Ep. 107: John Orloff on Masters of the Air
Ep. 107: John Orloff on Masters of the Air
John Orloff, creator, writer and co-executive producer of Apple TV+’s Masters of the Air
Aaron MacLean:
All right. We've been waiting a long time for this one. This Friday, January 26th sees the premiere on Apple TV of Masters of the Air. It's made by the same people who made Band of Brothers in The Pacific. And if you, like me, are fanatically devoted to those shows, this new production, which focuses on a bomber group that was part of the Eighth Air Force doing strategic bombing over Europe, is a big deal. Here at School of War, we are marking the occasion with two interviews I'm very excited about.
Today, we have the writer and co-executive producer of Masters of the Air joining us. His name is John Orloff. Among many other credits, Orloff also wrote the D-Day and the Holocaust episodes of Band of Brothers. So he was basically already a hero of mine long before I knew his name. We will talk about how this new series came to be, what it was like to write and produce it, and of course, the history behind the show. And then next week we have the author of the original book, Masters of the Air. Itself, a fascinating, extremely well-written document. Well worth your time. Don Miller, joining us as a guest for a truly fascinating discussion of the show, the book, and also of the history of strategic bombing over Europe. It's been a real treat for me to record these, so please enjoy and enjoy the show. I'll definitely be watching this Friday.
Aaron MacLean:
For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram and also feel free to follow me on Twitter, @AaronBMacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean, thanks for joining School of War. I am absolutely delighted to be joined today by John Orloff. He's the writer and co-executive producer of Masters of the Air. He's got many other credits to his name before that. Most relevantly to this discussion, and most meaningfully to me personal as an enormous fan of this production, he's also the writer, I believe, two episodes of Band of Brothers, is that correct?
John Orloff:
Yeah, that's correct. Two and nine.
Aaron MacLean:
John, thank you so much for joining us today. And I think you're the first pure artist we've had on the show, as opposed to writers who are writing about military history for a part of their career. Though I suppose one of the things you might say is actually that does characterize you. You're certainly the first filmmaker of any kind we've had on the show. I'm really excited about this, just as I'm excited about Masters of the Air itself. Maybe start by just telling us how you got into this line of work, whether it's writing and filmmaking broadly, and then more specifically this vein of World War II that you've been tapping for some time now.
John Orloff:
Sure. I mean, I'll get to the World War II stuff as quickly as I can because this is not about showbiz. But I grew up in an entertainment family. My father was a director, my grandfather was a director, my great-grandfather was a radio performer. So that's where I started, but I was always obsessed with history. And I am of a generation that loved World War II movies, Patton, Guns of Navarone, these really classic 1960s, 1970s World War II movies. Hogan's Heroes was like a television show that was on every day and reruns growing up. So I was really into the war.
And I, very early in my career, I was really lucky to meet Tom Hanks. And he, over the course of a couple meetings, ended up asking me if I would write an episode of Band of Brothers, which was the second episode, the D-Day episode. And he was really happy with my work on that. So he asked me to write another one, which was the episode where they stumble across the concentration camp. And then I got a phone call about 10 years ago to write a couple of episodes of the next one, Masters of the Air. And that turned into a really long odyssey of trying to get it made, culminating in us getting to make it. And it's really terrific.
Aaron MacLean:
There's so many ways into this. And if you don't mind, can we linger on Band of Brothers for just a couple of minutes before coming up to Masters of the Air?
John Orloff:
Sure.
Aaron MacLean:
I expect probably most of our listeners will have seen it. And if you haven't, by the way, you should. Colin will back me up here, I actually don't say this kind of thing to most guests, but the two episodes that you cite, the second episode, which covers D-Day itself, and then Why We Fight, are just two outstanding episodes in an already outstanding series. Incredibly, they were meaningful to me. My father participated, as a young man, in the Liberation of Dachau. So the Why We Fight episode, I felt like I was watching my own family.
John Orloff:
This was a sister camp, this was an affiliated camp of Dachau. So what you're... Wow, I'm getting like... I'm getting a little emotional. So he would've experienced something very, very similar.
Aaron MacLean:
And so let me, just a big picture question about Band of Brothers, and then the whole sub-genre that it spawned, which is, how did that start? And by it, I mean, the revival of big miniseries, because in the eighties, you had-
John Orloff:
It was banned. You know why?
Aaron MacLean:
Why?
John Orloff:
What happened was-
Aaron MacLean:
Because if you go back to the [inaudible 00:05:47]. Go ahead.
John Orloff:
Tom Hanks is incredibly passionate about American history, very knowledgeable about American history, and he had done Apollo 13, and after he made Apollo 13, he felt that the story could be a little deeper or broader and tell more about the Apollo mission. And so he made From Earth to the Moon, which was an eight part, I think. I didn't work on it. I think it was eight parts, might've been 10 parts, forgive me. And it met with a lot of success for HBO. And then some time around the same time he was making Saving Private Ryan. And when he was making that film, which is mostly fiction, I mean, it's very loosely based on a kind of real story, but not really. And in his research, he read Band of Brothers, the Stephen Ambrose book, and really thought, well, maybe he could do, with that book, what he did with the Apollo missions.
And so he got Steven Spielberg to read it. They agreed they should make it together. They took it to HBO, and HBO took an enormous gamble with Band of Brothers. It was incredibly expensive for the time and uncompromising in Tom's vision. And we had the incredible fortune to have had Dick Winters' blessing. And we all had to meet Dick and be approved in some ways, which then allowed the other guys the freedom to talk to us. And that doesn't happen ever. I mean, it was a really incredibly unique experience. And that led to episode two, which was a really interesting experience because I, for a short time, was the world expert on Brécourt Manor.
I mean, I really was, because Ambrose got stuff wrong. And the reason I know that is the first thing I did after I was hired, was myself and I think it was Bruce McKenna was on that one, maybe not yet, one of the other writers, we traveled to one of the famous hundred and first, well actually, just easy company reunions. This would've been in '98 or '99, and they were amazing. That's a whole nother episode to talk about that. But the important part was I sat down every single person who was alive, who was at Brécourt Manor, and I interviewed each of them for an hour or two and just took copious notes. And I'm not saying Ambrose didn't do that, I don't know, whatever. But he got stuff wrong.
It was slightly, stories didn't always gel a hundred percent, but why would they? And I'm immensely proud of that episode because yes, it's condensed. It was a six-hour battle, not a thirty-minute one, but it is as realistic as it could have been, and stands the test of time, and have the Dick Winters stamp of approval. Not an easy thing to get.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, let me ask you a question about something you just said, because I think it will get us into some themes that touch on both Band of Brothers and then your work on Masters of the Air. So you interview all these veterans about their experiences in that battle, amongst other things, that action. And you get stories that conflict. In my own experience, I mean, it's hardly shocking, you'd actually be shocked if you discovered the reverse. If you discovered that everyone had exactly the same account, you might start to suspect that something odd was afoot because it's just the nature of combat, isn't it? That it's so chaotic and so fast-moving that no one is really... And then your own memory plays tricks on you.
John Orloff:
And then you start telling the story, and the story sort of solidifies. And especially, this is now in '98, it's 45 years later. So I would start to hear the same pattern if you asked somebody, "Well, tell me more about..." Well, they couldn't tell me more. They could just kind of tell me what they just told me again, because the story that they've been telling.
Aaron MacLean:
I think it's Tim O'Brien who writes the Vietnam book, Things They Carried. I think he takes this point to a really radical extreme where he makes some assertion to the effect of, there really is no one story of combat. I mean, I don't know if on some sort of metaphysical level I accept that, but as a purely narrative or [inaudible 00:11:02].
John Orloff:
I think yes and no, right. I think what you just said. You're right, metaphysically, he's absolutely right because there are singular experiences, but the totality of those singular experiences is its own experience.
Aaron MacLean:
So this is all wind up for my actual question, which is, all right, here you are, you've got this Ambrose book, you've presumably got other written materials, other stuff will have been written about it. You've got your interviews.
John Orloff:
No, no, no other written material.
Aaron MacLean:
Oh, really? Okay, interesting.
John Orloff:
What are you talking about. Nobody knew who the fuck Brécourt Manor manner was in 1998.
Aaron MacLean:
I live in the world that's been [inaudible 00:11:37] by your work. So I've been to Brécourt Manor, I've stood on that.
John Orloff:
But were you there before 1998?
Aaron MacLean:
Of course not. [inaudible 00:11:43].
John Orloff:
No. And there was no internet basically in 1998. So for example, we take a lot of shit in Band for getting the Blythe story wrong. Blithe did not die of his wounds, as our end thing says. Blithe actually had a really interesting post-war career continuing in the Army, really honorably. So the problem was, you couldn't just type up Albert Blithe and get a bio on Wikipedia. Those things didn't exist. So the only way we would hear the stories was from the guys. And the guys all said he died. And what are you going to do? You're going to believe them.
Aaron MacLean:
So here you are, whether the question is in the nineties and you're dealing with episode two and Brécourt Manor or just on a bigger scale, now here you are with the task of doing Masters of the Air. As the information starts to roll in, how do you manage it? How do you decide what the story is? What is your, not only your writing process, but I guess I don't have a name for it, your historical, your analytic process to get to the facts, and then from there to the story?
John Orloff:
Well, that's what I try to do actually is really understand what the truth of the situation is. And then try to find the drama in that already existing truth, as opposed to taking a true story and turning it into some other thing that is more dramatically convenient. And what I mean by that is it really, if you're going to tell a true story, it's really important that you choose to tell the right true story. And what I mean by that is, let's take episode two of Day of Days in Band of Brothers because everybody knows it, it's a great reference point. So we didn't have to have episode two to only be Dick Winters on that day. There were a lot of other guys doing other things that day. This was about Easy Company. It was not about Dick Winters.
And I made the decision to say, "No, no, let's just stick with this guy from that moment in the plane to the end of D-Day. And let's just tell that 24-hour story." Because as I said, when I was sort of saying this is my idea, I was like, "Listen, if we as professionals can't make an interesting story out of a man who jumps out of an airplane in the middle of the night in Nazi occupied Germany and lands with nothing but a trench knife, but by the end of the day he is captured and destroyed. Four German 105s, or 88s shooting on Utah Beach, and we can't make that interesting, then we're not going be very good at our jobs." And so, in the best way possible, it was, "Don't screw it up." That's the story. Don't screw it up. And in the process of that episode being made, there were some people who wanted to over dramatize certain things or add elements, and those were tried and ultimately removed from the episode because it was enough.
And equally, in Masters of the Air, Tom and Steven read Masters of the Air, and part of Masters of the Air, about 60 pages of it, is about this one bomber group called the Bloody 100th, the 100th Bomber Group. And like the 101st Airborne, this 100th Bomber Group had a really unique experience in a world of unique experiences. I can't underscore this enough, that Band of Brothers is about more than Easy company. It's about all the companies that were in the ETO and have their own great moments like Dick Winters going down on D-Day.
And just this particular group, Easy Company, happened to have this really perfect way to tell a story, which is the story we all know of them. They were some of the best of the best. They were volunteers. They had this unique experience of D-Day that [inaudible 00:16:56] and a concentration camp. They experienced key moments as one unit that not all units did. So that was why they were a really great group. I mean, there were many reasons why, but it became, don't get in the way of telling what these guys went through.
Aaron MacLean:
And if I may, and I talked with Don Miller a little bit about this, but I don't think I'm going to offend you. I may offend folks that you're colleague's with, but why I think Band of Brothers was so successful, narratively and as a work of art, and why I hope obviously Masters of the Air is the same way, I haven't seen it yet. And in my opinion, it breaks my heart as a Marine to say this, why The Pacific was a little less successful, though I enjoyed it and I own it, and I've seen it multiple times, was in The Pacific, it seems like that decision was dodged on some level. At a high level, I know the history of the different Marine regiments to some extent, the famous ones. I know John Basilone, I know who all these people are, and even I am sort of struggling watching the episodes to try to figure out where I am and what's going on. And so if that's me, I can imagine that there are others who are significantly more confused.
John Orloff:
I didn't work on The Pacific. I obviously know a lot of the guys who did, and women. I love it and admire it, and it's just a different animal. It has that narrative. It made a narrative decision that makes it more complicated and difficult. But also they were trying to show a broader story and really hit the important things that people needed to know.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, I'm going to make a brief pitch, and then we'll get to Masters of the Air. But if the Marine Corps still needs it's really crusher, killer miniseries, historical miniseries. And my pitch, not that I want to do it, but my pitch that somebody who does these things should do is the Korean War, and the story of the 1st Marine Division, or at least some subset of the 1st Marine Division, the invasion of the North, the chosen Reservoir, and back to the Sea. There are a couple of great treatments, many great treatments of that, in writing, but that would make... As you're a man who does these sorts of things, if there's somebody out there-
John Orloff:
They're so hard. And you have no idea how hard it was to get Masters of the Air made. Even with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, it took 10 years. It took 10 years to get it made. I mean, I've spent 10 years on one season of television.
Aaron MacLean:
So let's get into it. So the decision had, from what you've just said, I have the impression that Hanks already knows that the 100th is his focus. And then how do you come into the story?
John Orloff:
So about 10 years ago, I got a phone call from Tom Hanks asking me if I would write a couple more episodes for the new one, just a couple of episodes. And yeah, I said, "Sure, that would be great." That would be great. I had read Masters of the Air and I thought it would be really exciting to do an Air Force show. And I don't know, six months a year goes by, and I get another phone call from him and he said, "We have to start over," for whatever reasons, "And we need somebody to write a whole Bible and just figure the whole show out. Are you up for that?" And I was like, "Okay." And that was kind of a big task because Don's book is not about one unit like Band of Brothers was.
So you read Band of Brothers, you go, "Oh yeah, this is about these people." You read Don's book and it's all over the place. It's about fighter squadrons, it's about the birth of the entire idea of strategic bombing in Italy and interwar years. But it's also, he follows a couple different units, and one of them is the 100th Bomber Group. Which arrived in May of '43 with 36 airplanes. By October 10th, 34 had been shot down. And the thing was, the book didn't follow the 100th, it just followed a couple of vents that the 100th experienced. But that's not a miniseries, right? That's not what the Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg miniseries are. Those are, we follow these certain men through the war. So I had to figure out what else these guys did in the war besides a couple of missions that are mentioned in this book. So that turned into a year of doing exhaustive research about these four guys that we decided to make the show centered around; three pilots and a navigator. And map their missions.
And then that opened a whole nother thing, which was combat, aerial combat. And that's what this show is about. It's about aerial combat, strategic bombing, daylight bombing, and what these men went through at 25,000 feet with an unpressurized cabin where it's 30, 40 degrees below Fahrenheit zero. Oh, yeah, and people are shooting at them. And one of the things I decided really, well as soon as I got the job, and knowing everything that had worked in the process of making Band of Brothers, that I had to make a document, a Bible, that was really specific and really clear. So when we show a battle, great thing about the Air Force is, they took copious after mission reports. And the internet now exists. It didn't when we did Band, but it does now. And so all those after mission reports are online. So I could read them.
So I could then, when you watch Masters of the Air, and you see a combat sequence, and there's a lot of them, most of the time, not all the time, but almost all of the time, if you see an airplane hit by a rocket on its right wing. Well, that's because that's how that ship got hit on that mission. If you see even in the background, a ship going down because its number one engine is going down, it's probably because its number one engine went down. We know the name of that plane, and during all the special effects, they would color code the planes and keep track of, oh, that's our baby, oh, and that one's Rosie's Riveters. And it's not like it's that plane to the left blows up. There are exceptions, don't get me wrong. It is a television show, but we really tried hard to get that kind of stuff right, because as I said to people, people went down on these planes, they're not Star Wars things. And we owe it to them to get it as right as we can get it. And that meant a lot to me.
Aaron MacLean:
Talk about this core group of characters. And in addition to the story of the 100th, what was so compelling about them? Not sure if spoiler alerts make sense. [inaudible 00:24:35].
John Orloff:
No, no, I think you can do any of this online and you would instantly... It's kind of out there. So we started with two pilots. Two young, well not that young, mid late twenties when we meet them, but they joined the US Army Air Corps at the same time in May of 1940. So a full 18 months before America's entered the war. And they do that because they want to fly airplanes. They're not joining the army, they're joining the Army Air Corps. And they get however many weeks of basic training, and then they're right into pilot cadet school. That's why they're there. And they become best friends. They're kind of unlikely guys. One is from Wyoming, this guy Gale Cleven, nicknamed Buck in our show. That's his nickname in life. And then his best friend, this other guy that joined at the same time, John Egan. Bucky is his name. So they were Buck and Bucky. And they were real old school cocked hats, 50 Mission Crush, toothpick in their mouth, scarves, that very first generation.
And so they ended up going through flight training, become pilots. Can't remember off the top of my head, I can't remember how they get into bombers as opposed to fighters. They end up in the same bomber group, the 100th Bomber Group. After Pearl Harbor, they're most majors by that point. They become squadron leaders each with a squadron of eight ships in 1941, '42 when this group is formed. And then they go over to England, as I said, in May of '43. Each one leading one of four squadrons in the 100th Bomber Group. So this show, I think people will be surprised, this show is not about one bomber crew going through the war. It's about friends who served on a lot of different planes, actually.
As a bomber squadron commander, if you went on a mission, you often were the co-pilot of whatever ship you're on. And then you're the lead pilot for all of your squadron. So you changed ships. So we're focusing on Buck and Bucky, these two guys, best friends, they end up at the same air base, obviously, go on a lot of missions in these early days. And then, this is not a spoiler, but it is, they both get shot down within a couple days of each other, both end up at the same POW camp, and this is not made up, in the same bunk room at Stalag Luft III, and continue to go through the war as best friends, at one point, Cleven, the Austin Butler character. Well, now I'm not going to... That's as far as I'm going to tell you now.
Aaron MacLean:
That's fine.
John Orloff:
But then also, so they're the sort of spine of the show. But a navigator, a guy called Harry Crosby, who starts as the worst navigator in the group, but ends up as the group navigator by the end of the war. And he's the only guy, of those first 36 ships, he's the only air flight crewman to still be at their air base by the end of the war. Everybody else has been shot down or POWs or done their tour of duty. And so he's the one person that's on the air base the whole show.
And then finally, we have one of the most amazing men I've ever written about it, a guy called Robert Rosenthal who was a replacement pilot. And his story is just phenomenal. He flies three missions in three days. His first three missions, three days, they lose 25 planes on those three missions. Each one with 10 guys. So they lose almost twice the amount of people that were in Easy Company in three days. And on that third mission, they go up. I mean, this is all famous. They go up with 13 ships and Rosie's is the only one to come home. He ends up doing his 25 and he re-ups, he gets shot down, I think, three times. No, shot down twice. No, three times. Three times. Somehow manages... Well, I'm not going to say. Maybe he lives, maybe he doesn't.
Aaron MacLean:
It strikes me that the title Masters of the Air, and this happens sometimes in film treatments of books, but it almost, from everything you just outlined and the way in which you focus on the kind of vulnerability and youth of these characters, the title takes on a bit of an ironic tinge for the film's production that maybe it doesn't have in the book. They're masters of the air in one sense. And in another sense, I mean...
John Orloff:
It's in the book too. The idea is, it was a culmination of getting there. The Masters of the Air are the Luftwaffe until 1944 basically. Without a doubt. And that's one of the things we show, as I said to you before, this show is not about one plane, it's on the group level. And the group is 36... Well, it depends on when in the war and how big the mission is, but a group is 36 planes. So we start with early '43 where an all-hands effort was two, maybe three groups, which would be around 70 airplanes on a single mission.
That's in June, July of '43. By October of '43, we're already getting to 250 to 300 airplanes on a mission. By close to D-Day, we were up to 600 planes, 700 planes in mission. And then by the bombing of Berlin, we're sending a thousand bombers up on a mission for one mission. It would take hours for them to go overhead, if you were the target, hours. They'd be under bombardment for three, four hours because it was just plane after plane after plane after plane. And that's part of our story. The industrial, the human and industrial cost was enormous.
Aaron MacLean:
We've spent a lot of time talking about how you use the historical record to tell this story. What are your major influences in terms of other film treatments of World War II? You were obviously raised and steeped in all of that. Was any of that influential?
John Orloff:
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. It is Band of Brothers. And the reason I say that is because it was actually my first job as a paid screenwriter, and Band was always a different animal. It was unlike anything that had really ever been made before. And because of its authenticity and that the men were such a part of the process of us telling the story, and because we have these production values that Tom and Steven and HBO would give to it was this just other thing. And even great World War II movies that existed before it and after it, that are fantastic, they're not that.
And so Masters of the Air and The Pacific, again, The Pacific also is different, and Masters is different. We can talk about that in a second. It's not Band of Brothers in the air. And The Pacific is not Band of Brothers in The Pacific, nor is Masters of the Air, The Pacific in the air. It's its own thing. But what is common is this real obligation to the real men who did this stuff, in a way that not a lot of other productions, certainly before, had ever done. Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's the Audie Murphy story, and there are true quote, unquote, "movies," about World War II that exist before Band. And I'm sure I'll think of something tomorrow that comes to mind. But right now, that's what drove every decision I made in Masters of the Air, was based on the stuff that we learned and did and were committed to in Band of Brothers.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, the one I was sort of in the back of my mind, I was curious to know if you were going to raise it, was Twelve O'Clock High.
John Orloff:
Twelve O'Clock High is a great film, fantastic film. My two favorite films that have anything to do with this, are Stalag 17 and Twelve O'Clock High. Twelve O'Clock High has an actual connection to the 100th Bomber Group because Saul Levitt. Isn't it Saul Levitt who wrote the book Twelve O'Clock High? I'm pretty sure.
Aaron MacLean:
Got it here. I can find it in a minute as you keep talking.
John Orloff:
Yeah. Is it... Who wrote the book?
Aaron MacLean:
I've got it right here, so I'll look it up as you talk.
John Orloff:
But he was in the 100th, and the Gregory Peck character is sort of a pastiche of a couple of different commanding officers of the 100th. And so it's very much part of the story of the 100th. I mean, the first two commanding officers in theater of the 100th both were relieved of duty because they couldn't handle the stress. They both had ulcers and gallbladder. I mean, they broke down, sending these guys. I mean, it was horrible. It was horrible. And that's a fantastic film, but it's not true. It is inspired by. And very well, it is emotionally true. It is absolutely emotionally true. Those were the experiences, but it's not the same as Band of Brothers or Masters, because these exact things happen to these exact guys. And that is a different animal, as a writer.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, and interestingly... And by the way, Colin here says, it's Sy Bartlett. Sy Bartlett.
John Orloff:
Right. That's right. Bartlett. He has a lot to do with the 100th. Saul Levitt, who's also in the 100th, ended up leaving and writing for Yank Magazine and Saturday Evening Post.
Aaron MacLean:
So in Twelve O'Clock High, of course, they don't even really go into the air.
John Orloff:
Right, exactly.
Aaron MacLean:
It's all focused on psychological dimensions of the war. You have to do both in the way that you've done this.
John Orloff:
And if anything, we did less of what you just said of what Twelve O'Clock High did. This really wanted to be about air combat. That's something we haven't seen before. Trust me, I love Memphis Belle, it is-
Aaron MacLean:
I was raised on Memphis Belle.
John Orloff:
Huh?
Aaron MacLean:
I was raised on Memphis Belle. [inaudible 00:37:04].
John Orloff:
Yeah, no, it's a fantastic-
Aaron MacLean:
[inaudible 00:37:06] documentary.
John Orloff:
Fantastic film. But we're trying to give you a different experience. I'm not joking when I say a thousand airplanes. You're going to see a thousand airplanes.
Aaron MacLean:
So say more about that and about the production of this. What were the challenges and what were you... You've talked a little bit about what you were trying to achieve, but how? What were the problems you had to solve in [inaudible 00:37:33].
John Orloff:
Everything. It was a really challenging shoot. Not the least of which, because it was COVID. We made it smack in the middle of COVID. And it was just a massive scale. We built two B-17 that could taxi. There's only a couple of, I don't know, the number dwindles by the month, how many B-17s can actually fly. The last I saw was eight, I think. And you would never want to use them in a production like this. And so we had to build them. We then had to build interior B-17s because we were going to shoot so much in B-17s. And then we built the volume. Have you seen how they make the new Star Wars movies with all these LED screens? It was super complicated. And it was a very ambitious project.
I mean, quite frankly, nothing like it has ever been attempted. I mean, for example, one of the things I like to share is the guy who is doing our special effects, our special effects supervisor, this brilliant man called Stephen Rosenbaum. And he did the effects for the first Avatar movie. And he says, "This is way more complicated than Avatar." And of course, when you kind of start to think about it, you go, "Oh, right. Nobody knows what a dragon really looks like, do they? Nobody knows how a dragon reacts when it gets hit by something, do they?" Oh, but these B-17s better fucking look like B-17s, and the wings better move the right way, and the flaps better do the flaps and the chin and the this. And it's a very different universe when you're trying to reproduce real things.
Aaron MacLean:
I don't know exactly how to phrase this question, but it strikes me that the elements of success in certainly the Hanks universe of film productions about World War II or maybe just about the American enterprise, so you'll include Apollo 13 in this.
John Orloff:
Put John Adams in there.
Aaron MacLean:
There's something in the writing that it's very much about procedure. I think of Greyhound.
John Orloff:
Oh, you have hit one of Tom Hanks' favorite words. I'm serious.
Aaron MacLean:
I might be stealing this from Scott Miller. But you could do it in a way that, you could just write procedure and it would be terribly boring. So how do you get it right and focus on procedure without squeezing all the life out of something? [inaudible 00:40:26].
John Orloff:
That becomes magic. And it has a lot to do with an actor and a director. One of the things that I will always think about Apollo 13, and even more Cast Away is, there's not a lot of people that you would watch by themselves in a space this big for two and a half hours. I guess he's not by himself in Apollo 13, but he's by himself and Cast Away. You have to be a really great actor to pull some of that stuff off. That said, with a great director, and if the procedure has been written in a context where the character is actually thinking something during this procedure. It's not a procedure for no reason. But getting into this airplane, for example, when the Buck Cleven character goes down first on a mission and his best friend, Bucky, Egan volunteers to lead the group on the very next mission to avenge his friend. We spend some time with him pushing buttons because that procedure has weight because he can't wait to get up into the air and avenge his friend. So it is revealing character, that procedure.
Second, better example actually, Rosie, the procedure of getting into an airplane as a pilot. So imagine the average lifespan at mid-1943 was 11 missions. So if you were on mission 12, you were on borrowed time. If you were on mission 13, you were on borrowed time, 14, 15, 16, all the way to 25. And everybody knew it, but they had to get back in that plane again. And so you can make that dramatic by, let's say you've had a traumatic experience, and now you're a pilot and you've got to do your pre-flight check, going around the plane, checking the wings and the tires and the guns before you get into the plane, knowing you're probably going to die, you're not going to come out of that plane. So it's procedure and it's more than procedure.
Aaron MacLean:
And so for the actors, we talk about this, I hate the word, trauma gets used and abused, but in this case, I mean, it's hard to think of any other word that can describe how you would respond to the experiences that your project is about.
John Orloff:
74% casualties, overall. That's including the end of the war when there aren't many.
Aaron MacLean:
And also just there's this dimension to it that is alien to me as somebody whose background is in the infantry of, and would make it worse, is that you get to go home, as it were, each night.
John Orloff:
Exactly right.
Aaron MacLean:
Meet your English girlfriend and go to the bar, and then in the morning you got to get up and do... I mean, that to me sounds absolutely horrifying.
John Orloff:
And we show almost none of this, but there was a lot of uppers and downers, a lot of pill popping for precisely that reason. It was brutal on them physically, psychologically, it was brutal on the English because these guys wanted to... They were having such existential experiences. When they went out on the town, they went out on the town. And when they wanted to be with a woman, granted there were a lot of women that... But it was intense. There was a lot of extremeness happening all around all the time. It is a unique experience these guys had. The submariners had it really, really hard, and they were the only casualty rates higher than the US Air Force, Air Corps, whatever you want to call it. But at least they were gone. They had a tour of duty and they came home.
This tour of duty was just, as you said, you get up in the morning, you didn't go on a mission every day. They would rotate crews and planes, but you'd wake up in the morning, fly to Munster, see 30 of your friends go down, get back, have weekend passes to London, go to London for three days, and you have to come home and get back into that plane on Tuesday. And just do it all over again. It was unique, and that's why they created the flak houses. These houses, they didn't know quite what PTSD was yet, but they were seeing it in these flyers, in particular, these bomber crews, very, very quickly, for exactly that reason. They called them the Focke-Wulf Jitters. And the flak, which was the AA guns, the Anti-Aircraft guns, they called them the Flak House, because imagine going through 10, 11 minutes of flak, you can't imagine it actually, you're going to in my show. But just that was a horrible experience because these planes were not allowed to deviate course.
So you just go, go, go. Doesn't matter what's exploding next to you or how close they're exploding, you just stay in a straight line. And remember, there's only one pilot, so the other nine guys are just looking outside going, "Holy fuck. Holy fuck." Excuse my language, but that's what they were saying. And then they get home. So they would have PTSD after just a few missions. And so they would send these crews inland to sort of country manors, English country manors, for seven days of total R and R. You weren't allowed to wear a uniform. You could talk whatever you wanted to talk about, but they wanted you to just detox basically.
Aaron MacLean:
And also for the submarine crews, presumably, and I'm not an expert here, but you're out operating in the Philippine Sea or whatever, finding your targets. And then for the most part, I imagine, on your way back to Pearl or wherever, there's probably a couple days where the threat is not as elevated. And so you have decompression time built into the mission itself. Whereas here, the whiplash is just intense.
John Orloff:
It was.
Aaron MacLean:
Just hours either way, constantly.
John Orloff:
It was brutal. And you'll experience that in Masters of the Air. I mean, that is one of the things we do really, really explore because that was what was unique.
Aaron MacLean:
One last question for you here. I want to be respectful of your time, but just everything we've just discussed and the burdens of showing the effect on humans of all this, what was the production looking for in the actors that you found? You're looking at younger actors who are at the front end of their careers. What is the through-line? What are you hunting for?
John Orloff:
You mean in looking for an actor?
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah. What about an actor gets them the role?
John Orloff:
Well, luckily that's not my department. I just sort of say, "Yeah, you're right, I like that guy," once they show me, because I think you're going to defer to Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg on that kind of stuff. And in this case, with Masters, I could tell you the story with Damian too, but with Masters, Austin Butler, who stars as Gale Cleven, had worked with Tom Hanks on Elvis. In Elvis, he plays Elvis. And Elvis hadn't even finished rapping. They were still shooting it, when Tom said, "This guy is an amazing, he would be an amazing Cleven." And of course he was right.
We had a great cast. There's actual jobs, casting directors, they're called. Lucy Bevan and Olivia Grant were our casting directors. And they did an amazing job filling out the other guys. I mean, really spectacular. And I think in particular, our four guys, those four guys that we follow the whole time, Crosby, who's played by this Brit named Anthony, oh God, Boyle. And he's actually going to play... He's in Manhunt, which is about the Lincoln assassination, and I think he plays John Wilkes Booth. And then this guy Callum Turner, who plays John Egan, he's right now in Boys in the Boat. So he's sort of stayed in period anti-Nazi stuff, and he's also spectacular. And then Nate Mann, who plays Rosie Rosenthal, I think he's the least known and will become as big as them all.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, I said that was the last question, but you teased me, you mentioned Damian Lewis.
John Orloff:
Go ahead. It's fine, it's fine.
Aaron MacLean:
Tell me the Damian Lewis story, the Dick Winter story.
John Orloff:
So another brilliant casting director, Meg Lieberman was the woman's name, and I can't remember whether she had seen Damian, but Spielberg, Steven Spielberg saw Damian playing Laertes in a production of Hamlet, and had him read for it off of that. Which is not how you expect to get Dick Winters, one of the now iconic American figures. And it was just brilliant. And I remember being one of the people who was like, "What? We're hiring a Shakespearean Brit to play Dick Winters. Okay."
Aaron MacLean:
It's wild when you think about it too, because to be found on the stage for, I mean, obviously stage and screen are different in terms of what they call for from an actor, but then the Winters performance itself is so restrained. I mean, it's just a study in restraint.
John Orloff:
Clearly, as we now know, Damian is a genius, and he was then too. And he was so committed to the show and to Dick, and he spent a lot of time talking to Dick. And I think Dick was very happy with the performance.
Aaron MacLean:
John Orloff, writer and co-executive producer of Masters of the Air. This has been a totally fascinating conversation, and I am sure all listeners are looking forward to this show. And thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us.
John Orloff:
It has been a total pleasure for me. Thank you so much.
Aaron MacLean:
This is a Nebulous Media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.