Jac Venza
Nacimiento : 1926-01-01, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Historia
Jac Venza is a public television producer who is directly responsible for most of the theatre and music programs that have been seen on PBS since its creation in 1970. 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.
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 - 57 - until 2010.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Executive Producer
An intimate portrait of Suzan-Lori Parks, featuring actors Don Cheadle and Jeffrey Wright. The film shows the playwright’s process and how a play gets produced in behind-the-scenes footage of Topdog/Underdog in rehearsal and performance. It captures the play’s triumphant Broadway debut and traces Parks’ opportunities, challenges, and personal milestones during the production of her 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner.
Executive Producer
Mary Haines's life falls apart and her social circle shatters after her husband's affair is revealed. Filmed version of the 2001 Broadway revival with the original cast reprising their roles.
Executive Producer
Fosse is a three-act musical revue showcasing the choreography of Bob Fosse. The musical was conceived by Richard Maltby, Jr., Chet Walker, and Ann Reinking. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2000. In 2002, Fosse, featuring Reinking and Ben Vereen, was aired as part of the "Great Performances — Dance In America" series on PBS television. This filmed Broadway tribute strings together acclaimed director/choreographer Bob Fosse's "greatest hits."
Executive Producer
Crazy For You is a romantic comedy musical with a book by Ken Ludwig, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and music by George Gershwin. Billed as "The New Gershwin Musical Comedy", it is largely based on the songwriting team's 1930 musical Girl Crazy, but incorporates songs from several other productions as well. Crazy For You won the 1992 Tony Award (Broadway), 1993 Olivier Award (London), and 1994 Dora Award (Toronto) for Best Musical. Originally aired on the PBS series "Great Performances" (season 28, episode 2).
Executive Producer
Released in 1999, the album, featuring music composed in traditional Christian styles, is not only Bocelli's most commercially successful classical album to date with over 5 million copies sold, but also the biggest selling classical album by a solo artist in history.
Executive Producer
Episode of Great Performances about Jim Henson
Co-Producer
Featuring music instead of any dialogue and set in a near Kafkaesque future, this loose remake of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari follows a bureaucrat whom mysterious Dr. Ramirez and his hideous sidekick want as their latest victim.
Executive Producer
A study of the Group Theatre, a company that changed the face of American drama. The Group was founded in 1931 by Cheryl Crawford, Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, who were strongly influenced by the naturalistic acting of Konstantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre.
Executive Producer
Natica Jackson (Michelle Pfeiffer) es una famosa actriz agotada por los numerosos compromisos y rodajes conseguidos por su ambicioso agente Morris (Hector Elizondo). Un día tiene un accidente gracias al cual conoce a Hal Graham (Brian Kerwin), con quien inicia una apasionada historia de amor. Hal está casado, y su celosa mujer planea su venganza cuidadosamente. Mientras tanto, el director del estudio A.D. Natham (Darren Macgavin) organiza una cena a la que invita a un grupo de personas, entre ellas al actor de moda Tony Montoya (Steven Bauer) y al director fracasado Canteret...
Executive Producer
From the elaborate Broadway revival of the 1932 Eva Le Gallienne/Florida Friebus production comes a whimsical retelling of the Lewis Carroll classic.
Executive Producer
This musical adaptation of the Studs Terkel book examines the average worker's viewpoint--showing that he or she is anything but average. Based on a series of interviews with real working people--construction workers, waitresses, firemen, secretaries, and cleaning women, Working is both an exploration of the individuals' occupations and a lament for lost hopes and dreams.
Executive Producer
Ken Talley is 32, strong, goodlooking and a Vietnam vet with both legs shot off seven years earlier. He is somewhat cynical. His lover Jed is bigger and stronger, a gardner, a good listener. On Independence Day 1977 Ken's home in Lebanon Missouri is visted by the others. Much of their past relationships, pre- and post-Vietnam, must be pulled up and examined before any of them can decide their future.
Associate Producer
The powerful tales of seven diverse African-American women are woven together in this 1982 performance of Ntozake Shange's Obie Award-winning landmark play. A breakthrough portrayal of black women's experiences in America, the story combines music, poetry and dance to celebrate their unique culture while painting a poignant portrait of their terrible struggles.
Executive Producer
John Cheever's wry comedy of errors comes to the screen in this filmed presentation from the Broadway Theatre Archive. An upper-middle-class suburb is turned upside-down by the apparent kidnapping of Toby Wooster (Garrett Hanf). Unaware that the whole thing is a setup, the town swings into action to raise funds to meet the kidnappers' ransom demands. George Grizzard, Polly Holliday, Katharine Balfour and Celeste Holm star.
Executive Producer
The Five Forty-Eight, drawn from a Cheever story about the fictional New York suburb of Shady Hill, concerns an advertising man, John Blake (Laurence Luckinbill), who is emotionally estranged from his wife and those around him. His disturbed secretary, Miss Dent (Mary Beth Hurt), whom he has seduced and then fired and discarded, pursues him harrowingly, and in a final scene in which she holds him at gunpoint in a field beyond the Shady Hill railroad station, she forces him to confront the squalor of his life.
Executive Producer
Cash Bentley and his wife Louise lead an average upper-middle-class life in suburbia, with a nice home and two fine children. But Cash grows increasingly unsettled in his life, yearning for the glories of his athletic youth and watching them fade further in the distance with accumulating age. Louise worries about him as his difficulties with mid-life pull him further away from happiness and comfort with his family.
Executive Producer
An affluent suburban couple's empty and gin-fueled lives are observed through the eyes of their neglected, eight-year old daughter.
Executive Producer
While at an impromptu reunion lunch, five women reminisce and relive their college days at Mount Holyoke, and weigh their goals and aspirations against their lives.
Producer
A writer (made to resemble Russian playwright Anton Chekhov) narrates a collection of his stories, all of which are written in the style of Chekhov.
Executive Producer
Donald Moffat stars in Moliere's classic comedy about lovable scoundrel Tartuffe, who befriends the wealthy Orgon and then attempts to seduce both his new friend's wife and daughter in this TV presentation from the Broadway Theatre Archive. Tartuffe pretends to be a pious man whose faith convinces Orgon and his family to succumb to his influence, but he's undone when his womanizing ways make it clear that his piety is a charade.
Executive Producer
This absorbing 1976 production of dramatist Sidney Kingsley's historical play centers on the formative days of the United States and the disputes between founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Although the two men greatly respect each other, the deep-seated clash in their ideologies engenders conflict just as the fledgling country is beginning to take root.
Executive Producer
On a Connecticut farm, James Mayo's two sons both love Ruth Atkins. Robert, the younger son, is sickly and dreams of escaping to a romantic life somewhere "beyond the horizon." Andy is hard-working and steadfast and loves his brother deeply. When Ruth reveals that she loves Robert and not, as everyone believed, Andy, Robert's plans to go to sea with his uncle are disrupted. He decides to stay at home and marry Ruth, while Andy, unwilling to remain close at hand as his brother marries the girl he loves, takes Robert's place on the voyage. This turn of events leads to heartache and tragedy for everyone involved.
Producer
London society matron Lady Sneerwell loves to gossip and spends her free time engaged in manipulation. When she selfishly derails the romance of Charles Surface, her scheming unexpectedly creates a ripple effect among her well-to-do acquaintances.
Executive Producer
Frank Chin's edgy story breaks down the stereotypes of Asian Americans and centers on San Francisco Chinatown tour operator Fred Eng. Eng hides his contempt for the tourists while dealing with the uproar that occurs within his oddball family after his dying father reveals he's hiding a second wife.
Executive Producer
In this rousing satire a native upstate New York clerk comes to 1920s Manhattan with dreams of making in big on Tin Pan Alley.
Executive Producer
This powerful drama about the social ferment that culminated in the 1917 Russian Revolution is set on an estate in provincial Russia in 1905. In a sun-dappled garden, some factory owners and their wives discuss the unrest among the workers. Rather than submit to a strike, they decide to close down the factory. When an owner is slain in a scuffle with a workman, the ensuing investigation uncovers the socialist fervor that is sweeping the countryside. The play goes beyond depicting class struggle by keenly examining the gulfs between youth and old age, vision and shortsightedness, and conservatism versus change.
Executive Producer
Cornelius "Con" Melody is an Irish tavern keeper in New England who lives in reverence of his former days as a nobleman and decorated officer in the British army during the Napoleonic wars. Impoverished now, he struts about in his uniform and plots to make money by manipulating the love of his daughter for the son of a wealthy manufacturer. His daughter sees through his façade and his chicanery and begins to plot for herself.
Producer
Documentary about radio comedies primarily focused on Burns & Allen, Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, The Jack Benny Program, Fibber McGee & Molly, The Bob Hope Show, and The Fred Allen Show.
Executive Producer
A scrub-woman attempts to rescue a dolphin who will talk to no one but her from a research laboratory.
Executive Producer
Set in a Norwegian hamlet, an idealistic physician discovers that the town's hot springs are contaminated. But with the community relying on the spa for tourist dollars, his warning to the powers-that-be falls on deaf ears.
Producer
The Star Wagon is a play in black and white starring Dustin Hoffman.
Producer
Dustin Hoffman stars in this television adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's tale about Dmitri Zoditch, a simple manuscript reader at a publishing house whose grand dreams don't square with his dead-end job and miserable apartment. When he's assigned to read the diary of a nobleman, he finds bitter parallels between his own pathetic existence and the wasted life described in the journal. Michael Tolan and Charlotte Rae co-star.
Production Design
Helen Lester is in love with a man she has known just 24 hours, a playboy who spent time in jail for passing bad checks. Though the man has promised to change, most of her strait-laced relatives are up in arms. But Clare Lester, Helen's grandmother, says the girl is free to join the man she loves. On one condition, that she listen to the story of a day in Clare's own life and of a man she tried to change.
Production Design
Ruth Sherwood and her sister, Eileen, have moved to 1935 Greenwich Village. They're surrounded by colorful Village characters (including an out-of-work football player known as the Wreck, and Mr. Appopolous, a modern painter and their landlord) and embark on various New York adventures. Ruth, who's trying to make it as a writer, meets up with a sleazy newspaper writer named Chick and a kindly editor named Bob, both of whom take an interest in both her career and her.
