about the producers

Stephen Talbot, Producer and Writer

 With more than 20 years in public television, Stephen Talbot has produced, written and directed more than 30 documentaries, including biographies, history specials and investigative reports. Much of his recent work has appeared on the PBS series FRONTLINE, which has broadcast nine of his documentaries, including Justice for Sale (1999) with Bill Moyers and The Best Campaign Money Can Buy (1992), which won a duPont award from Columbia University.

For KQED and PBS Talbot wrote and produced or co-produced five one-hour biographies of celebrated fiction writers. For PBS Talbot also produced and co-wrote The Odyssey of John Dos Passos (1994). For Oregon Public Broadcasting he produced 1968: The Year That Shaped a Generation (1998) which aired on PBS.

As a staff producer and reporter at KQED in San Francisco from 1980 to 1989, Talbot produced many award-winning local documentaries, including Broken Arrow (1980), about nuclear weapons accidents. He also reported dozens of feature stories for The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. His articles on politics and culture have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, most recently in Salon and the Washington Post Magazine.

Talbot’s Justice for Sale was nominated for an Emmy and a Writers Guild of America award and won a Gold Medal at the Houston International Film Festival. His FRONTLINE: The Battle Over School Choice (2000) won first prize from the Education Writers Association for Television Hard News and Investigative Reporting. Talbot’s work has also received the duPont award, two George Foster Peabody awards, a George Polk award, four local Emmys (San Francisco), three Golden Gate Awards from the San Francisco Film Festival and an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

He is currently producing an expanded, two-hour retrospective on the sixties and the Vietnam War.

Rachel Raney, Co-producer

 Rachel Raney has worked both on public television documentaries and on independent nonfiction films. She worked as a production manager and associate producer for the Center for Investigative Reporting on several FRONTLINE documentaries, including The Best Campaign Money Can Buy, a report on the fat-cat donors of the ’92 presidential race; The Heartbeat of America, a profile of the stumbling General Motors Co. in the mid-1990s; and The Battle Over School Choice, a look at the recent struggle between Bush and Gore to become the next "education president."

Raney also was the associate producer for "Fair Play" , an episode of the four-part ITVS-funded series Digital Divide, which explored youth and access to technology. Later she co-produced Presumed Guilty, a two-hour profile of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, scheduled to air nationally on PBS in early 2002.

In addition to her work in public television, Raney has developed several independent nonfiction film projects. In 2000 she produced and directed Toll Collector, a series of eight short films about these often-maligned transportation workers. She is also currently in post-production on Welcome to Livermore (working title), a trip down memory lane with some of Livermore’s more eccentric residents, who are intent on documenting the town’s past.

Amy Young, Editor

 Amy Young has edited documentary films for PBS, the BBC, National Geographic and others, including several for theatrical release. In 1995 she received a national Emmy Award nomination for editing on the series Moon Shot, which also earned a Peabody Award. Her feature film credits include picture editing on Matthew Broderick's directing debut Infinity, about the life of physicist Richard Feynman, in which Broderick also stars. This is her second film effort with Stephen Talbot and Rachel Raney; she also edited FRONTLINE's The Battle Over School Choice for Talbot Productions in 2000.

 

Downtown Oakland from above.




Oakland Military Institute cadets.



Oakland tenant Kiki Williams.

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