” that was American tv within the Sixties and ’70s an oasis of cultural programming, together with “Great Performances,” “American Masters” and “Live From Lincoln Center,” died on Tuesday at his residence in Lyme, Conn. He was 97.
His dying was confirmed by his partner, Daniel D. Routhier.
Mr. Venza by no means attended school. As an actor, he pronounced himself “dreadful.” As an aspiring artist, he started his profession in Chicago by designing surroundings for the Goodman Theater and window shows for the Mandel Brothers division retailer. But whereas nonetheless in his 30s, he started taking part in an important function in bringing artwork to public tv.
He was working as a tv producer when he was requested to collaborate with different TV innovators assembled by the Ford Foundation within the early Sixties to rework a restricted service that generated no unique programming into National Educational Television, the forerunner of the Public Broadcasting Service.
While his fellow producers and different media specialists have been mulling how greatest to coach the viewing public by means of a nonprofit community, Mr. Venza recalled, he volunteered, “Why don’t we entertain them, too?”
In the Sixties and ’70s, he launched “NET Playhouse,” “Theater in America,” “Live From Lincoln Center,” “Great Performances,” “American Masters” and, on the suggestion of the National Endowment for the Arts, “Dance in America.” He additionally imported well-liked BBC productions like “Brideshead Revisited.”
He collaborated with choreographers like George Balanchine and Martha Graham, composers like Leonard Bernstein and playwrights like Tennessee Williams. Dustin Hoffman had his first starring function on tv in a 1966 NET manufacturing of Ronald Ribman’s play “The Journey of the Fifth Horse.” A decade later, Meryl Streep appeared onscreen for the primary time within the William Gillette play “Secret Service” on “Great Performances.”
“I’m undecided there can be performing arts in prime time on public tv if there hadn’t been Jac Venza within the lifeblood of this station,” John Jay Iselin, a former president of WNET, informed The Times in 1982. “We take performing arts with no consideration because the signature of our entire cultural programming. But he was creating packages at a time when most individuals hadn’t the manufacturing talent or perception or ingenuity to make them actually attention-grabbing and compelling.”
Before he retired from “Great Performances” in 2004, Mr. Venza and the packages he produced for WNET, the PBS flagship station, acquired 57 Emmy nominations, a file not surpassed till 2010, the station stated. He received 10 Primetime Emmys, an International Emmy for lifetime achievement and a Governor’s Award, additionally for lifetime achievement. In 1997, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting introduced him with the Ralph Lowell Award for excellent achievements.
Mr. Venza was variously characterised as an excellent visionary and a savvy deal maker. He may be cussed and self-assertive. “I’ve been terrific on this job,” he informed The New York Times in 1982, “as a result of I’ve an open thoughts.”
He was sometimes credited as an government producer, however he was significantly greater than that: He was the uncommon inventive polymath who deserved the title “impresario.”
“Everyone at all times wonders what an government producer does,” Mr. Venza informed The Times. “He retains his eye on the horizon. He units the objectives, whether or not they’re what an artist desires, or program concepts we should always pursue, or discovering the proper individuals to work for a mission.”
William F. Baker, who succeeded Mr. Iselin at WNET, described Mr. Venza in an e mail as “really a luminary in getting arts on tv.”
“He led us right into a style of media that had not been examined,” he wrote. “Other networks by no means tried to get into it as a result of audiences have been smaller and older, and manufacturing was costly. But we felt it was ‘mission,’ and PBS remains to be dominant and stands alone in it as we speak.”
Mr. Venza was born on Dec. 23, 1926, in Chicago to Rosario and Frances (Roppolo) Venza, immigrants from Sicily. It’s not clear what his given beginning title was, however he was often called Jac since childhood. The household lived in two rooms behind his father’s shoe restore store. His mom managed the family.
Jac began shining sneakers earlier than he was 10. But he needed to be an artist. “While different boys have been studying comedian books,” he informed The Times, “I used to be studying design books.”
After graduating from a Roman Catholic highschool, he acquired a scholarship by means of a classmate’s father to assist design units for the Goodman Theater on the situation that he additionally act in its productions. (“I used to be dreadful,” he informed the Archive of American Television.)
A colleague who acknowledged his inventive expertise advisable that Mr. Venza transfer to New York. After designing units for the Spoleto Festival in Italy, he settled within the metropolis and, as a business artist, designed retailer window shows for Bonwit Teller and different Fifth Avenue emporiums. The first Broadway musical he attended was Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate.” (He would current a revival of that present on “Great Performances” in 2003.)
In 1950, he joined CBS, the place he designed units for “I Remember Mama,” “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “Adventure,” a documentary sequence produced in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History. For that sequence, as a substitute of counting on graphics, he substituted costumed dancers to painting chromosomes and musical notes. He labored his method up from set designer to producer.
In 1964, a couple of years after Newton N. Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, declared tv “an enormous wasteland,” Mr. Venza started his profession in public tv. But he didn’t turn out to be an aesthetic snob, and he acknowledged what business TV did greatest.
“To current wonderful artists in prime time, now we have to do it no less than as elegantly as CBS does ‘Dallas,’” he stated in 1982, referring to the hit prime-time cleaning soap opera. “Commercial tv is essentially the most slickly, professionally produced on the earth. So when a wonderful artist offers me one thing, I need to make certain it’s properly produced.”
“I noticed,” he recalled of his early days, “that the best artists had not been requested to hitch tv in a significant method. To succeed, public tv wanted performances.”
In addition to Mr. Routhier, Mr. Venza is survived by nieces and nephews. His sister, Eileen Mitchell, died earlier.
Reflecting on his profession at 75, Mr. Venza noticed, “There’s nothing in my background that ought to have introduced me right here” — “right here” which means skilled success, however with out the monetary reward he may need had if he had pursued a profession in business tv.
“I’ll come away from the system with out a big checking account or a swimming pool, or proudly owning a type of packages I produced,” he stated.
But, he added: “What I’ll have 20 years from now, lots of people in tv received’t have. Our packages received’t spoil. They shall be in faculties and in videodisc collections. What now we have received’t diminish with age.”
