Jac Venza, a shoemaker’s son who virtually single-handedly delivered to the proverbial “huge wasteland” that was American tv within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s an oasis of cultural programming, together with “Nice Performances,” “Masterpiece Theater” and “Stay From Lincoln Middle,” died on Tuesday at his house in Lyme, Conn. He was 97.
His loss of life 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. However whereas nonetheless in his 30s, he started enjoying 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 Basis within the early Nineteen Sixties to remodel a restricted service that generated no authentic programming into Nationwide Instructional Tv, the forerunner of the Public Broadcasting Service.
Whereas his fellow producers and different media specialists had been mulling how finest to coach the viewing public via a nonprofit community, Mr. Venza recalled, he volunteered, “Why don’t we entertain them, too?”
Within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, he launched “NET Playhouse,” “Theater in America,” “Stay From Lincoln Middle,” “Nice Performances,” “American Masters” and, on the suggestion of the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts, “Dance in America.” He additionally imported fashionable 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 “Nice Performances.”
“I’m unsure there could 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 Occasions in 1982. “We take performing arts with no consideration because the signature of our complete cultural programming. However 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.’‘
Earlier than he retired from “Nice Performances” in 2004, Mr. Venza and the packages he produced for WNET, the PBS flagship station, obtained 57 Emmy nominations, a report not surpassed till 2010, the station stated. He received 10 Primetime Emmys, an Worldwide Emmy for lifetime achievement and a Governor’s Award, additionally for lifetime achievement. In 1997, the Company for Public Broadcasting introduced him with the Ralph Lowell Award for excellent achievements.
Mr. Venza was variously characterised as a superb 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 Occasions 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 creative polymath who deserved the title “impresario.”
“Everybody all the time wonders what an government producer does,” Mr. Venza informed The Occasions. “He retains his eye on the horizon. He units the objectives, whether or not they’re what an artist needs, or program concepts we should always pursue, or discovering the proper folks to work for a venture.”
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. “Different networks by no means tried to get into it as a result of audiences had been smaller and older, and manufacturing was costly. However we felt it was ‘mission,’ and PBS remains to be dominant and stands alone in it at present.”
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 start title was, however he was generally known as 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. However he needed to be an artist. “Whereas different boys had been studying comedian books,” he informed The Occasions, “I used to be studying design books.”
After graduating from a Roman Catholic highschool, he obtained a scholarship via 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 Tv.)
A colleague who acknowledged his creative expertise really useful that Mr. Venza transfer to New York. After designing units for the Spoleto Competition in Italy, he settled within the metropolis and, as a industrial artist, designed retailer window shows for Bonwit Teller and different Fifth Avenue emporiums. The primary Broadway musical he attended was Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate.” (He would current a revival of that present on “Nice Performances” in 2003.)
In 1950, he joined CBS, the place he designed units for “I Bear in mind Mama,” “The Ed Sullivan Present” and “Journey,” a documentary collection produced in collaboration with the American Museum of Pure Historical past. For that collection, as an alternative of counting on graphics, he substituted costumed dancers to painting chromosomes and musical notes. He labored his approach up from set designer to producer.
In 1964, a number of years after Newton N. Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Fee, declared tv “an enormous wasteland,” Mr. Venza started his profession in public tv. However he didn’t change into an aesthetic snob, and he acknowledged what industrial TV did finest.
“To current advantageous artists in prime time, we now 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. “Industrial tv is essentially the most slickly, professionally produced on the planet. So when a advantageous artist provides me one thing, I wish to make certain it’s effectively produced.”
“I spotted,” he recalled of his early days, “that the best artists had not been requested to affix tv in a serious approach. To succeed, public tv wanted performances.”
Along with 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” that means skilled success, however with out the monetary reward he may need had if he had pursued a profession in industrial tv.
“I’ll come away from the system with out a big checking account or a swimming pool, or proudly owning a kind of packages I produced,” he stated.
However, he added: “What I’ll have 20 years from now, lots of people in tv received’t have. Our packages received’t spoil. They are going to be in faculties and in videodisc collections. What we now have received’t diminish with age.”
