Jack Willis, a journalist and tv government who gained a number of Emmys and a Polk Award for his progressive movies and information and documentary programming in the course of 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 spouse, Mary Pleshette Willis, mentioned. He lived in Manhattan.
When he was in his late 30s, Mr. Willis broke his neck in a body browsing accident that quickly left him a quadriplegic earlier than he miraculously recovered, his spouse mentioned, inspiring a tv film. But after a half century, the accidents had been taking their toll. Six years in the past, he broke his hip and started utilizing a wheelchair, she mentioned.
From 1971 to 1973, Mr. Willis was director of programming and manufacturing for WNET, the general public tv station in New York, the place he launched progressive native information protection as government producer of “The 51st State,” a program that took its title from the zany 1969 mayoral marketing campaign of the creator Norman Mailer, who proposed that New York City secede from New York State.
The program, which gained an Emmy Award, targeted on communities fairly than the extra conventional fare of the nightly native information.
“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,” mentioned 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 government producer of one other Emmy-winning collection, “The Great American Dream Machine,” a weekly 90-minute program on PBS. The tv critic John J. O’Connor of The New York Times, writing in 1971, mentioned this system 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, however concluded that it was “one of the most exciting and imaginative segments of television to come along this season.”
Looking again, Mr. Willis himself advised The Times in 2020: “It was a great time in public television. If you thought it, you could do it.”
In 1963, he directed his first documentary, “The Streets of Greenwood,” a 20-minute movie a couple of voter-registration drive within the Mississippi Delta. Collaborating with two pals, Phil Wardenburg and John Reavis, Mr. Willis shot it with a digicam he had borrowed from the people singer Pete Seeger, whose live performance in a cotton discipline was featured within the movie.
In 1979, Mr. Willis shared the George Polk Award for finest documentary with Saul Landau for “Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang.” The movie targeted on the journalist Paul Jacobs’s investigation of radiation hazards from atomic testing in Nevada within the 1950s and ’60s and the federal authorities’s efforts to suppress data on its menace to public health.
Two different movies he produced — “Lay My Burden Down” (1966), concerning the plight of tenant farmers in rural Alabama, and “Every Seventh Child” (1967), questioning tax subsidies and different authorities advantages for Catholic training — had been proven at the New York Film Festival.
Mr. Willis wrote, directed and produced “Appalachia: Rich Land Poor People” (1968), which uncovered grinding poverty largely triggered, the movie argued, by company greed, racism and ineffective native authorities.
Mr. Willis’s dedication to civil rights was mirrored in his enduring friendship with the singer Harry Belafonte, an activist within the motion, who described Mr. Willis in an electronic mail 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 producer of women’s footwear, and Libbie (Feingold) Willis, a homemaker. The household moved to California when he was 9.
He earned a bachelor’s diploma in political science in 1956 from the University of California, Los Angeles, the place he additionally performed shortstop on the varsity baseball crew. He appreciated to recall that he was recruited by a Boston Red Sox minor-league crew.
Mr. Willis dropped out of U.C.L.A. School of Law to serve within the Army for 2 years, then graduated in 1962 and moved to New York, the place he hoped to attach with a job educating in Africa or the Middle East.
While ready for a job overseas that by no means materialized, he labored briefly in tv for Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera” and David Susskind’s “Open End.”
He ran a film manufacturing firm in California, then was employed as vice chairman for programming and manufacturing at CBS Cable, a short-lived however well-received performing arts channel.
From 1990 to 1997, Mr. Willis was president of KTCA, the general public tv station in Minneapolis-St. Paul, then returned to New York, the place, working for George Soros’s Open Society Institute, he developed a media program. In 1999, he was a founding father of Link TV, a nonprofit satellite tv for pc TV community. He retired in 2011.
In addition to his spouse, he’s survived by their two daughters, Sarah Willis and Kate Willis Ladell; three grandchildren; and his brother, Richard.
Mr. Willis and his spouse wrote a ebook, “… 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 advised he would by no means stroll once more.
After two operations and six months of inpatient rehabilitation, he walked out of Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in Manhattan. The couple married a 12 months later.
His story was tailored right into a TV movie, “Some Kind of Miracle” (1979), with a screenplay by the couple. They wrote and produced different movies collectively.
Shortly earlier than he died, Ms. Willis mentioned, her husband advised her that the accident had “taught me to put everything in perspective — including the fear of failure.” He admitted to no regrets, she mentioned, “except,” she quoted him as saying, “for taking that wave and turning down the Boston Red Sox.”
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