Stephen Henderson Talbot (born February 28, 1949) is a TV documentaryproducer, writer and reporter. Talbot directed and produced "The Movement and the 'Madman' " for the PBS series American Experience in 2023.[1] He is a longtime contributor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and worked for over 16 years for the series Frontline.
Talbot's more than 40 documentaries include the Frontline films "The Best Campaign Money Can Buy", "Rush Limbaugh's America", "The Long March of Newt Gingrich", "Justice for Sale", and "News War: What's Happening to the News". Talbot has also written and produced PBS biographies of writers Dashiell Hammett, Beryl Markham, Ken Kesey, Carlos Fuentes, Maxine Hong Kingston and John Dos Passos. He was co-creator and executive producer of the PBS music specials, Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders.[3]
Early life and education
Born in Hollywood and raised in Studio City, California, Stephen Talbot is the son of film, stage and TV actor Lyle Talbot and Paula Talbot (born Margaret Epple).[4] Stephen graduated in 1966 from Harvard Boys School in Studio City (now called Harvard-Westlake).[5]
From 1970 to 1973, he worked at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury, then an experimental college on Long Island. He began as assistant to the school's president John Maguire and subsequently became a lecturer in the American Studies program.
Acting career
Talbot's first appearance as Gilbert on Leave It to Beaver was in a 1959 episode called "Beaver and Gilbert", in which he played an insecure new kid in town who is prone to telling tall tales. Early in the series, Gilbert frequently got the hapless Beaver into trouble. But as the series developed, Gilbert became a more genuine friend of the "Beav".
Talbot guest-starred on many television programs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including three episodes of Lassie, "Growing Pains," "The Flying Machine," and "The Big Race." He appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone: "Static" and "The Fugitive".[8] In 1960, he played Jimmie Kendall, son of the title character in CBS's Perry Mason in the episode, "The Case of the Wandering Widow".
Having spent his early years in front of the cameras, Talbot abandoned acting for a career as a journalist. In an article for Salon.com in 1997, he looked back with a sense of humor about his past role on Leave It to Beaver:[9]
In the interests of historical accuracy I should say that, yes, Gilbert was a troublemaker and an occasional liar, but my character was certainly no Eddie Haskell – that leering teenage hypocrite who spoke unctuously to parents ("Well, hello Mrs. Cleaver, and how is young Theodore today?") and venomously to the Beav ("Hey, squirt, take a powder before I squash you like a bug").... I have spent my adult life trying to conceal my Leave It to Beaver past or correcting the historical record. Either way the series has become inescapable. When I was a kid, I loved acting; in fact, I badgered my father and mother until they allowed me to work. But how could I have known as an innocent 9-year-old that I was taking part in a television program that would live on for 40 years as an icon for baby boomers? In the early '80s, I turned down an offer to revive my role as Gilbert in a Beaver reunion series. "I'm trying to establish myself as a documentary filmmaker and an investigative reporter," I explained to the producers. "I can't go back to being Gilbert."
More recently Talbot has reflected affectionately on his Beaver experience in articles and interviews and even in a Frontline documentary, "Diet Wars."[10][11]
KQED
In the 1980s, Talbot was a staff reporter and producer at KQED-TV, the PBS affiliate in San Francisco.
Early in his career at KQED, Talbot produced two national PBS Peabody Award winners, Broken Arrow, about nuclear weapons accidents,[12] and The Case of Dashiell Hammett, a biography of the crime writer.[13]
During his time at KQED, Talbot produced local documentaries, as well as national PBS documentaries such as Namibia: Behind the Lines, South Africa Under Siege (a portrait of Nelson Mandela's ANC in exile), and The Gospel and Guatemala (an investigation with Elizabeth Farnsworth of Guatemala's presidential strongman Efraín Ríos Montt and his conservative evangelical U.S. supporters).
After leaving KQED in 1989, Talbot produced and co-wrote a PBS biography of John Dos Passos narrated by newsman Robert MacNeil and actor William Hurt.[16]
Talbot has returned to KQED over the years to produce documentary specials. In 1991, he investigated the May 1990 car bomb explosion in Oakland, California that nearly killed Earth First! environmental activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. Talbot's documentary, Who Bombed Judi Bari?, critiqued the FBI and Oakland Police Department's charges against her and Cherney, and raised questions about who was actually responsible for placing the pipe bomb in her car.[17]
Returning again to KQED in 2001, Talbot wrote and produced a one-hour documentary about Jerry Brown as mayor of Oakland, The Celebrity and the City.[18] He had previously produced a KQED documentary about San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, "The Art of Being Mayor."
Frontline
Talbot has had a long association with Frontline, beginning with his documentary on the financing of the 1992 presidential campaign, The Best Campaign Money Can Buy. It won a DuPont Award. Many of his Frontline films were co-productions with the Center for Investigative Reporting. He continued such projects through 2007 with his documentary on the media, News War: What's Happening to the News.
His other Frontline news documentaries include "The Heartbeat of America" (an investigation of General Motors), "Public Lands, Private Profits" (about gold mining on federal land in the West), "Rush Limbaugh's America",[19] "The Long March of Newt Gingrich", "Why America Hates the Press", "Spying on Saddam",[20] "Justice for Sale",[21] and "The Battle Over School Choice".
His "investigative biography" of Newt Gingrich – "The Long March of Newt Gingrich" (1995) – drew renewed interest and was posted with updates on the Frontline website in 2012 when Gingrich made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination.[22]
In 2002, Frontline's executive producer David Fanning named Talbot as series editor of Frontline World, Frontline's international news magazine series, which was initially a co-production of WGBH and KQED.[23] Between 2002 and 2008, Talbot oversaw the editorial content of 30 hour-long television episodes and helped commission and supervise nearly 100 broadcast stories.
Based at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, Talbot and Tiller taught classes and helped identify and mentor the "next generation of video journalists" whose work was showcased on Frontline/World.[24]
With reporter Kate Seelye, Talbot also produced a half-hour FRONTLINE/World story, "The Earthquake", about political turmoil in Lebanon and Syria.[25] He was senior producer of the Emmy-winning FRONTLINE/World documentary by Gwynne Roberts, Iraq: Saddam's Road to Hell, an investigation of a massacre of Kurds carried out by Saddam Hussein's regime.
Talbot was the co-creator and executive producer of Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders, a national PBS music show with host/reporter Marco Werman and reporters Alexis Bloom, Arun Rath and Mirissa Neff. The pilot episode was presented to PBS by Oregon Public Broadcasting, airing in 2010 with stories about the Russian propaganda song "A Man like Putin," Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, and Borat music composer Erran Baron Cohen, and a performance by fado singer Mariza.[26]
In the 1970s, he was a reporter, writer and editor for Internews and the International Bulletin, a radio and print foreign news service based in Berkeley, California.
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and freelance production
For Oregon Public Broadcasting and PBS, Talbot wrote and directed with David Davis, The Sixties: The Years That Shaped a Generation, a two-hour history special that aired nationally on PBS in 2005. It drew from his earlier film, 1968: The Year That Shaped a Generation (1998).
Talbot wrote the one-hour political biography, Moscone: A Legacy of Change (2018), about San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, "the people's mayor" who was assassinated in 1978 along with gay Supervisor Harvey Milk.[33]
From 2012 to 2014, Talbot was senior producer for video projects at the Center for Investigative Reporting, including feature news stories and short documentaries for the PBS Newshour, Univision, KQED-TV in San Francisco, and The New York Times. At CIR, Talbot also led the editorial team that created and ran "The I Files", the first investigative news channel on YouTube.com.
From 2015 to 2022, Talbot was senior producer for documentary shorts at ITVS / Independent Lens (PBS) in San Francisco. He commissioned filmmakers and arranged distribution of their films to a wide range of media outlets, including the PBS Newshour, The Atlantic, Salon and USA Today.[34]
From 2019-2020, Talbot co-wrote and co-produced with Christine Ni four documentaries for the San Francisco Bay Area NBC series Bay Area Revelations, narrated by Peter Coyote. He started with the episodes "Exploring Space"[35] and "Loma Prieta Earthquake, 30 Years Later".[36] He continued in 2020 with "Female Sports Icons"[37] and "Riding the Waves", about surfing in Northern California.[38]
Talbot produced and directed the feature documentary "The Movement and the 'Madman' " for the PBS series American Experience in 2023.[39][40] The film reveals how anti-Vietnam war protests in the U.S. in the fall of 1969 pressured President Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger to call off their planned major escalation of the war, including the threatened use of nuclear weapons.[41]
Personal life
Stephen Talbot lives in San Francisco with his wife, Pippa Gordon, a medical social worker. They named their son Dashiell, now an attorney, after San Francisco mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. Their daughter, Caitlin, graduated with an M.F.A. from American Conservatory Theater, in San Francisco.[42] In 2015, he wrote a story, "Call the Midwife", reminiscing about the home birth of his daughter.[43]
Talbot's sister, New Yorker magazine staffer Margaret Talbot, wrote The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century (Riverhead Books, 2012), about their father, Lyle Talbot, and their family history.[44] His younger brother, David Talbot, is the author of several books, including Season of the Witch (about San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s), and was the founder and original editor-in-chief of Salon.com. His sister, Cynthia, is a medical doctor in Portland, Oregon. His nephew, Joe Talbot, won the Best Director prize at Sundance for his debut feature film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019).
Shadow of the Thin Man is a 1941 American murder mystery comedy film directed by W. S. Van Dyke and starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles. It was produced and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as the fourth in the series of six The Thin Man films. In this film their son Nick Jr. is old enough to figure in the comic subplot. Other cast members include Donna Reed and Barry Nelson. This was one of three films in which Stella Adler appeared.
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the characters he created are Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, The Continental Op and the comic strip character Secret Agent X-9.
Frontline is an investigative documentary program distributed by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States. Episodes are produced at WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts. The series has covered a variety of domestic and international issues, including terrorism, elections, environmental disasters, and other sociopolitical issues. Since its debut in 1983, Frontline has aired in the U.S. for 42 seasons, and has won critical acclaim and awards in broadcast journalism. In 2024, Frontline won its first Oscar at the 96th Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature, 20 Days in Mariupol, made by a team of AP Ukrainian journalists. Frontline has produced over 800 documentaries from both in-house and independent filmmakers, 200 of which are available online.
The Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award honors excellence in broadcast and digital journalism in the public service and is considered one of the most prestigious awards in journalism. The awards were established in 1942 and administered until 1967 by Washington and Lee University's O. W. Riegel, Curator and Head of the Department of Journalism and Communications. Since 1968 they have been administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, and are considered by some to be the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, another program administered by Columbia University.
Lowell Bergman is an American journalist, television producer, and professor of journalism. In a career spanning nearly five decades, Bergman worked as a producer, a reporter, and then the director of investigative reporting at ABC News and as a producer for CBS's 60 Minutes, leaving in 1998 as the senior producer of investigations for CBS News. He was also the founder of the investigative reporting program at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and, for 28 years, taught there as a professor. He was also a producer and correspondent for the PBS documentary series Frontline. In 2019, Bergman retired.
KQED is a PBS member television station licensed to San Francisco, California, United States, serving the San Francisco Bay Area. The station is owned by KQED Inc., alongside fellow PBS station KQEH and NPR member KQED-FM (88.5). The three stations share studios on Mariposa Street in San Francisco's Mission District and transmitter facilities at Sutro Tower.
Elizabeth Farnsworth is a journalist, author, and filmmaker. She is a former foreign correspondent and former chief correspondent and principal substitute anchor of PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. She has written two books, including a novella, Last Light, which was published by Flint Hills Publishing, and a memoir. Her 2008 documentary, The Judge and the General,, aired on television around the world, winning many awards. She has reported from Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, Haiti, Iraq, and Iran, among other places. Having previously lived in Peru, Chile, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. for extended periods, she now lives in Berkeley, California.
The Thin Man (1934) is a detective novel by Dashiell Hammett, originally published in a condensed version in the December 1933 issue of Redbook. It appeared in book form the following month. A film series followed, featuring the main characters Nick and Nora Charles, and Hammett was hired to provide scripts for the first two.
Darryl Cherney is an American musician and environmental activist. He is a member of the Earth First! environmental movement. Born and raised in New York City, he lives in Humboldt County, California.
Thomas Furneaux Lennon is a documentary filmmaker. He was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1968 and Yale University in 1973.
The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) is a nonprofit news organization based in San Francisco, California.
The Maltese Falcon Society is an organization for admirers of Dashiell Hammett, his 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, and hardboiled mystery books and writers in general. Founded in San Francisco in 1981, the organization is no longer active in the United States; however, a chapter in Japan has been active continuously since 1982. The Japanese branch of the society presents the Falcon Award, Japan's highest honor in the mystery field, to honor the best hardboiled mystery novel published in Japan.
The Rejected is a made-for-television documentary film about homosexuality, produced for KQED in San Francisco by John W. Reavis. Notable as the first documentary program on homosexuality broadcast on American television, KQED first aired the film on September 11, 1961. Later syndicated to National Educational Television (NET) stations across the United States, it received positive critical reviews.
Martin Smith is a producer, writer, director and correspondent. Smith has produced dozens of nationally broadcast documentaries for CBS News, ABC News and PBS Frontline. His films range in topic from war in the Middle East to the 2008 financial crisis. He is a member of the Overseas Press Club and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Jeanne Jordan is an American independent director, producer and editor. She was nominated for an Academy Award and has received the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival among many other awards.
Steven Ascher is an American independent director, producer and writer. He was nominated for an Academy Award and has received the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival among many other awards. His book The Filmmaker’s Handbook is a bestselling text.
Irving Saraf was a Polish-born American film producer, film editor, film director and academic. Saraf won an Oscar for producing the 1991 documentary film, In the Shadow of the Stars. In total, Saraf had more than one hundred fifty film and television production credits. His resume included Poland, Communism's New Look, a 1965 television film; USA Poetry: Twelve Films About Modern Poets in 1966; and the 2009 documentary Empress Hotel following the residents of a low-income hotel in Tenderloin, San Francisco.
David E. Fanning is a South African American journalist and filmmaker. He was the executive producer of the investigative documentary series Frontline since its first season in 1983 to his retirement in 2015. He has won eight Emmy Awards and in 2013 received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in honor of his work.
Michael Chandler is an American producer, director, writer and editor of feature and documentary films. He produced and directed, with Sheila Canavan, the feature documentary Compared to What? The Improbable Journey of Barney Frank, a Showtime Networks Broadcast Premier and official selection of the Tribeca Film Festival; the PBS Independent Lens feature documentary Knee Deep which one reviewer called, “one of the year's best 'believe it or not' documentaries, a rural Rashomon and a compelling cinematic experience;” and produced & directed Forgotten Fires, a PBS documentary which investigated the burning by Ku Klux Klansmen of Black churches. Bill Moyers said about it: "If we wanted a real dialog about race in America, we'd start with this film." Chandler also produced & directed investigative documentaries for the PBS series Frontline, including Blackout, a collaboration with The New York Times, The Future of War, and Secrets of the SAT.
The Movement and the "Madman" (2023) is a feature documentary directed by Stephen Talbot. The documentary covers the 1969 showdown over the war in Vietnam between the peace movement in the United States and President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Based on interviews with antiwar activists, historians, and former Kissinger aides, the film shows how two enormous demonstrations in the fall of 1969 pressured Nixon to cancel what he called his “madman” plans to drastically escalate the war, including threats to use nuclear weapons.
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