Jac Venza, public television pioneer, dead at 97

Jac Venza, a public television pioneer who produced programs such as “Great Performances’ and “Live From Lincoln Center,” died May 28. He was 97.

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Venza died at his home in Lyme, Connecticut, his spouse, Daniel D. Routhier, told the The New York Times.

The 10-time Emmy Award winner designed sets at CBS in 1950, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The designs were for shows such as “I Remember Mama,” “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “Adventure, the Times reported.

In 1964 Venza led cultural programming at National Education Television (NET), the newspaper reported. That network later became The WNET Group, which was the home of New York’s PBS station, THIRTEEN.

NET later became the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), according to Deadline.

While other producers at the network were trying how to educate the viewing public through a nonprofit organization, Venza had a novel approach.

“Why don’t we entertain them, too?” he once said.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, he introduced “NET Playhouse,” “Theater in America,” “Live From Lincoln Center,” “Great Performances” and “Dance in America,” the Times reported. He also imported BBC productions like “Brideshead Revisited.”

“I realized,” Venza told the Times in 1982, “that the finest artists had not been asked to join television in a major way. To succeed, public television needed performances.”

“Great Performances” would win 32 Emmy Awards.

Venz was nominated for 57 Emmys, winning 10 times.

Through the years, Venza worked with George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Leonard Bernstein and Tennessee Williams, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Dustin Hoffman appeared in his first starring role on television in NET’s 1966 production of “The Journey of the Fifth Horse,” the entertainment news website reported.

A decade later, Meryl Streep appeared onscreen for the first time in the play “Secret Service” on “Great Performances,” the Times reported.

“I’m not sure there would be performing arts in prime time on public television if there hadn’t been Jac Venza in the lifeblood of this station,” John Jay Iselin, a former president of WNET, told the newspaper in 1982. “We 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’t the production skill or insight or ingenuity to make them really interesting and compelling.”

Venza was born on Dec. 23, 1926, in Chicago, the son of an immigrant shoemaker from Sicily, according to the Times.

He said he never regretting shifting from commercial to public television.

“I will come away from the system without a large bank account or a swimming pool, or owning one of those programs I produced,” Venza told the Times in a 2002 interview. “What I will have 20 years from now, a lot of people in television won’t have. Our programs won’t spoil. They will be in schools and in videodisc collections. What we have won’t diminish with age.”

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