Jim Brown’s On-Set Affair with Brenda Sykes During Black Gunn

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Jim Brown’s On-Set Affair with Brenda Sykes During Black Gunn

Jim Brown and Brenda Sykes — Black Gunn / 1970s

While filming the 1972 blaxploitation crime picture Black Gunn in Los Angeles, its star Jim Brown began an affair with co-star Brenda Sykes. Brown, already a major public figure from his career as an NFL running back, played the nightclub-owning title character, while Sykes appeared as his loyal girlfriend. Their relationship unfolded during a production built around sex, violence, Mafia intrigue, and Black militant politics, adding a real-life romantic entanglement to an already charged set. The affair is one of the few behind-the-scenes scandals specifically associated with the film, although the surviving account gives no detailed chronology of the relationship or evidence of a major production shutdown, lawsuit, or public feud. Black Gunn was released by Columbia Pictures on December 20, 1972, and the affair did not prevent Brown and Sykes from completing the film; its documented historical significance is chiefly as an example of the intimate complications that could develop when high-profile performers were thrown together on location for a low-budget, fast-moving genre production.