\n<\/p>\n
Jac Venza, a shoemaker\u2019s son who almost single-handedly delivered to the proverbial \u201cvast wasteland\u201d that was American television in the 1960s and \u201970s an oasis of cultural programming, including \u201cGreat Performances\u201d and \u201cLive From Lincoln Center,\u201d died on Tuesday at his home in Lyme, Conn. He was 97. <\/p>\n
His death was confirmed by his spouse, Daniel D. Routhier.<\/p>\n
Mr. Venza never attended college. As an actor, he pronounced himself \u201cdreadful.\u201d As an aspiring artist, he began his career in Chicago by designing scenery for the Goodman Theater and window displays for the Mandel Brothers department store. But while still in his 30s, he began playing a vital role in bringing art to public television.<\/p>\n
He was working as a television producer when he was asked to collaborate with other TV innovators assembled by the Ford Foundation in the early 1960s to transform a limited service that generated no original programming into National Educational Television, the forerunner of the Public Broadcasting Service.<\/p>\n
While his fellow producers and other media experts were mulling how best to educate the viewing public through a nonprofit network, Mr. Venza recalled, he volunteered, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we entertain them, too?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In the 1960s and \u201970s, he introduced \u201cNET Playhouse,\u201d \u201cTheater in America,\u201d \u201cLive From Lincoln Center,\u201d \u201cGreat Performances\u201d and, at the suggestion of the National Endowment for the Arts, \u201cDance in America.\u201d He also imported popular BBC productions like \u201cBrideshead Revisited.\u201d<\/p>\n
He collaborated with choreographers like George Balanchine<\/a> and Martha Graham<\/a>, composers like Leonard Bernstein<\/a> and playwrights like Tennessee Williams<\/a>. Dustin Hoffman had his first starring role on television in a 1966 NET production of Ronald Ribman\u2019s play \u201cThe Journey of the Fifth Horse.\u201d A decade later, Meryl Streep appeared onscreen for the first time in the William Gillette play \u201cSecret Service\u201d on \u201cGreat Performances.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not sure there would be performing arts in prime time on public television if there hadn\u2019t been Jac Venza in the lifeblood of this station,\u201d John Jay Iselin<\/a>, a former president of WNET, told The Times in 1982. \u201cWe take performing arts for granted as the signature of our whole cultural programming. But he was creating programs at a time when most people hadn\u2019t the production skill or insight or ingenuity to make them really interesting and compelling.\u201d<\/p>\n Before he retired from \u201cGreat Performances\u201d in 2004, Mr. Venza and the programs he produced for WNET, the PBS flagship station, received 57 Emmy nominations, a record not surpassed until 2010, the station said. He won 10 Primetime Emmys, an International Emmy for lifetime achievement and a Governor\u2019s Award, also for lifetime achievement. In 1997, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting presented him with the Ralph Lowell Award for outstanding achievements.<\/p>\n Mr. Venza was variously characterized as a brilliant visionary and a savvy deal maker<\/a>. He could also be stubborn and self-assertive. \u201cI have been terrific in this job,\u201d he told The New York Times<\/a> in 1982, \u201cbecause I have an open mind.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He was typically credited as an executive producer, but he was considerably more than that: He was the rare artistic polymath who deserved the title \u201cimpresario.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone always wonders what an executive producer does,\u201d Mr. Venza told The Times. \u201cHe keeps his eye on the horizon. He sets the goals, whether they are what an artist wants, or program ideas we should pursue, or finding the right people to work for a project.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n William F. Baker, who succeeded Mr. Iselin at WNET, described Mr. Venza in an email as \u201ctruly a luminary in getting arts on television.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe led us into a genre of media that had not been tested,\u201d he wrote. \u201cOther networks never tried to get into it because audiences were smaller and older, and production was expensive. But we felt it was \u2018mission,\u2019 and PBS is still dominant and stands alone in it today.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Venza was born on Dec. 23, 1926, in Chicago to Rosario Venza, an immigrant from Sicily, <\/span>and Frances (Roppolo) Venza. It\u2019s not clear what his given birth name was, but he was known as Jac since childhood. The family lived in two rooms behind his father\u2019s shoe repair shop. His mother managed the household.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Jac started shining shoes before he was 10. But he wanted to be an artist. \u201cWhile other boys were reading comic books,\u201d he told The Times, \u201cI was reading design books.\u201d<\/p>\n After graduating from a Roman Catholic high school, he received a scholarship through a classmate\u2019s father to help design sets for the Goodman Theater on the condition that he also act in its productions. (\u201cI was dreadful,\u201d he told the Archive of American Television<\/a>.)<\/p>\n A colleague who recognized his artistic talent recommended that Mr. Venza move to New York. After designing sets for the Spoleto Festival in Italy, he settled in the city and, as a commercial artist, designed store window displays for Bonwit Teller and other Fifth Avenue emporiums. The first Broadway musical he attended was Cole Porter\u2019s \u201cKiss Me, Kate.\u201d (He would present a revival of that show on \u201cGreat Performances\u201d in 2003.)<\/p>\n In 1950, he joined CBS, where he designed sets for \u201cI Remember Mama,\u201d \u201cThe Ed Sullivan Show\u201d and \u201cAdventure,\u201d a documentary series produced in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History. For that series, instead of relying on graphics, he substituted costumed dancers to portray chromosomes and musical notes. He worked his way up from set designer to producer.<\/p>\n In 1964, a few years after Newton N. Minow<\/a>, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, declared television \u201ca vast wasteland,\u201d Mr. Venza began his career in public television. But he didn\u2019t become an aesthetic snob, and he recognized what commercial TV did best.<\/p>\n \u201cTo present fine artists in prime time, we have to do it at least as elegantly as CBS does \u2018Dallas,\u2019\u201d he said in 1982, referring to the hit prime-time soap opera. \u201cCommercial television is the most slickly, professionally produced in the world. So when a fine artist gives me something, I want to make sure it is well produced.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI realized,\u201d he recalled of his early days, \u201cthat the finest artists had not been asked to join television in a major way. To succeed, public television needed performances.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to Mr. Routhier, Mr. Venza is survived by nieces and nephews. His sister, Eileen Mitchell, died earlier.<\/p>\n