♪♪
That's funny, isn't it?
Yeah. That's William Shatner walking down the stairs in my house.
That's pretty funny.
What are you doing here? What?
How'd you get up there? That's the question.
I'm looking at the works of art all around here. The works of art.
Your wife is a work of art. Did you know that?
I beg your pardon? Your wife is a work of art.
No, that's her parents. That's not me. How's that go?
I had nothing to do with that. Really? You didn't fashion anything?
I beg your pardon? The two of you together, forming--
The two separate making a whole. Oh, man.
You know, now you're a biologist too.
Bill Shatner. Avery Brooks.
Hey. Long time coming.
Yeah, man, you know, I told you, this is-- this is new, baby.
I've never done such a thing.
Avery had the capacity...
to be so enigmatic.
His intellect and the way he phrases and articulates his feelings,
they're advanced.
He's a big man,
but with his presence he seems enormous.
He's bold. He's soft. He's mellow.
With Avery, I felt like there was a way we were communicating without speaking.
Avery Brooks is jazz.
I think about him more than probably any actor I ever worked with.
I wonder about him more.
He really is not that complicated.
It's just that he's deep.
I still try to unlock the mystery...
of who the hell is Avery Brooks.
I'm William Shatner,
and we're going close-up with Avery Brooks.
Every time you look at a human being...
you see something that you did not know,
especially if you didn't know him at all.
And you say, "Oh.
Oh, my."
♪♪
To try and describe a man like Avery Brooks is...
futile.
He's not comfortable with lines of demarcation.
He is someone who demands your attention...
and then rewards you for giving it.
An enigma to some,
Mr. Brooks is a man of multiple layers and talent.
Musician,
theater, film and television actor,
husband, father, professor.
But it was his role as Captain Benjamin Sisko on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine...
that would bring him into millions of our living rooms..
for seven successful seasons.
But don't be fooled.
Mr. Brooks has no intention of allowing any one thing...
to define him.
I'm interested in the equation of life saving and life giving.
Period.
It doesn't matter what I'm doing.
Avery's first major television success came in 1985...
when he landed the role of Hak in the ABC television series Spenser for Hire...
and its spin-off, A Man Called Hawk.
But in 1992,
he was offered the role of Commander Benjamin Sisko in Deep Space Nine,
the third installment of the Star Trek television franchise,
which would bring him worldwide fame.
I asked Avery why he took the role.
I wanted to put my children through college. That's it. Got it.
That was part of it.
That's not really what it was. Wait. Don't retract that.
No, no, I'm not retracting.
I'm just going on to say, because I read the pilot.
That's what happened.
And I said, "Oh. Well. Oh.
This is very interesting to me."
One of the things that attracted me about the Star Trek...
was that I did not have prosthetic makeup on my face,
that somewhere, some 400 years hence,
that I would be human.
Completely human.
And brown... too.
See?
That is a beneficent...
fiction...
born out of the imagination...
of how we can be.
I think Avery-- his performances and in his personal life--
he... pays attention.
And it's a very, um, dignified quality of his.
He doesn't just communicate to you with words.
It's--
It's like life is more complicated and layered than that.
And he sees all that.
He sees the layers, feels the layers,
and he's trying to communicate all of that to you in the simplest way.
And it demands from you that you be-- that you be relaxed, open...
and just be yourself.
Otherwise, he can see right through you.
You know, when Armin and I would do a scene-- Quark and Odo--
we would sort of-- "Oh, I screwed it up."
And the crew and everybody would be talking and doing their thing.
But when you would get in scenes with Avery, there was a, you know--
down to business.
When he's on the set, everybody pays attention.
Everybody brings their "A" game.
Everybody makes sure that they're not wasting his time or their time.
'Cause he's making sure that he's on top of it.
Avery Brooks's professional acting career began on stage,
as do so many fine actors.
His critically acclaimed performances in productions such as Othello and King Lear...
and Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine...
have captivated audiences since the 1970s.
But it is his portrayal of Paul Robeson,
the famous singer, actor and civil rights leader...
in a one-man show...
that has perhaps resonated the most with Avery,
who is dedicated to preserving the legacy of this great historical figure.
In 1919, Robeson became one of the first African-Americans...
to graduate from Rutgers University.
Fittingly, Avery would graduate from Rutgers over a half a century later.
Avery has a sense of...
himself and his--
and pride in who he is, where he comes from,
hat his view of the world is...
and his view of working as an artist.
And there is tremendous dignity and pride.
You're a latter-day Paul Robeson.
No, I'm not. Yes, you are.
He was, obviously, a hero of yours--
Yeah. for a long time.
Yes. Even as a kid?
Oh, sure.
That is to say that I grew up understanding...
the-- the people in the culture who move us forward.
I mean, my-my-- my heroes are my parents.
And then, moving through the neighborhood,
through the community, that's what I knew.
I listened to the great music.
I listened to great people.
I understood who Paul Robeson was.
I understood who Nat Turner was. I understood who Denmark Vesey was. You see?
Did Paul Robeson influence your playing of Star Trek?
If you want to talk about in the sum of what I know--
Well, what influences you. Yes. Yes, absolutely.
Because without Paul Robeson, I'm not on Star Trek.
What do you mean? That is to say that I wouldn't be here.
I wouldn't be there without Brock Peters.
I wouldn't be there without Canada Lee.
I wouldn't be there without Sidney Poitier.
I wouldn't be there without William Warfield.
I mean, I could go on and on. That's the fact of the matter.
But you're talking about cultural acceptance of black guys being--
I'm talking about Hollywood, baby, the way it works. Okay, Hollywood.
And I am not in any way...
fooled, cajoled...
to think, by virtue of Star Trek or any other reality,
that I am in some other place.
I'm-- You know, I'm exactly who I was before the fact.
When Deep Space Nine began,
we all knew we were go
and to be honest, at the beginning we had no idea...
how we were gonna deal with the character of Sisko.
Avery Brooks was the first African-American lead in a Star Trek series,
but he wasn't cast as a captain.
He was cast as Commander Benjamin Sisko.
When Mike and Rick originally conceived the character of Ben Sisko,
the idea was to make him a commander,
a younger-- younger man, less experienced.
Pete Fields and I, at the time, were the only two guys on staff.
We came on and we were already developing stories before the show had been cast.
And then suddenly they were all excited about this audition they had just had,
and it was with Avery Brooks.
I'm thinking, "Avery Brooks from Hawk?"
And here's a guy who's not in any way a young man--
he's a man with gravitas...
and, uh, strength.
And we're thinking, commander?
Why isn't he a captain?
I just thought,
I haven't treated Star Trek with the seriousness that I had when I made it.
I realize that all these... jocular things that have been said about me--
Yes?
And I thought, "Maybe Star Trek isn't all that good."
When people come up to me and said, "My life changed because of what you did,"
I would think, "They don't really mean that."
Well, I-I don't know.
I can't make the case.
But, you know, except for the spandex--
When we did that crossover thing, you know--
Uh, Lieutenant-- Benjamin Sisko, sir.tenant--
I've been on temporary assignment here.
Before I leave, I just want to say...
it's been an honor serving with you, sir.
The uniforms-- I mean, Lord. Huh?
Huh! No lunch. That was no fun, baby.
But you did it, and you were good at it.
Come on. That's what you did.
What did you do?
As Cagney talked about it, you know,
you spend a nickel and take a chance.
I go to work every day.
You know? Just like that.
I'm not thinking about anything...
but, you know, looking and talking to the people who are in front of me.
That's all I'm doing.
He wasn't on a starship that was going places.
He was in a station that was stationary.
What some people complained about...
was that he seemed to be nothing more than a hotel director...
because he was dealing with problems in the restaurant...
or he was dealing with problems in the engineering side of things.
The stories didn't go anywhere. They couldn't go anywhere.
Which is one of the reasons that it was hard for the writers...
to write the kind of episodes that Star Trek was known for.
It seemed like we were doing The Love Boat without the lov.
Kirk and Picard were so clearly defined,
whether they were fighting or whether they were negotiating.
You understood why they were doing it.
They had to find different ways to involve the characters with one another.
It became the first Star Trek series that was character-driven.
Prior to that, it had always been story-driven.
I think Deep Space Nine may end up, of those series,
being the most complex in terms of the characters.
Every character had some big, strange problem, you know.
When we started the show he had hair and no goatee,
and that bothered him every second of every day that we filmed.
He hated it.
With Sisko, he started out as a guy who had lost his ship, lost his wife,
was not happy to be at the place where he was.
That's asking the audience to make a huge left turn...
in getting behind this character.
And it was very difficult for them to do that.
And we didn't make it easy for them, unfortunately.
He loved the character. He wanted this character to be precisely proposed.
The bald head with the goatee was part of the look.
It was part of the defining of who this person was.
People used to ask me, how does it feel to be a brown person--
the first black captain?
I can't think about that. No. Absolutely not.
- You know, you're almost brown. Look. - I am.
- I don't know how to ask the question. - Go on. Go on.
Is there an anger? Is there any resentment?
Yeah. I'm angry about the condition of the world.
Why don't we start there? It has nothing to do with color.
The intellect that I've been given as a human being...
allows me to talk about the world,
not in terms of color, but in terms of circumstance of the human condition.
That's where I begin.
Now, you want to put it in terms of television and Hollywood and all that,
that's what they're looking at-- here, here, here, here.
They want me to be this way, and I'm not.
I'm not the black dude in the pink hat.
And that's what's so interesting talking to you now.
I could sit here and talk about, you know, some resentment or some anger,
and I don't have that.
How we treat each other.
I have the rage about that.
- You're firing me? - I have no choice, Benny.
It's his decision.
Well... you can't fire me.
I quit!
To hell with you...
and to hell with Stone!
- Try to stay calm, Benny. - No.
I'm tired of being calm. Calm never got me a damn thing.
Chinua Achebe--
Nigerian, brilliant novelist, thinker--
talks about two kinds of imagination.
One benevolent, the other malevolent.
A set of people should not exist on the planet.
It's fiction. It comes out of the imagination.
There is this benevolent way of imagining humankind and our world,
and there's another way.
And that is our history.
You know, of mankind.
That's our history.
In the third season,
I went to see Avery do his one-man show as Paul Robeson,
and I was blown away.
He had such a life force in him.
He was funny. He was personable.
You felt and empathized with him.
I went back to the writers room and said,
you know, it's not him.
It's us.
We're not doing justice to the actor.
It wasn't until they made him the captain of the Defiant...
that it totally changed it for the writers...
and for him as an actor.
He was a captain now. He could command a crew on a ship,
and they could go places.
And it totally changed it.
In my opinion, after the third season,
we had the most interesting,
most multidimensional captain...
in the history of the franchise.
I think that what Avery and the Emissary...
and Sisko all brought to Deep Space Nine...
was a great deal of the reason that the audience continued to tune in.
He was the Emissary.
He had something to him that was an incredibly deep and rich part of the captain...
that I don't think any of the other captains had.
He was a leader. He was a father.
He was a friend. He was a lover.
And he turned out to be God.
You love Sisko.
You love what the writers did.
Then you love Gene Roddenberry.
You have to keep going to talk about the things and how it was created.
You say, "Oh, Captain Sisko." So what?
I didn't write it. Hmm?
I spoke the words. I surely did.
I'm a very small part of this huge, huge thing...
that was going on long before me.
And so I acknowledge where that power comes from.
In 1976, Avery became the first African-American...
to receive a Master of Fine Arts degree...
in Acting and Directing from Rutgers,
where he is currently a tenured professor of theater...
at the Mason Gross School of the Arts.
I came from teachers. That's true.
My mother-- teaching 40-plus years in public school...
and teaching private lessons.
Choral music, piano, organ-- all that stuff.
And then my grandmother-- Mississippi--
you know, 44, whatever those years were.
You know, so if I live,
then perhaps-- longer--
then I'll have something to teach.
But I'm not fooled.
I've gained information, and I'm really interested in it.
What information are you learning in this school?
Well, it's the exchange of the discovery, isn't it?
The discovery-- Discovery. Discovery of self.
Oh, really? Indeed. It's not that easy.
The classes aren't dull, even though I haven't been teaching full time for a while.
You know, I'm gonna sit in front of somebody and say what?
I'm gonna tell you the truth. I'm gonna ask you a question.
"Are you telling the truth?"
But how do I know? No, no, no.
That's the point. You have to answer it.
Well, I'll answer it, but how do I know it's the truth?
And how to you know that, if it were the truth, that it is the truth...
or that I'm trying to make something up to please teacher?
It's based on belief and faith and all that stuff...
which moves us into this, you know,
these other places I'm talking about.
And it is the "highfaluting"--
It is the high-reaching place of human expression...
that I know is at the base of what I come from.
It is not about the job.
It's not about the award or the thing.
It's about expression.
On any set, be it Star Trek or any TV series,
the star of the show sets the tone.
And I think Avery set the tone...
in terms of what he saw the show being.
We didn't play a lot of practical jokes and pranks,
which surprised the fans.
They expected that we were, you know,
just as crazy and wild as The Next Generation.
Sometimes The Next Generation--
on the other side of the alley at the studio--
would finish while DS Nine was still shooting.
And they would come over, and they couldn't believe...
how different the attitude was on the set.
What we did have was a seriousness and an intensity.
And I do think that it came across...
when you watched the show.
The Deep Space Nine set was-- was...
a place where people worked...
rather than went to kid around and have "fun."
But I will say it was a very welcoming set.
Avery Brooks is the only person...
that knew everybody's name on the set.
Seven years later,
sometimes you don't know who that guy, you know,
hanging up there, what his name is.
Avery did.
He called everybody out by their first and last name.
It made you feel like... this is important, what's going on.
wrap it around that pain and toss them both away.
But it doesn't work like that.
Running may help for a little while,
but, sooner or later, the pain catches up with you.
And the only way to get rid of it...
is to stand your ground and face it.
I believe everything is music. That's exactly right.
I've done so many things-- the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington,
doing Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine.
You know, the free verse and the meter.
It's so large.
This wild, enormous piece.
So how else can I think about it except in terms of music?
I can't. I opened in Tamburlaine.
In the Winter Garden, Stratford, Ontario.
What year was that? Middle '50s.
Guthrie's. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it was my introduction to American television. That's great.
They-They filmed it?
No, but the producers came to see it,
and I got some notices.
And that was how I got-- broke into TV. Is that right?
I didn't know that. Out of Tamburlaine.
I played Usumcasane, your--
Oh, Usum-- Yeah. I remember that.
Isn't that wild? Is that an incredible coincidence--
that the two of us played that piece?
Unknown piece. Who's ever heard of Marlowe's Tamburlaine?
Actually, that we should not have played it together.
We should have.
That's Avery Brooks. He hits the high notes.
And he can pause and leave everybody still.
Most of us had huge theater backgrounds,
and I do think it made a very big difference.
Not just in our discipline working,
but also the way we interacted.
What's he gonna say next?
What's he gonna do next?
It was exciting to work with Avery...
because it was like you showed up for a tennis game,
and suddenly a basketball would come at you.
That's how we watch him. We don't know-- What's he gonna do next?
We just love it though.
Any scene-- especially two-character scenes--
is like a sport.
And you're playing it together...
and you want to get the volleys going.
You're not competing with each other.
But you are demanding of each other...
that you deliver the goods.
♪♪
♪ I'll be tired of you ♪
♪ Not before dinner ♪
♪ When ♪
♪ Grass is tired of growing ♪
Oh, that's fun.
♪ I'll be tired of you ♪
♪ When music reaches its end ♪
♪♪
Go on.
♪ Music goes on ♪
♪ And so does my love ♪
♪ The notes go on ♪
♪ Then I'll be tired ♪
♪ Of you ♪
♪ Of ♪ ♪ You ♪♪
Here.
♪ You ♪
♪ You, you, you ♪
No, no. It's right here.
♪ You ♪♪ B-natural.
You're not gonna keep most of this stuff, so it's okay.
What are you talking about? That's what I'm talking about.
This is a special. It's horizontal. It's your show.
And it's horizontal. That's how it works.
I don't know what our show is,
and I think what we're doing here is monumental actually.
It's certainly unusual.
It's-- Yeah. I'd say.
Unique probably.
Listening to him play...
reminded me of one of the best decisions...
I made during the production of my documentary, The Captains--
bringing Avery aboard...
as the music supervisor for the film.
Mr. Shatner called and said that he would like me...
to do this music.
And then I said, "Well, I know who I need.
His name is Andy Milne."
He's one of the finest pianists that I have ever heard,
whose virtuosity...
is in no way an impediment...
to the breadth of empathy...
and feeling.
Avery Brooks called me and asked me...
if I'd be interested to score the music...
for a documentary about the captains of Star Trek.
The next thing you know, Bill Shatner gave me a call...
and said, "Are you ready to do this?
And I said, "Sure."
His facility is an understanding of the piano,
you know, in a way that it's both percussive...
and this incredible orchestra in your hands.
Avery and I have known each other for several years.
I've been performing with him in New York...
and recorded on his CD.
♪♪ ♪ You and I ♪
I've improvised many aspects of this...
in sort of dialogue with the characters and the actors in the film.
And that's different than taking musical ideas and preparing them...
and coming to the studio to record them.
I think when I was young,
acting was, for me, the great escape.
My parents would disappear for a few days,
go to New York, see a Broadway show and come back home---
We're putting music...
to a film as it is happening,
extemporaneously.
So it's real-- real fat.
Avery and I are working back and forth throwing ideas at each other,
and somehow it's coming together.
It's magic actually. I think it's a really interesting process.
What register it was, that doesn't matter.
No, I'm talking about higher in key.
Okay. With a "B"? Up a tritone?
♪♪
Yeah.
So we're in the midst of it now. Deep in it.
Let's get into Vegas actually. Let's do the second thing.
- You wanna see Vegas? - Yes. Correct.
Let's tackle that one.
Part of me feels like we're--
There's something historic happening here.
And it's, like, pretty cool to be engaged in it, you know.
We're thrilled with it. Okay? You cool?
I had fun. That's great. You're cool?
Yeah. Okay.
So now pressing on. What's the next one?
The unknown...
is part of the wonder of living, after all.
What may be orthodox for one...
is certainly not orthodox for all.
♪♪
Those great songs.
Whoa.
♪♪
We could go on.
We could. We could tour.
You know we could.
Thank you so much.
It's great to see that aspect of you...
and to get to know that part of you.
Or to become acquainted with it.
Hey, man.
Over the shoulder.
Yeah.
The wonder of being alive.
The wonder of possibility.
That's what Mr. Roddenberry created, et cetera.
Not alone, but that's what he did.
And then the people took it.
You admire so many--
Like for example, people like-- Well, me, I admire Brando.
- I admire you. - I admire you.
- Okay. - All right.
- But I've had no influence on your work. - No, you haven't.
- But yes, you have. - How?
And-And this-- this moment is what we witness.
See? That's the beauty of it.
- The moment of-- - Yes. You and I.
- Right now. - That's it.
- The interaction. - I think so.
And you will have influenced me.
I will take from this conversation you...
and will remember essences of you until I die.
Yeah. You could also play it back.
Not fully.
"Who was your favorite character?" Child asked me.
Huh? What do you mean,
who's my favorite character in Star Trek?
It's gotta be Sisko. What?