Made in Hollywood

Thanks to Eddie Muller, host of TCM's "Noir Alley," who paid tribute to "the amazing Talbot family" on his Saturday night show. Eddie showed my father Lyle Talbot's 1959 B-thriller City of Fear, costarring Vince Edwards as an outlaw slowly expiring from radiation poisoning and my dad as the Los Angeles police chief with a big problem on his hands.

The Saturday TCM show also featured the trailer that my son Joe Talbot made for Eddie's annual "Film Noir" festival a few years ago, before Joe burst on the scene with The Last Black Man in San Francisco. (Eddie was the first one to give a break to the talented, young Joe, a high school dropout who eschewed college and film school.)

Eddie also gave shout-outs to my brother Stephen Talbot, an award-wining documentary producer, and our sisters Margaret Talbot, an author and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and "the eminent physician" Cynthia Talbot.

Next up for our family: my wife Camille Peri has just finished writing Wilder Shore, a riveting portrait of the bohemian marriage of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson. The book will be published by Viking Penguin.

And me? At the ripe old age of 71, after a year of working on a screenplay, I feel I can take off this holiday season and catch up on my reading and viewing.