Stephen Talbot
Stephen Henderson Talbot is an American TV documentary producer, reporter, writer, and longtime contributor to the Public Broadcasting Service, particularly the series Frontline. His more than 40 documentaries include the Frontline episodes "The Best Campaign Money Can Buy", "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, , and an online series of music videos Quick Hits.
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. Talbot has also worked as a producer and senior producer for the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Before becoming a journalist and documentary producer, Talbot was a television child actor in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He is known for his role in the TV sitcom Leave It to Beaver, in which he played Gilbert Bates, friend of Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver.
Early life and education
Born in Hollywood and raised in Studio City, California, Stephen Talbot is the son of Lyle Talbot, a film and TV actor, and Paula Talbot. Stephen Talbot graduated from Harvard High School in 1966. In 1970, he graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he studied English and film and was very active in anti-Vietnam war protests. He began making films about the anti-war movement, including March on Washington, DC III, and Year of the Tiger. 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", where he plays an insecure new kid in town who is prone to telling tall tales. Early on in the series, the Gilbert character was someone constantly getting the hapless Beaver into trouble. "I may be a dirty rat, but I'm not a dumb rat," Gilbert once declared. But as the series went on Gilbert became a more genuine friend of the Beav, really his closest friend, as seen in episodes like "Beaver on TV" when Gilbert is the only one to believe Beaver had been on a local TV show that did not air live as everyone expected.Having spent his early years in front of the cameras on Leave It to Beaver as Gilbert Bates, 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:
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 and venomously to the Beav.... 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 dreadful 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."
Talbot guest-starred on many television programs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including three episodes of Lassie, M Squad, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, The Blue Angels, Men Into Space, Lawman, , Law of the Plainsman, The Donna Reed Show, Mr. Novak and The Lucy Show. He appeared in comedy sketches with Bob Newhart in the early '60s NBC variety program, The Bob Newhart Show. Talbot played the role of Ronnie Kramer in the CBS's anthology series The DuPont Show with June Allyson episode "Hit and Run". Talbot also appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone: "Static" and "The Fugitive".
In 1959, he was cast as Ab Martin, a grade-school pupil in the episode "The Twister" of the ABC/Warner Brothers western series, Sugarfoot, with Will Hutchins in the title role. In the episode, he recites to his dying teacher, Roy Cantwell a part of Patrick Henry's 1775 address at St. Johns' Church. The "twister" in the title of the episode is a tornado that wipes out a western town.
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".
On stage, Talbot co-starred as "Sonny" in William Inge's Dark at the Top of the Stairs with Marjorie Lord at the La Jolla Playhouse.
He also played Dick Clark's ward and nephew in the first movie Clark ever acted in, Because They're Young, a high school melodrama with Tuesday Weld and music by "rock 'n roller" Duane Eddy.
Journalism
As an adult, Talbot turned from acting to journalism and did not dwell on his Leave It To Beaver heritage, turning down numerous LITB reunion offers in order to be taken seriously as a reporter. But in recent years he has reflected affectionately on his Beaver experience in articles and interviews and even in a Frontline documentary, "Diet Wars." He wrote about Leave It to Beaver and becoming an anti-war activist for KQED's website.His articles have appeared in Salon.com, the Washington Post Magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. Talbot wrote about meeting and interviewing Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe in an article, "From Liberator to Tyrant," for the Frontline/World website.
In the 1970s, he was a reporter and editor for Internews, a radio and print foreign news service based in Berkeley, California.
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, and The Case of Dashiell Hammett, a biography of the crime writer.
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, and The Gospel and Guatemala with Elizabeth Farnsworth.
He also wrote and produced several hour-long PBS biographies of noted writers, including: Dashiell Hammett, Ken Kesey, Beryl Markham, Carlos Fuentes, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
At KQED, Talbot reported and produced dozens of feature news stories for The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour.
After leaving KQED in 1989, Talbot produced and co-wrote a PBS biography of John Dos Passos
Talbot has returned to KQED over the years to produce documentary specials. In 1991, Talbot investigated the car bomb explosion in Oakland, California that nearly killed Earth First! environmentalist Judi Bari. His documentary, Who Bombed Judi Bari?, critiqued the FBI and Oakland police department charges against her and raised questions about who was responsible for placing the pipe bomb in her car. 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. 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", which won a DuPont Award, and continuing 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", "Public Lands, Private Profits", "Rush Limbaugh's America", "The Long March of Newt Gingrich", "Why America Hates the Press", "Spying on Saddam", "Justice for Sale", and "The Battle Over School Choice".
His "investigative biography" of Newt Gingrich – "The Long March of Newt Gingrich" – drew renewed interest and was posted with updates on the Frontline website in 2012 when Gingrich made his unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination.
In 2002, Frontline's executive producer David Fanning named Talbot as series editor of Frontline World, Frontline's international news magazine series. Between 2002 and 2008, Talbot oversaw the editorial content of 30 hour-long television episodes and helped commission and supervise nearly 100 broadcast stories.
With colleague Sharon Tiller, Talbot also oversaw the Frontline World website and its Emmy Award and Webby Award-winning online video series, Rough Cuts
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.
With reporter Kate Seelye, Talbot also produced a half-hour FRONTLINE/World story, "The Earthquake", about political turmoil in Lebanon and Syria. 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.
Frontline World won the 2004 Overseas Press Club of America award for best international TV reporting.
''Sound Tracks''
Talbot was also the co-creator and executive producer of , a music show for PBS with host Marco Werman and reporters Alexis Bloom, Arun Rath and Mirissa Neff. The pilot episode aired 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.A second one-hour episode aired in 2012 with Wynton Marsalis, Youssou N'Dour, Julie Fowlis and Of Monsters and Men. Talbot was also the executive producer of a series of twenty Sound Tracks online music videos for PBS Digital and YouTube, including interviews with and performances by Levon Helm, Yuja Wang, Hélène Grimaud, KT Tunstall, Seun Kuti, Seu Jorge, Anoushka Shankar and Of Monsters and Men.
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and freelance production
In addition to his work for KQED and Frontline, Talbot over the years has produced, written or directed a number of specials for PBS, as well as producing long and short-form videos for the Center for Investigative Reporting.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, and was based on his earlier film, 1968: The Year That Shaped a Generation.
He has executive produced a number of indie documentaries, including The Price of Sex, a documentary by director and photo journalist Mimi Chakarova about sex trafficking in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Chakarova won the 2011 Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking from the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York and the Daniel Pearl Award from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Talbot wrote the one-hour political biography, Moscone: A Legacy of Change, about San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, "the people's mayor," who was assassinated along with gay Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978.
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.
Since 2015, Talbot has been senior producer for documentary shorts at ITVS / Independent Lens in San Francisco.
In 2019 Talbot began co-writing and co-producing with Christine Ni the Bay Area NBC series Bay Area Revelations, narrated by Peter Coyote, starting with the episodes "Exploring Space" and "Loma Prieta Earthquake, 30 Years Later" and continuing in 2020 with "Female Sports Icons" and "Riding the Waves" about surfing in Northern California.
Personal life
Stephen Talbot lives in San Francisco with his wife, Pippa Gordon, a medical social worker. They have a son, Dashiell, and a daughter, Caitlin. They named their son Dashiell, now an attorney, after San Francisco mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. His daughter, Caitlin, graduated with an M.F.A. from American Conservatory Theater, in San Francisco. In 2015, he wrote a story, "Call the Midwife", reminiscing about the home birth of his daughter.Talbot's sister, New Yorker magazine staffer Margaret Talbot, wrote The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century, about their father, Lyle Talbot, and their family history. His brother, David, 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 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.
Awards
Talbot has won numerous awards for his broadcast journalism, including two national Emmy Awards, five local Emmys, three Golden Gate Awards from the San Francisco International Film Festival, three Thomas M. Storke International Journalism Awards from the World Affairs Council of Northern California, three Peabody Awards, two DuPont-Columbia Journalism Silver Batons, a George Polk Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club of America, a First Prize TV Award from the Education Writers Association, a National Press Club Arthur Rowse Award for media criticism, and an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He has been nominated three times for best documentary script writing by the Writers Guild of America.Select filmography
| Year | Title | Role |
| 1959–1963 | Leave It to Beaver 56 episodes | Gilbert Bates |
| 1960 | Perry Mason "The Case of the Wandering Widow" | Jimmie Kendall |
| 1961 | The Twilight Zone "Static" | The Boy |
| 1962 | The Twilight Zone "The Fugitive" | Howie |
| 1980 | "" | Reporter, Co-Producer |
| 1982 | The Case of Dashiell Hammett | Writer Producer |
| 1984–85 | The Gospel and Guatemala | Reporter, Co-Producer |
| 1986 | "World Without Walls: Beryl Markham's African Memoir" | Writer, Co-Producer |
| 1987 | "Further! Ken Kesey's American Dreams" | Writer, Co-Producer |
| 1989 | Crossing Borders: The Journey of Carlos Fuentes | Writer, Co-Producer |
| 1992 | Frontline "The Best Campaign Money Can Buy" | Producer |
| 1993 | Frontline "The Heartbeat of America" | Producer |
| 1994 | Frontline "Public Lands, Private Profits" | Producer |
| 1994 | Frontline "Rush Limbaugh's America" | Producer, Co-Writer |
| 1995 | Frontline "The Long March of Newt Gingrich" | Producer, Co-Writer |
| 1996 | Frontline "Why America Hates the Press" | Correspondent, Producer |
| 1999 | Frontline "Spying on Saddam" | Producer |
| 1999 | Frontline "Justice for Sale" | Producer, Co-Writer |
| 2000 | Frontline "Battle Over School Choice" | Producer, Writer |
| 2001 | "The Celebrity and the City" KQED | Producer, Writer |
| 2002–2008 | Frontline "Frontline World" 30 episodes | Series Editor, Senior Producer |
| 2004 | Frontline "Diet Wars" | Host |
| 2005 | The Sixties: The Years That Shaped a Generation | Co-Producer |
| 2007 | Frontline "News War: What's Happening to the News" | Producer, Co-Writer |
| 2010, 2012 | "" PBS | Executive Producer |
| 2011 | The Price of Sex | Executive Producer |
| 2013 | "To Kill a Sparrow" | Senior Producer |
| 2015 | "Daisy and Max" Al Jazeera America | Executive Producer |
| 2018 | "" PBS | Writer |
| 2019 | "" | Co-Producer, Co-Writer |