Avery Brooks Blacklisted?

Just read on wiki that in 2020, Ciroc Lofton did an interview where he said that Brooks would love to get back into acting but Hollywood has blacklisted him. No further details are given. Anyone got a scoop on this? He hasn't been doing the convention circuit in awhile and his last role was 15 minutes. He doesn't even have an agent. What gives?

 

Don't know about him being blacklisted. I do recall hearing he had health problems a few years back which is why he stopped doing conventions, and I would guess is why he isn't acting anymore.

 

Nothing, really. Behr mentioned that he received a call before the series premiered which warned him about Brooks. No details beyond that.

 

Brooks is definitely the most socially conscious of all the Trek leads. Is he, I wonder, the word Americans hate, a socialist?

Look at his great interest in Paul Robeson, who was blacklisted in the '50s.
https://www.artsatl.org/preview-sta...rooks-plays-paul-robeson-georgia-shakespeare/

 

Huh?

 

You wouldn't be blacklisted for being a socialist. That was big in 1950, but socialism is pretty mainstream nowadays.

And honestly, if Brooks had been blacklisted, the whole Trek community would have been up in arms when it happened, unless he had REALLY done something to deserve it. Practicing a mere philosophy would not have done it.

 

That's what he said. He got call warning him about hiring Brooks, saying he hated white people. That is all the detail Behr offered. The stream in which Behr said it occurred somewhere in the last year.

 

Behr wasn't the showrunner or an executive producer during development of DS9, why would he have gotten that mail and not Piller or Berman? Are supervising producers more involved in casting?

 

He was hired to be a producer while the show was still in development. Perhaps you have heard of the Dodgers games he attended with Michael Piller?

 

Maybe many consider him to be difficult to work with.

 

I know that. But like I said, he was a supervising producer, so why contact him specifically?

 

Are you actually asking me to justify the ravings from some racist from almost thirty years ago? Please!

 

What’s your source? I’d never heard this.

 

I believe it's in the first quarter of the stream.

 

Thanks, I’ll have a watch later!

 

After you've confirmed what I said, don't be afraid to come back here to give me a like.

 

Like given! I listened to the start and will listen to more later, it’s really interesting. Brooks is clearly a complicated and passionate man, and maybe not the easiest person to work with. The first inkling I got was from an interview with Armie Shimmerman back in the day when he only addressed him as “Mr. Brooks” which I thought was strangely formal. There are some interesting comments in the “50 Years of Trek” (?) book. It’s likely he maybe did rub people up the wrong way and had a reputation for being difficult.

 

Yeah, when I saw this thread I thought of Siddig's comments in The 50 Year Mission about how Brooks introduced him to "militant writers", and how Brooks had a very bad temper.

I can see the former bothering some executives in that era, and the latter would understandably be a potential concern for anyone.

 

From what I've read he seems to have been very outspoken about how his character was portrayed and what message it might have sended.
Now I don't consider that a bad thing, but with the way Hollywood seems to work they might consider him "difficult to work with" because of that.

 

No doubt, he is a peculiar cat. 50YM didn't go into depth about any disagreements he may have had, but it seems that they really had to do with questions about acting, particularly when he directed episodes, and I think that they were mostly between Auberjonois and him. The story about "René's anger" in FBTS is now on the record, being in the documentary. Casey Biggs said that Brooks was normally a very quiet, reserved man EXCEPT when he directed. On the other hand, Shimerman and Farrell have said recently that Auberjonois could himself be tempermental. I tend to think that the conflicts on the show were more about the craft, with many seasoned performers, who thought they knew best, trying to get their way. And I could see how it would be difficult to get Brooks and Auberjoinois to work well together given their differing styles (I would never want to see a play with both men).

Every now and then someone comes around to repeat the accusation that Brooks hates white people. This accusation may well just be an artifact from this same producer who called Behr; perhaps Star Trek was not the only show he "warned." I find it to be a canard, certainly when it comes to how Brooks felt about pairing his character with white women. Not only did he cast a white woman to play Jake's Dabo girlfriend, in the same auditions, he saw Chase Masterson, whom he recommended to the producers as a future love interest for Sisko. (Which leads to this question: would we have been better off if Sisko feel in love with a bubbly hostess rather than a level-headed freigter captain? What would the Kasidy-Rom pairing look like?)