American Masters (TV Program)

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    Jac Venza, Who Delivered Culture to Public Television, Dies at 97

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    By making entertainment as well as education part of its mission, he gave the world “Great Performances” and other enduring programs. Jac Venza, a shoemaker’s son who almost single-handedly delivered to the proverbial “vast wasteland” that was American television in the 1960s and ’70s an oasis of cultural programming, including “Great Performances” and “Live From Lincoln Center,” died on Tuesday at his home in Lyme, Conn. He was 97. His death was confirmed by his spouse, Daniel D. Routhier.Mr. Venza never attended college. As an actor, he pronounced himself “dreadful.” 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.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.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, “Why don’t we entertain them, too?”In the 1960s and ’70s, he introduced “NET Playhouse,” “Theater in America,” “Live From Lincoln Center,” “Great Performances” and, at the suggestion of the National Endowment for the Arts, “Dance in America.” He also imported popular BBC productions like “Brideshead Revisited.”He collaborated with choreographers like George Balanchine and Martha Graham, composers like Leonard Bernstein and playwrights like Tennessee Williams. Dustin Hoffman had his first starring role on television in a 1966 NET production of Ronald Ribman’s play “The Journey of the Fifth Horse.” A decade later, Meryl Streep appeared onscreen for the first time in the William Gillette play “Secret Service” on “Great Performances.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A New Film on William F. Buckley Examines the Godfather of Modern Conservatism

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      The PBS documentary “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley” implicitly and explicitly asks: What would William F. Buckley think of today’s Republican Party?William F. Buckley Jr., widely considered the godfather of modern conservatism, defended Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch hunts. He praised the “restraint” of Alabama law enforcement officers who brutally assaulted civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. He was also a silver-tongued intellectual who abhorred boorish thinking and behavior and savored debates with the sharpest minds of his era.Such a track record invites the question asked, implicitly and explicitly, in a new “American Masters” documentary: What would Buckley think of the current Republican kingpin, Donald Trump, and his followers? Would Buckley, who died in 2008, denounce the direction of the movement he helped start and disown a former (and perhaps future) American president who has expressed his admiration for a strongman Russian president? Or would he find a way to fold Trump and his supporters into his dreams of a conservative empire?In “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley,” which premiered last week on PBS and is streaming on PBS.org, Buckley’s son, the novelist and former George H.W. Bush speechwriter Christopher Buckley, gives a cryptic assessment of what the senior Buckley would think of Trump: “He might just have said, ‘Demand a recount,’” a riff on William F. Buckley’s oft-repeated joke about what he would do if he won his 1965 New York mayoral bid. In a recent video interview, however, Christopher Buckley was more direct.“I don’t equate Trumpism with conservatism,” he said. “I’m very glad my father and Ronald Reagan are not alive to see what’s happened to the G.O.P. and to the national discourse.”Others, including some who appear in the film directed by Barak Goodman, say it’s not that straightforward.“My own view is that Buckley would probably think about Trump more or less what he thought about McCarthy,” Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale University and author of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning J. Edgar Hoover biography “G-Man,” said in a video interview. “He would see Trump as tremendously useful as a concentration of many of the themes and constituencies that Buckley stood for.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: The Super Bowl and an Oscar Micheaux Documentary

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      The Super Bowl airs on NBC. And TCM airs a documentary about a pathbreaking filmmaker.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Feb. 7-Feb. 13. Details and times are subject to change.MondayLOVE & BASKETBALL (2000) 6 p.m. on BET. Football is front of mind this week, but Gina Prince-Bythewood’s coming-of-age classic “Love & Basketball” is timeless. Set in Los Angeles, the movie stars Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps as young people who are passionate for each other and for the game.TuesdayAMERICAN MASTERS: MARIAN ANDERSON — THE WHOLE WORLD IN HER HANDS (2022) 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The filmmaker Rita Coburn (“Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise”) looks at the barrier-breaking contralto Marian Anderson in this new documentary. Anderson is perhaps best known for her 1939 concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which became a civil rights milestone; she also broke the color barrier for soloists at the Metropolitan Opera and toured for the State Department. Anderson’s life and legacy — she died in 1993 at 96 — are discussed here by interviewees including the tenor George Shirley and the mezzo-sopranos Denyce Graves and J’nai Bridges.WednesdayA scene from “Fairview.”Comedy CentralFAIRVIEW 8:30 p.m. on Comedy Central. A small American town deals with big changes in this new, “South Park”-esque half-hour animated series, which counts Stephen Colbert among its executive producers. The stand-up comic Blair Socci voices the mayor of Fairview, where people’s jobs are being replaced by artificial intelligence; Covid is a concern; and, in at least one case, a student gives a school presentation on his father’s career running an explicit OnlyFans account. While moderating an interview panel at New York Comic Con last year, the comedy writer-performer Jen Spyra said to the “Fairview” creator R.J. Fried, “I understand that you take the comedy to some abjectly disgusting places.” Fried responded calmly and succinctly: “That’s for sure.” The voice cast also includes the comics Aparna Nancherla and Atsuko Okatsuka.ThursdayDavid Oyelowo and Storm Reid in “Don’t Let Go.”Lacey Terrell/Universal PicturesDON’T LET GO (2019) 5:20 p.m. on FXM. Grief seems to bend time in “Don’t Let Go,” a sci-fi thriller led by David Oyelowo and directed by Jacob Aaron Estes. Oyelowo plays Jack Radcliff, a Los Angeles detective whose niece (played by Storm Reid) is murdered. But soon after the killing, Radcliff receives what is apparently a phone call from his dead niece, speaking from the past — or perhaps from another dimension. He sets off to untangle the mystery. The result is “a likable, derivative genre mash-up,” Manohla Dargis said in her review for The New York Times. “You get lost in its thickets because Estes hasn’t wholly figured out how to make toying with time work,” she wrote. “But he has a fine cast and a good sense of place, including a feel for the spookiness of emptied-out spaces.”FridayEVERYTHING’S GONNA BE ALL WHITE 8 p.m. on Showtime. The producer-director Sacha Jenkins (“Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James”) is behind this new three-part docuseries, which explores race and racism in America’s past and present. It does so with the help of interviewees from an array of fields — academic, political, artistic and more — including the historian Nell Irvin Painter, the human rights activist Linda Sarsour, the comedian Amanda Seales, the artist Favianna Rodriguez, the rapper Bun B and the sexuality educator Ericka Hart.SaturdayCRY MACHO (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. Clint Eastwood plays a patinated Texas rodeo retiree tasked with transporting a boy (played by Eduardo Minett) from Mexico to the United States in this modern Western. (Or almost modern: It’s set in 1980.) Their journey is risky but roundabout, filled with 20-miles-an-hour detours that make the movie a slow burn. Its relative quiet is especially pronounced in comparison to the work that Eastwood is best known for — a trait that A.O. Scott welcomed, mostly, in his review for The Times. “This one,” Scott wrote, “is something different — a deep cut for the die-hards, a hangout movie with nothing much to prove and just enough to say.”SundayPaul Robeson in Oscar Micheaux’s “Body and Soul.” A documentary about Micheaux will air on TCM on Sunday night.Kino LorberOSCAR MICHEAUX: THE SUPERHERO OF BLACK FILMMAKING (2021) 9:30 p.m. on TCM. From 1919 to 1948, the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux made some 40 movies filled with nuanced Black characters who broke screen stereotypes and often directly addressed issues of race. This documentary from the filmmaker Francesco Zippel (“Friedkin Uncut”) looks at Micheaux’s groundbreaking work and remarkable life: Micheaux’s parentshad once been enslaved, and he turned to professional storytelling only after a stint as a homesteader in South Dakota. His first film, “The Homesteader” (1919), was based on a fictionalized memoir he wrote. Produced about a century later, this documentary features perspectives from the late contemporary filmmakers John Singleton and Melvin Van Peebles, and a handful of performers and scholars.SUPER BOWL LVI 6 p.m. on NBC. Will the Los Angeles Rams or the Cincinnati Bengals prevail? What will it be like seeing two quarterbacks who were No. 1 draft picks — Joe Burrow of the Bengals and Matthew Stafford of the Rams — face off in a championship game, an extreme Super Bowl rarity? Most important, will Matthew McConaughey grace us with another weird, surrealist commercial, as he did for Doritos last year? Find out on Sunday during this live broadcast of the 56th Super Bowl. Viewers who are in it more for the culture (and, perhaps, the guacamole) will be glad to see a stacked halftime performance lineup: Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Ailey’ and ‘Somebody Somewhere’

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      PBS’s “American Masters” airs a documentary on the choreographer Alvin Ailey. And a bittersweet comedy series debuts on HBO.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Jan. 10-16. Details and times are subject to change.MondayRICHARD JEWELL (2019) 9 p.m. on TNT. In this biographical drama, Clint Eastwood revisited the case of Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser), a security guard who alerted authorities to the presence of homemade explosives at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, then was wrongly implicated in the bomb attack by the F.B.I. and media outlets. In Eastwood’s telling, Jewell’s story becomes a case study in prejudice and the potential ill effects of media attention. The result is a “flawed, fascinating movie,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times — “a rebuke to institutional arrogance and a defense of individual dignity, sometimes clumsy in its finger-pointing but mostly shrewd and sensitive in its effort to understand its protagonist and what happened to him.”TuesdayAMERICAN MASTERS: AILEY 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Like many influential artists, the choreographer Alvin Ailey has had two lives. One began when he was born, in segregated small-town Texas in the 1930s, continued as he worked to become a fundamental part of the evolution of modern dance and ended in 1989, when he died of AIDS-related illness. The other began in 1958, when Ailey established the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and continues today. This new documentary superimposes these two lives by mixing an exploration of Ailey’s rags-to-stages journey — told in part through his own words captured in archival audio recordings — with a behind-the-scenes look at a 2018 project by the choreographer Rennie Harris to stage a dance evocation of Ailey’s life with present-day members of Ailey’s company. The early chapters suggest that Ailey had a performer’s awareness of his own body even in his youth: “I remember being glued to my mother’s hip, sloshing through the terrain, branches slashing against a child’s body,” he says, “going from one place to another — looking for a place to be.”Daniel Puig and Kaci Walfall in “Naomi.”Boris Martin/The CWNAOMI 9 p.m. on the CW. The filmmaker Ava DuVernay (“A Wrinkle in Time” and “When They See Us”) and the writer-producer Jill Blankenship (“Arrow”) are behind this new superhero series. Based on a DC Comics character, the show follows Naomi (Kaci Walfall), a teenager with a passion for comic books who, after a supernatural occurrence, starts down a path to becoming a hero herself.WednesdayTHE GREAT ESCAPE (1963) 8 p.m. on TCM. A pair of World War II prisoners-of-war classics will be aired on Wednesday night. First, “The Great Escape” with Steve McQueen and company, which focuses on the slow but steady digging of an escape tunnel beneath a German prison camp. Then, at 11 p.m., THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957) with Alec Guinness. That movie’s action takes place above ground, as a group of British prisoners are forced to construct a bridge to aid the Japanese.ThursdayTRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG (2020) 6 p.m. on Showtime 2. Jane Campion’s quasi-Western “The Power of the Dog” is one of the most critically acclaimed movies of this season, and a lot of praise has gone to Ari Wegner’s cinematography. Wegner previously shot “True History of the Kelly Gang,” a visually striking period piece about the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, adapted from a Booker Prize-winning novel by Peter Carey. Directed by Justin Kurzel, the film casts George MacKay as Kelly, whose story culminates with a famous shootout. In his review for The Times, Glenn Kenny wrote that the film’s depiction of that event is “undeniably impressive.” But, he added, “the jumpy, springy qualities of the movie’s visual style are unfortunately undercut by its verbal content.”FridayLiev Schreiber in “Ray Donovan: The Movie.”Cara Howe/ShowtimeRAY DONOVAN: THE MOVIE (2022) 9 p.m. on Showtime. The crime drama “Ray Donovan” was canceled in early 2020 before its plot — about a professional fixer played by Liev Schreiber — had reached a clear conclusion. Two years later, its audience will get some level of closure with this feature-length continuation of the show’s story line. The original cast, which also includes Eddie Marsan and Jon Voight, returns.SaturdayHOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (2012) 6 p.m. on Syfy. “Hotel Transylvania: Transformania,” the fourth installment in the animated “Hotel Transylvania” family-movie franchise, will debut Jan. 14 on Amazon Prime Video. Kids might appreciate this opportunity to revisit the original movie on Syfy, which introduced the series’ exaggerated take on Dracula (Adam Sandler) and his daughter, Mavis (Selena Gomez). The first sequel, HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2, follows at 8 p.m.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More