Stephen Henderson Talbot (born February 28, 1949) is a TV documentaryproducer, reporter and writer. 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]
He began his career in broadcast journalism as a reporter and producer at KQED-TV in San Francisco, where he also contributed feature news stories to the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.[4] Talbot has worked as a producer and senior producer for the Center for Investigative Reporting and for ITVS and the PBS series, Independent Lens.[5]
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).[6] Stephen graduated in 1966 from Harvard Boys School in Studio City (now called Harvard-Westlake).[7]
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 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. He appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone: "Static" and "The Fugitive".[9] 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 "Beaver":[10]
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 reflected affectionately on his Beaver experience in articles and interviews and even in a Frontline documentary, "Diet Wars."[11][12]
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,[13] and The Case of Dashiell Hammett, a biography of the crime writer.[14]
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 "born again" 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.[17]
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.[18] 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.[19] 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. 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",[20] "The Long March of Newt Gingrich", "Why America Hates the Press", "Spying on Saddam",[21] "Justice for Sale",[22] 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.[23]
In 2002, Frontline's executive producer David Fanning named Talbot as series editor of Frontline World, Frontline's international news magazine series.[24] 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.[25]
With reporter Kate Seelye, Talbot also produced a half-hour FRONTLINE/World story, "The Earthquake", about political turmoil in Lebanon and Syria.[26] 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.[27]
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.[34]
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.[35]
In 2019 Talbot began co-writing and co-producing with Christine Ni the San Francisco Bay Area NBC series Bay Area Revelations, narrated by Peter Coyote. He started with the episodes "Exploring Space"[36] and "Loma Prieta Earthquake, 30 Years Later".[37] He continued in 2020 with "Female Sports Icons"[38] and "Riding the Waves", about surfing in Northern California.[39]
Talbot produced and directed the feature documentary "The Movement and the 'Madman' " for the PBS series American Experience in 2023, revealing 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 a planned major escalation of the war, including the threatened use of nuclear weapons.[40][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).
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 39 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 750 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.
David Helvarg is an American journalist and environmental activist. He is the founder and president of the marine conservation lobbying organization Blue Frontier Campaign. He is also a participant in the Seaweed rebellion, an informal marine environmentalist activist movement. He is an author; his writing is often related to marine environmental activism, such as his second book, Blue Frontier. His first book, The War against the Greens, argues that violent organized resistance is being orchestrated against the environmental movement.
Elizabeth Farnsworth is an American journalist and author of the memoir, A Train Through Time – A Life, Real and Imagined.
KQEH, branded on-air as KQED Plus, is a PBS member television station licensed to San Jose, California, United States, serving the San Francisco Bay Area. The station is owned by KQED Inc., alongside fellow PBS station KQED and NPR member KQED-FM (88.5) in San Francisco. The three stations share studios on Mariposa Street in San Francisco's Mission District and transmitter facilities atop Sutro Tower; until January 17, 2018, KQEH's transmitter was located atop Monument Peak.
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. It was founded in 1977 as the nation’s first nonprofit investigative journalism organization, and has since grown into a multi-platform newsroom, with investigations published on the Reveal website, public radio show and podcast, video pieces and documentaries and social media platforms. The public radio show and podcast, “Reveal,” co-produced with PRX, is CIR’s flagship distribution platform, airing on 588 stations nationwide. The newsroom focuses on reporting that reveals inequities, abuse, and corruption, and holds those responsible accountable.
Jamal Dajani is a Palestinian-American journalist and an award-winning producer. He is the co-founder of Arab Talk Radio. He formerly served as Director of Strategic Communications & Media for former Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah. Prior to this he was Vice President of Middle East and North Africa at Internews. He is currently a lecturer at San Francisco State University.
Larry Bensky is a literary and political journalist with experience in both print and broadcast media, as well as a teacher and political activist. He is known for his work with Pacifica Radio station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California, and for the nationally-broadcast hearings he anchored for the Pacifica network.
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.
James Sandler is an American investigative journalist who was part of the New York Times team that won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and on PBS Frontline.
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.
Evelyn Messinger is an American TV and print journalist, digital media pioneer, television producer, and media activist. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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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