It may be more than twenty years since Band of Brothers was released, but that series still sticks for many as an incredibly moving war drama. Now decades later, the filmmakers have reunited to tell another powerful World War II story, this time moving the battle from the ground to the sky.
Based on Donald L. Miller’s 2007 book, Masters of the Air is a nine-part series that follows the experiences and unfathomable challenges – both physical and psychological – of the “Bloody Hundredth Bomb Group,” the men tasked with conducting bombing raids over Nazi Germany. Starring Austin Butler, Callum Turner and Anthony Boyle, the series was scripted by John Orloff and executive produced by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman. Orloff and Goetzman spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about the TV show and the importance of telling these stories as accurately as possible, even years after the actual events occurred.
The Origins Of The TV Series
Speaking to the origins of this project, Goetzman says, “After Band of Brothers, Steven Spielberg’s father said, “That’s great…when are you going to do the air war in Germany?”
Gary Goetzman: He was in the Air Force, and it kind of stuck with Steven that that could be something we could do at some point. We thought about it for a couple of years and eventually found Donald Miller’s book. We really tried to figure out, with John Orloff, what a limited series approach to this would be.
We like telling these stories in a bigger frame if possible, so we proceeded to do that… and eventually we felt we found the story of Gale Cleven (Butler) and John Egan (Turner) and all the other characters. The fact that the skies overlapped for a minute with these guys was huge for us.
In trying to do a show of this magnitude, you go through great pains trying to budget and figure out set design and casting and so on. But what we really needed to focus on was our air war. How are we going to portray this war in the air, making it feel very real for our actors and real for our audience?”
Gary Goetzman. Photo by Axelle/ Bauer-Griffin/ FilmMagic
And who better to develop the story than John Orloff. I got a phone call from Tom Hanks saying, “Hey, you want to do another one?” he laughs. “And I said, ‘yeah, sure…what’s this one?” I read Miller’s book and it’s great. One of Tom’s and Steven’s great gifts is recognizing the right story to tell. As a screenwriter, that’s half the battle, right? They had already figured out who they wanted to focus on as characters, because it’s a natural story. Steven had read the book first and he fell in love with Gale Cleven and John Egan and their odyssey.
Except the book isn’t about those guys; it’s really about the entire air war against Germany, and there are only a couple of chapters about them. So my first task was to spend about a year writing a 250-page bible – I have about 500 footnotes and 40 different sources to figure out what these particular guys did through the war and if there was enough to make a whole show about them.
Obviously there was way more than enough to make a show about. And so that’s how I got started. After that initial text, I started writing scripts… and more scripts. I wrote 7 in total, 600 pages, before we got greenlit. It was a very ambitious task!
The initial plan was that I would write one or two and other writers would write one or two… they are really complicated scripts, and each one is a feature requiring as much work as a feature does.
Orloff spent about four months on each script for the first draft, describing the challenge as, “an incredibly intricate dance between truth and drama where you err on the side of truth. The dance is finding the truth and not enhancing it any more than necessary.”
Researching The Bloody Hundredth Bomb Group
Not surprisingly, a tremendous amount of research was involved and while the passage of time did not permit any firsthand accounts of the Hundredth Bomb Group, Orloff was able to speak with other pilots who had similar experiences. But more importantly, he credits the Air Force for having extensive records that he could consult. “They took amazing notes on everything during the war,” he says.
Orloff: I had access to everything, all of the after reports of every mission. With Band of Brothers, we tried to make all of the battle sequences as accurate as possible and I wanted to do the same thing with this.”
I wrote Episode 2 of Band of Brothers, the D-Day episode, which is a very intense and, I would argue, an incredibly accurate representation of what happened that day. Time is compressed, but when you see Buck Compton (Neal McDonough) throw a hand grenade and it magically seems to time perfectly so that it blows up on the German? That’s not movie bullshit – that really happened. When Joseph Toye (Kirk Acevedo) falls on his hand grenade twice… that’s not bullshit, that happened. Similarly, we wanted to do the same thing in the air war.
John Orloff
Complicating matters for this task, from a writing standpoint in particular, is that the series doesn’t just follow one air crew or one plane, but multiple at the same time. We had to cut between airplanes and the guys have masks on, so it was challenging.
But it all started in my scripts – I outlined what the formation was for that mission so we would know where every single plane is. We know who is in each one. Because if we, as filmmakers, couldn’t keep track, how is the audience supposed to?
While Cleven and Egan could be considered the “main” characters, the story is narrated by Major Harry Crosby (Boyle), a decision that Orloff calls his “big aha moment.” Crosby is almost not mentioned in (the book) at all. He’s a navigator. I was trying to figure out how to tell the story because, without giving spoilers, over the course of the show crews come and go from this air base, mostly because of either getting shot down or killed.
The attrition rate was horrible – 75%. Just think about that. 75% of the men who got in an airplane were either shot down, killed, became a POW, or went home as a casualty. Huge casualty rate. So that meant that some of our main characters didn’t quite overlap in time on the base and that was a problem.
By nature of his story, position and character arc, Crosby became the solution to that problem. “He’s my glue,” says Orloff. The foundation that all these other guys get to work off of. When I told Tom about my big idea, he said, ‘Oh my god, that’s fantastic. Nobody’s got a navigator as a narrator.’ So, then we were good to go.
Revisiting Historic Events For A Modern Audience
The Bloody Hundredth Bomb Group operated some eighty years ago, and as time passes, so can familiarity with the history.
Orloff: I’m Gen X, and we grew up as latchkey kids watching shows like Hogan’s Heroes and McHale’s Navy. The cool actors were making World War II movies and I grew up on that. That doesn’t exist anymore. I think it’s a privilege to be given the opportunity to tell these stories as legitimately, realistically, honestly and historically accurately as possible. To let the history guide the story, not easy drama. Hopefully people will understand that this stuff is real, it happened.
Goetzman: I think we all felt history was kind of going away, being lost on our younger generation. We didn’t know when we would finish it or how long it would take… but it’s never bad to let people see history that’s true. And for them to apply that to their lives and to see the young men who were all out there to protect their freedoms and that of their families and countries. I don’t think that’s a bad message.
Lt. Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle) Photo courtesy of Apple TV+
Speaking of messages, Crosby delivers a line that resonates about there coming a time when the world needs to confront itself.
Orloff: That generation was faced with a real existential question. The whole world – and I don’t say that lightly. What kind of society, what kind of world, do we want to have? Do we want to be enslaved or not? What will it take to not be enslaved?
Well, it turns out it took a lot. Our victory was not preordained. We cannot underestimate the home front – remember, we started the war with 200 B-17s and built almost 13,000 of them in just a matter of years…and then another 18,000 or so B-24s. That was being done at home, mostly by women. Our entire society had to find it in themselves to say, ‘Will we sacrifice in all these different ways – in money, in blood, in tears – or will we not?’ And it was at great, great cost that we did answer that call and this victory was made.
