Jac Venza obit

In Memoriam: Jac Venza

 

He was not on the list.

GREAT PERFORMANCES mourns the passing of its founding Executive Producer, Jac Venza, who was one of pioneering leaders of American public media for over three decades, and a major force in harnessing the power of television to achieve international recognition for America’s leading performing artists. Beginning with the GREAT PERFORMANCES series in 1972, Mr. Venza created a new framework for the performing arts on PBS, launching the sub-series THEATER IN AMERICA, DANCE IN AMERICA and MUSIC IN AMERICA to initiate television collaboration with performers and artistic companies throughout the country. GREAT PERFORMANCES’s vast program collection has garnered virtually every major television honor, including 67 Emmy Awards.

With Venza’s purview expanding in 1997 as WNET’s Director of Culture & Arts Programs, Venza’s co-productions included AMERICAN VISIONS, the eight-part series with TIME Magazine critic Robert Hughes on the history of American art; YO-YO MA: INSPIRED BY BACH, a six-part exploration of the creative process via J.S. Bach’s Suites for Solo Cello; the six-part I’LL MAKE ME A WORLD: A Century of African-American Arts; the six-part GREAT COMPOSERS profiling some of classical music’s most enduring composers; and Sir Richard Eyre’s six-part history of the English-language theater, CHANGING STAGES. In October 2000, Venza launched WNET’s new theater showcase STAGE ON SCREEN with the live telecast of The Man Who Came to Dinner starring Nathan Lane from the Roundabout Theatre on Broadway. In 2004, the Culture & Arts unit produced the Emmy-winning series BROADWAY: THE AMERICAN MUSICAL hosted by Julie Andrews, an epic six-part chronicle of the American musical theater from the Ziegfeld Follies to the blockbuster premiere of Wicked.

Born in Chicago in 1926, Venza’s father was an Italian immigrant shoemaker. Looking back on his prolific achievements for a 30th anniversary interview in 2002, Venza remarked, “There’s nothing in my background that should have brought me here.” Nevertheless, Venza’s passion for the arts was always a driving force, with the veteran producer adding, “But I knew from the age of eight that I wanted to be an artist.”

He began his career on CBS in the 1950s, where he began to notice the scarcity of programming devoted to the fine arts on television. It was his dream to bring more of it to the home screen on a regular basis, but he did not receive a full opportunity to do so until the creation of National Educational Television, where it soon became possible, thanks largely to Venza, to see great dramatic literature regularly performed by some of the world's most renowned actors. A then-unknown Dustin Hoffman made his first major television appearance in a play—Ronald Ribman's The Journey of the Fifth Horse—on NET in 1966. NET Playhouse was perhaps the first television anthology to present commercial-free, full-length productions (rather than one-hour or ninety-minute adaptations) of theatrical classics such as Arthur Miller's adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. When NET became PBS, Venza quickly launched Great Performances, which is still running today.

Upon his retirement from PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting awarded Venza the Ralph Lowell medal. He held the record for the most Emmy nominations for an individual—fifty-seven—until 2010.

From the early 1960s until his retirement in 2005, Venza brought such programs as NET Playhouse, Live from Lincoln Center, American Playhouse, American Masters, and Great Performances to millions of viewers. He won a Personal Peabody Award in 1998.