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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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      Sandra Elkin, Creator of a Pioneering Feminist Talk Show, Dies at 85

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      “Woman,” which she hosted, brought frank talk about issues like birth control, pay inequality and homosexuality into millions of homes in the 1970s.Sandra Elkin, who as the creator and host of the weekly PBS talk show “Woman” in the mid-1970s brought frank discussions about birth control, job discrimination, health care and other issues confronting American women into millions of living rooms across the country, died on Nov. 8 at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.The cause was a heart attack, said her son Todd.Ms. Elkin was a stay-at-home mother in suburban Buffalo in 1972 when she approached the management of WNED, the local PBS member station, with an idea: a half-hour public affairs show focused on women and their concerns as the sexual revolution and second-wave feminism reshaped the gender landscape.Although she had no experience working in television, the station was sufficiently impressed with her pitch to give it the green light after just two weeks of negotiation.“Woman” was an immediate local hit, and after its initial season PBS picked it up for nationwide distribution. By 1974 it was reaching about 185 stations as far-flung as Fairbanks, Alaska, and Corpus Christi, Texas, distant from the liberal cities where the women’s movement had first emerged.Guests included a Who’s Who of contemporary feminism. Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Susan Brownmiller all trooped to Buffalo to speak with Ms. Elkin. She also led an all-female crew to Paris to film an interview with Simone de Beauvoir.But most of her guests — housewives (and househusbands), prisoners, blue-collar workers — were far from famous, by intention. Ms. Elkin insisted that the show was about information, not entertainment, and that she was there merely as a “conduit.”“We don’t play the usual talk-show games,” she told The Buffalo News in 1975. “There’s no baiting guests or embarrassing them.”That’s not to say Ms. Elkin and “Woman” shied from controversy. Ms. Brownmiller sat for a two-episode interview about rape. An episode about birth control featured diaphragms and intrauterine devices, intimate items that many viewers probably considered exotic or even frightening, especially in conservative corners of the country.Still, the show won broad viewership among both men and women, in part thanks to Ms. Elkin and her unguarded warmth as a host. She had never wanted to be on camera, and she agreed to do so only after the first season ended and the original moderator, Samantha Dean, moved to another station.Sitting on a couch facing her guest, often with one leg tucked under her and casually dressed in jeans and a sweater, Ms. Elkin made viewers feel they were simply listening in on two friends talking.“Women love to teach each other things, to tell each other what they think,” she said in 1975. “I love being a part of this.”Sandra Ann Marotti was born in Rutland, Vt., on Oct. 16, 1938. Her father, John, was a tailor, and her mother, Lisle (Thornton) Marotti, was a secretary for an investment firm.She studied theater at Green Mountain College. While working in summer theater in Vermont she met Saul Elkin, a theater student at Columbia University. They married in 1958.The couple settled first in Vermont and in 1969 moved to Buffalo, where Mr. Elkin taught at the State University of New York.Ms. Elkin and a friend, who were growing bored as homemakers, pitched a conventional women’s show to WNED, focused on things like cooking and decorating. But they shelved the proposal when the friend moved to Florida.In 1972, the station asked if she was still interested. Yes, she replied. But she had a different idea.“A few years ago I started writing questions that were bothering me and my friends,” she said in an interview with The Kane Republican, a newspaper in Pennsylvania, in 1977. “I found that they broke down into categories that turned into the list of topics I first presented” to the station.She started with 30 show ideas, enough for a full season and then some. She didn’t need to search for more — within weeks of the first episode, Ms. Elkin found herself inundated with suggestions, via letters, phone calls and casual cocktail party conversations.After some 200 episodes, “Woman” went off the air in 1977. It ended for a variety of reasons, among them Ms. Elkin’s move to New York City and PBS’s decision to withdraw support from the show in favor of a more slickly produced women’s interest series with a magazine-style format.Ms. Elkin and Mr. Elkin divorced in the early 1980s. She married her longtime partner, Anke A. Ehrhardt, in 2013. Along with her son Todd, Dr. Ehrhardt survives her, as do another son, Evan, and two grandchildren.In New York, Ms. Elkin pursued a second career as a literary agent. She also produced videos on H.I.V. education at the height of the AIDS crisis and later traveled to South Africa to produce similar videos for local viewers.For the last two decades, she had pursued a series of long-term photography projects. One involved portraits of women around the world. Another focused on women town clerks in Vermont, the sort of people she considered the “first firewall of our democracy” — people she said were needed now more than over.“We’re at the precipice with democracy,” she said in a 2020 interview with the website Think Design. “We’re certainly at the precipice with climate change and with institutionalized racism and sexism. We’ve just got to step up and do what we need to do.” More

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      in Movies

      Jack Willis, TV Producer and Empathetic Filmmaker, Dies at 87

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      A survivor of a crippling accident, his documentaries and news coverage for public television focused on poverty, race and other social issues.Jack Willis, a journalist and television executive who won several Emmys and a Polk Award for his innovative films and news and documentary programming during the embryonic years of cable and public broadcasting, died on Feb. 9 in Zurich. He was 87.He underwent assisted suicide at a clinic there, his wife, Mary Pleshette Willis, said. He lived in Manhattan.When he was in his late 30s, Mr. Willis broke his neck in a body surfing accident that temporarily left him a quadriplegic before he miraculously recovered, his wife said, inspiring a television movie. But after a half century, the injuries were taking their toll. Six years ago, he broke his hip and began using a wheelchair, she said.From 1971 to 1973, Mr. Willis was director of programming and production for WNET, the public television station in New York, where he introduced innovative local news coverage as executive producer of “The 51st State,” a program that took its name from the zany 1969 mayoral campaign of the author Norman Mailer, who proposed that New York City secede from New York State.The program, which won an Emmy Award, focused on communities rather than the more traditional fare of the nightly local news.Patrick Watson, center, the anchor of the WNET program “The 51st State,” moderated a discussion of racial tensions in New York City in 1971. Mr. Willis was the program’s executive producer. WNET records, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries“He pioneered in-depth local coverage of New York’s outer boroughs on WNET, focusing on long-ignored and disenfranchised minorities and immigrants, often letting them speak for themselves,” said Stephen B. Shepard, former editor in chief of Business Week and founding dean of the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. “For Jack, it was always about the people affected by government decisions.”Mr. Willis was an executive producer of another Emmy-winning series, “The Great American Dream Machine,” a weekly 90-minute program on PBS. The television critic John J. O’Connor of The New York Times, writing in 1971, said the program had been conceived as “a free‐form program that could offer the viewer worthwhile bits and pieces of humor, controversy, entertainment, investigative reporting, opinion, documentary and theatrical sketches.”“It has been called a hodgepodge of the brilliant and the trite,” he added, but concluded that it was “one of the most exciting and imaginative segments of television to come along this season.”Looking back, Mr. Willis himself told The Times in 2020: “It was a great time in public television. If you thought it, you could do it.”Marshall Efron, left, and Andy Rooney, two of the stars of the PBS program “The Great American Dream Machine,” in 1972. Mr. Willis was its executive producer. WNETIn 1963, he directed his first documentary, “The Streets of Greenwood,” a 20-minute film about a voter-registration drive in the Mississippi Delta. Collaborating with two friends, Phil Wardenburg and John Reavis, Mr. Willis shot it with a camera he had borrowed from the folk singer Pete Seeger, whose concert in a cotton field was featured in the film.In 1979, Mr. Willis shared the George Polk Award for best documentary with Saul Landau for “Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang.” The film focused on the journalist Paul Jacobs’s investigation of radiation hazards from atomic testing in Nevada in the 1950s and ’60s and the federal government’s efforts to suppress information on its threat to public health.Two other films he produced — “Lay My Burden Down” (1966), about the plight of tenant farmers in rural Alabama, and “Every Seventh Child” (1967), questioning tax subsidies and other government benefits for Catholic education — were shown at the New York Film Festival.Mr. Willis wrote, directed and produced “Appalachia: Rich Land Poor People” (1968), which exposed grinding poverty largely caused, the film argued, by corporate greed, racism and ineffective local government.Mr. Willis’s commitment to civil rights was reflected in his enduring friendship with the singer Harry Belafonte, an activist in the movement, who described Mr. Willis in an email as “a soul brother” whose “intellect and humor, combined with his courageousness, make him one of the most precious people I have ever known.”“For those on the political left,” Mr. Belafonte added, “he was living proof of the proverb, ‘You can cage the singer but not the song.’”Jack Lawrence Willis was born on June 20, 1934, in Milwaukee to Louis Willis, a manufacturer of women’s shoes, and Libbie (Feingold) Willis, a homemaker. The family moved to California when he was 9.He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1956 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also played shortstop on the varsity baseball team. He liked to recall that he was recruited by a Boston Red Sox minor-league team.Mr. Willis dropped out of U.C.L.A. School of Law to serve in the Army for two years, then graduated in 1962 and moved to New York, where he hoped to connect with a job teaching in Africa or the Middle East.While waiting for a job abroad that never materialized, he worked briefly in television for Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera” and David Susskind’s “Open End.”He ran a movie production company in California, then was hired as vice president for programming and production at CBS Cable, a short-lived but well-received performing arts channel.From 1990 to 1997, Mr. Willis was president of KTCA, the public television station in Minneapolis-St. Paul, then returned to New York, where, working for George Soros’s Open Society Institute, he developed a media program. In 1999, he was a founder of Link TV, a nonprofit satellite TV network. He retired in 2011.Jack Willis in an undated photo. via Mary WillisIn addition to his wife, he is survived by their two daughters, Sarah Willis and Kate Willis Ladell; three grandchildren; and his brother, Richard.Mr. Willis and his wife wrote a book, “… But There Are Always Miracles” (1974), about his body-surfing accident in 1969 off Southampton, N.Y. They had been planning to marry when a crashing wave broke his neck and left him paralyzed from the chest down. He was told he would never walk again.After two operations and six months of inpatient rehabilitation, he walked out of Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in Manhattan. The couple married a year later.His story was adapted into a TV film, “Some Kind of Miracle” (1979), with a screenplay by the couple. They wrote and produced other films together.Shortly before he died, Ms. Willis said, her husband told her that the accident had “taught me to put everything in perspective — including the fear of failure.” He admitted to no regrets, she said, “except,” she quoted him as saying, “for taking that wave and turning down the Boston Red Sox.” More

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      in Television

      Bob Abernethy, Longtime Host of PBS Show on Religion, Dies at 93

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      He conceived and produced “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and was its face for 20 years, after four decades as an NBC News correspondent.Bob Abernethy, who capped a four-decade career as an NBC News correspondent by injecting religion, one of the most under-covered subjects on television, into national programming with a weekly series that ran for 20 years on PBS, died on May 2 in Brunswick, Maine. He was 93.His death, at a heath care facility, was confirmed by his daughter Jane Montgomery Abernethy. The cause was Alzheimer’s dementia.The grandson of a Baptist minister in Washington whose congregation included President Warren G. Harding and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Mr. Abernethy had retired from NBC in 1994 after covering the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nascent space program and Congress.He was not ready to stop working, though. Armed with his deep faith, intellectual curiosity and a theology degree he had earned from Yale Divinity School during a one-year leave of absence in 1984, he persuaded WNET, the PBS station in New York, to produce “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly,” a half-hour nonsectarian series that Mr. Abernethy hosted and presided over as executive editor beginning in 1997.Within 10 years of its launch, the show — which Mr. Abernethy had described as “a news program, no preaching” — was airing on 250 public stations nationwide, winning some 200 industry awards. He and his collaborators went on to broadcast regularly until 2017, when he was 89.With the journalist William Bole, Mr. Abernethy edited “The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World,” (2007), an anthology of interview transcripts from the PBS program.“Nothing I have done has been as personally satisfying as founding and working on” the program, he wrote in the introduction to the book, adding, “The main reason for that is the many opportunities the show provides for sitting down with the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu — extraordinary men and women who speak as naturally about their faith and doubt and spiritual practices as they do about the weather.”Mr. Abernethy in an undated photo. He persuaded PBS to produce “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly,” becoming its host and executive producer.David HollowayOther guests included the Dalai Lama, President Jimmy Carter, the Rev. Billy Graham and Jonathan Sacks, at the time the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom.The series covered a wide range of topics, including atheism, abortion, assisted suicide, sexual abuse by clergy and organ transplants.“Finding this line between sensitivity to the spiritual dimensions of a story on the one hand and objective, traditional skepticism is a constant struggle and a very appropriate one, but I think we’ve got it right,” Mr. Abernethy told The Washington Post in 2000. “This is a matter of good reporting. Unless you get the spiritual element of the story, you’re missing something very important. It’s like interviewing Babe Ruth and not asking about hitting.”When “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” was approaching the end of its run, Jerome Socolovsky, the editor in chief of Religion News Service, was rueful, telling the news service Current in 2016, “The media landscape will miss this crucial provider of video stories about religion that didn’t favor one or the other but gave viewers a full perspective on religious news developments.”Robert Gordon Abernethy was born on Nov. 5, 1927, in Geneva to Robert and Lois May (Jones) Abernethy. His father worked for the Y.M.C.A.’s international newspaper. After Bob was born, the couple returned to the United States. His father began to teach religion at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa., but died of complications of appendicitis in 1930.Bob and his mother moved in with his paternal grandparents in Washington, where his grandfather was senior minister of Calvary Baptist Church. She taught piano at the National Cathedral School.After graduating from the Hill School, he enrolled in Princeton University but interrupted his studies to serve with the American occupying Army in postwar Japan, where he hosted a program for Armed Forces Radio. Returning to college, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from what is now the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.Coming from a family of pastors, he felt “a certain amount of pressure on me to become a minister, too,” he told the website Resources for Christianity in 2013, “but I never heard a call.”Mr. Abernethy married Jean Montgomery in 1951; she died in 1980. In addition to their daughter, Jane, he is survived by his second wife, Marie (Grove) Abernethy, whom he married in 1984; their daughter, Elizabeth C. Abernethy; and four children from Ms. Abernethy’s first marriage. He had homes in Brunswick as well as in Washington and Jaffrey, N.H.Mr. Abernethy was a member of the United Church of Christ. His wife is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church.He joined NBC News after receiving his master’s from Princeton in 1952. Early on he wrote and hosted “Update,” a program for young people, and was later a Washington interviewer for the “Today” show. He anchored the evening news for KNBC in Los Angeles among other assignments.One posting was to Moscow, after he had completed his leave from NBC News to study theology in 1984. Before he left, he recalled: “I ran into a guy I had known who asked me, ‘What’s new?’ I said, ‘I took a year’s leave from NBC and went to divinity school. I got married and we had a baby. What’s new with you?’”He never stopped working. At his death, he was hoping to document the lives of homeless people through video interviews, for a future broadcast. More