Current.org | Current Q&A with Jac Venza

Great Performances team brought stage virtuosos into the videoscape

At left, Great Performances veteran Judith Jamison will share the screen with newcomer Anna Deveare Smith in an Alvin Ailey tribute in June 1998. (Photo: K.C. Bailey.)

Twenty-five years ago this week, public TV first aired Great Performances, its major performing arts showcase. And just in time for the anniversary, CPB in October 1997 gave its top public TV award, the Ralph Lowell medal, to Jac Venza, executive producer of the series from the start. Earlier in the fall the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences honored him with its Governors Award.

No other producer has captured as much free-floating excellence and put it on videotape as Venza, public TV's major performing arts impresario. He also serves as director of cultural and arts programs at New York's WNET, overseeing the American Masters biographies, the pop music series In the Spotlight and the local City Arts series.

For this interview, Venza talked with Current Editor Steve Behrens in the offices of the arts unit at WNET. This edited transcript was originally published in Current, Nov. 3, 1997

The season was designed to have highlights of the arts that are now pretty uniquely broadcast on Great Performances. There is one of America's most important symphonic organizations, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, performing at Carnegie Hall with one of the great soloists of our time, Yo-Yo Ma.

The San Francisco Opera opened its new house last fall, and we have something that happens almost exclusively on our series: a gala of opera superstars, with Beverly Sills hosting.

The opening of the reconstructed Globe Theater in London reminds us that at one time Great Performances featured the great literature of theater--something that is almost never done anywhere else.

We have persisted in presenting American composers. It's shocking that nowhere else in television can you hear a Cole Porter song or Duke Ellington's music, so we have followed that tradition with a tribute to Kander & Ebb and their 30 years of songwriting [Dec. 3]; a look at a younger composer who's just coming into prominence, Alan Menken, taking his music out of context of Disney's animated films [March 6, 1998]; and a documentary on the making of the new musical "Ragtime" [Jan. 21, 1998].

American concert dance has not been really tapped anywhere else. Public television started presenting American dance when it was the most sought-after and celebrated thing all over the world. On the ballet side, we'll have a commissioned program, "Hymn: Remembering Alvin Ailey" [June 24, 1998], a loving piece created by Judith Jamison, the choreographer, and Anna Deveare Smith, who has done these marvelous theater pieces that are made from real material--in this case the dancers' memories about Alvin. And there's the added ingredient of Orlando Bagwell, the filmmaker. I invited him to meet them, see this piece, and conceive an hour-long film. So the program brings together one of most important black filmmakers in this country, one of the most interesting voices in black theater, and Judith Jamison, one of Ailey's most prominent dancers, who inherited his company.

And then we're doing a big show with American Ballet Theatre [May 27, 1998], reminding people that in this period, this is the company where the world superstars of dance wanted to perform.

That's our business. It's the value of having continuing strands in public television. Just as you'd expect my colleagues who do Nature to know who are the top filmmakers, and who knows about cats, for instance, our job is to know the performing arts. We have a department of experts, so we hear. That's essentially what the system is putting money into: for us to be the lead expert.

That's particularly important because we're dealing with world-class artists. Their schedules are booked two and three years in advance. If Wynton Marsalis or Kevin Kline says I'd like to do this, but I can't do it for the next nine months, you can say, "That's okay, we'll do it next season." That's why it's important to have continuity and the three-year commitments from Chase and PBS. I'm already locking things up for a season from now.

I looked at the people who gathered together to make the show and thought there's got to be an interesting story here: E.L. Doctorow, who wrote the original novel; Terrence McNally, who adapted it; and Frank Galati, the director, who has done wonderful operas and that beautiful production of "The Grapes of Wrath" for American Playhouse; and Graciela Daniele, the choreographer. Also involved were Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, the writers of the music and lyrics, whose work we had been following since their show on Broadway. So that's what drew us to "Ragtime."

In order to follow the process of a show, you have to start shooting when they start rehearsing. [Laughter.] So you don't know what you're going to get. We also did that with "Jelly's Last Jam" and "Angels in America" [both 1992-93]. We've been doing "process" as a way to get musical theater, because the rights to full musicals are still eluding us in terms of cost.

There must be some acts you chased after and never got. For instance, did you pursue "Rent?"

No, "Rent" has a long, profitable theatrical run ahead, so we're not that unrealistic. Remember, we did not buy the rights to "Ragtime." We did a film about the making of the musical because its rights will not be available for television for years from now. There may be a movie of it before then.

Don't these "process" documentaries also have the effect of condensing the show to the hit numbers, to move things along for an audience that might be too impatient for the whole book?

That's true. I think one of the problems of things designed for the theater is their length and pacing is different, so we're always looking for ways to do things in shorter form, even in opera. For example, this year we have a wonderful film, "The Art of Singing: Golden Voices, Silver Screen" [March 25, 1998], with excerpts of opera stars in films--starting with silent movies, believe it or not.

Are process documentaries becoming a bigger part of your series? "Creating Ragtime," "Henry V at Shakespeare's Globe," Itzhak Perlman's "In the Fiddler's House," and the Tonys broadcast this year--all use documentary technique.

It has always been a part of Great Performances. We're trying always not to duplicate the theater experience but to bring people to it. I believe public television still can be an educational experience. So, we often look for some sense of process to help people understand what they're seeing. We're dealing with theater material differently on television, to do something that isn't just a recreation of the concert hall or theater.

Over the 25 years, I would look back and say most of the people who excelled in the unit had dedicated their career to very specialized material. They know it, they know how you work with artists, how you record a symphony.

The pattern has been to take young people and develop them. I'm proud of my proteges who've had successful careers. Lindsay Law, who came from here has a film company at Fox. David Horn began his career here, as an office temp, and now is head of music. Judy Kinberg came from CBS with Merrill Brockway, who's now pretty much retired, and took over the lead in dance, but Judy has also done films on other subjects, like her documentary "The World of Jim Henson" [1994-95]. And Kimberly Myers has just come back from Turner to head our drama department.

Phylis Geller was a graduate of our first drama work and is now at WETA in Washington. And Glenn DuBose, who was here helping me run this department, is now at PBS. I have a very good relationship with my kids, who are all very successful.

We've had some tragedies, we've had some deaths. We've lost two of our people to AIDS and one to cancer. It's like losing your children, who go before their time.

It seems an amazing number of the operas and plays were directed by Kirk Browning. Does he still work with you?

Kirk was unusual because when we first started public television, there really were almost no directors who had concentrated on arts programs. He and one other, Roger Englander, directed all the NBC operas and could musically direct as opposed to working from text. When we started Theater in America, we needed a seasoned television director to collaborate with the theater director on how they would approach the play. Kirk is the most extraordinary man; he would work with someone if he liked their work. From his point of view, he's spent his life with very interesting people. He's still the key director for all of Live from Lincoln Center.

When we started, public television had to create its own directors because there were none being trained by commercial television to interpret the fine arts.

Both in public television and in public radio, cultural programming is down and public affairs is up as proportions of the schedule. In radio, stations are replacing music with NPR news, and in TV, cultural programming became the "sacrificial lamb," according to the latest CPB Programming Survey. It peaked at 22 percent of the schedule in 1982 and was down to 16 percent by 1992. Why is this happening? Is it because "reality" programming is on a roll, and everything else has to get out of the way? Or is it because the arts are on the outs?

I believe the quality of what we do has to be considered before the size of audiences, if we are genuinely offering an alternative television service. It's important to define a unique profile for public television. Other kinds of PBS programs are duplicated on many cable channels. Fortunately, I'm not alone in believing that arts programs should be available to a broad American audience. Chase, our new corporate funder, has committed funding for three years.

I know that [PBS President] Ervin Duggan and [top PBS programmer] Kathy Quattrone have supported a higher profile for what we're doing. This is one of the kinds of programs in which we still have dominance on television.

What's particular to Chase and the decision-makers there that made them willing and able to underwrite?

Chase, like Exxon and Mobil, had a long tradition of supporting the arts. Their support for Great Performances is consistent with the fact that they're major supporters of Carnegie Hall and museum shows and a lot of other arts initiatives. Also, Chase has expanded tremendously; they have become one of the world's largest banks with the acquisition of Chemical Bank. So I think you'll see Chase investing not only in Great Performances but also in other major strands in public television.

How close have you come to having no money for the next season, or not nearly enough?

What's surprising is that in the days when stations voted in the [SPC or Station Program Cooperative] program market, Great Performances often came in in the top four and never below seventh or eighth. Even though people are saying they wish the arts had higher ratings, I don't think there are many who would want them eliminated from the public television system.

But in terms of underwriting, have there been periods approaching the time you need to make commitments and you did not yet have a corporate underwriter?

That's true of probably half the major strands--I think at some point it's been true of both MacNeil/Lehrer and Nature.

We always have, I think. The point is to stay with as many as we could in principle, in case there's some program that has a usage we haven't thought of yet. But the fact that we don't have time in our schedule for repeats for a lot of our strands says something is right about what we're doing.

There's a great economic advantage that the rock video channels have: the record companies pay to produce the programs. Is that kind of subsidy at all available for the Great Performances kinds of arts?

Yes, it always has. The difference is we don't take a program made as as an EPK--an "electronic press kit." We've turned those down consistently. If they would work with us and let us make the program, it would be a good public television program and a better selling tool.

Peter Gelb has worked with you as an independent producer for years and is now head of Sony Classical Film & Video. Are you getting a better buy on the programs because Sony is involved, or is Gelb's production operation divorced from the Sony record label?

It's important in this way. If we're watching the arts for the public television system, one place to watch is what the artists are doing. And Peter Gelb has done excellent classical programs with us like the beautiful Kathleen Battle/Wynton Marsalis show on baroque music that we co-produced with CAMI [Columbia Artists Management] [1991-92].

But the main business of Sony is to sell records--video has not been a main component of profit. We usually conceive the program, whether it's for Great Performances or In the Spotlight. It's a very good pairing with a record label since we want to offer a CD or home video with shows that are used for pledging.

When did it first occur to you, either when you were working in the TV industry or before, that TV could be a place for the performing arts?

I had a very unusual opportunity. I started in the very early '50s as a designer at CBS. And because I was a designer I was able to move from drama to variety shows to game shows to news sets. As the industry developed, the bottom line began to eliminate certain things that were less popular.

In the postwar years, when I was making friends in the concert world, the world's best artists were here in New York. This is where everyone in Europe wanted to get to. And very few of those high-quality artists had any place in television--maybe five minutes on Ed Sullivan or a 10-minute aria on The Bell Telephone Hour.

So when I went to WGBH, on leave from CBS, to do an early series, A Time to Dance--before PBS or NET [National Educational Television] was formed--it was to help my concert dance people, who'd never been asked to do television before. It was the first time I was working with fine artists to do what they do, not popularizing it as on Bell Telephone or Ed Sullivan. That idea stuck with me. So when NET was formed, I was one of the first group of 10 or 12 producers who came [in 1964]. I later became the first head of drama. The executive in charge of cultural programs, Curtis Davis, was a fanatic about classical music, and Bill Kobin, who was head of all programming, was very much an enthusiast for dance.

Later, when no one else was working on dance, I inherited it, and when Curtis Davis was not part of the merger to create WNET, I took on music. Someone had to keep the banner for the arts high.

It was important that the leadership at Exxon was very interested in giving classical music a higher profile. Their support in the beginning years of Great Performances and later for Live for Lincoln Center allowed music to rise to the prominence it has.

Steve Stamos, who was in charge of public relations at Exxon, was a fanatic music lover. He later became the president of the New York Philharmonic.

We started with them underwriting Theater in America, and they were pleased with what they were doing and asked to expand it. And that's when Great Performances started.

So you do need corporate people who do have a vision for the arts, and who see how it works for their companies.

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