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    With ‘Masters of the Air,’ a 10-Year Dream of Spielberg and Hanks Lifts Off

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    The Apple TV+ series is an heir to their World War II epic “Band of Brothers,” set this time among the bomber pilots known as the Bloody Hundredth.After Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks spearheaded the epic 2001 World War II series “Band of Brothers,” Spielberg got some feedback from one of his most important critics.His father, Arnold, a World War II veteran who served in what was then called the United States Army Air Forces, liked the series. But he wanted more aerial action. Then Spielberg and Hanks returned as executive producers in 2010 with “The Pacific.” Again, the elder Spielberg approved — with the same caveat.“‘Well, that’s a great series,’” Spielberg, in an interview this week, recalled his father saying. “‘But where’s the Air Force?’”Arnold Spielberg, who died at age 103 in 2020, would most likely be pleased with Spielberg and Hanks’s third World War II series (following the 1998 movie “Saving Private Ryan,” in which Spielberg directed Hanks). “Masters of the Air,” a nine-part Apple TV+ series starring Austin Butler and Callum Turner, premieres on Friday and chronicles the dangerous feats of the 100th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, known as the Bloody Hundredth. The unit flew daytime bombing missions 25,000 feet over German targets knowing that the odds suggested they might not survive.With 10-man crews packed into B-17 bombers so big they were called Flying Fortresses, the 100th faced not only a constant barrage of enemy fire, but also thin air, subzero temperatures and the psychological strain of what often played out as suicide missions. An estimated 77 percent of the Eighth Air Force was killed, injured or captured; the number of fatalities, more than 26,000, was higher than that of the entire U.S. Marine Corps during World War II.B-17 bombers, packed with 10-man crews, were so big they were called Flying Fortresses. The Bloody Hundredth flew missions in them knowing that the odds suggested they might not survive. National ArchivesFor Spielberg, “Masters of the Air,” adapted from Donald L. Miller’s more expansive nonfiction book about the Eighth Air Force, is part of a continuing effort to keep World War II in sight as the years claim the lives of more and more veterans.“I see it as a consistent recognition of the courage and sacrifice of the greatest generation, in keeping their memories alive today in a society that looks ahead more than they look back,” he said. “Through these dramas, we can tell these stories and get people to not only watch our series, but to go online and start to explore and navigate the history of World War II. That’s a big win for us.”“Masters of the Air” was conceived a little more than 10 years ago, when Hanks called the screenwriter John Orloff, one of many writers who had worked on “Band of Brothers.” As Orloff recalled in a video interview, Hanks’s question was simple: “You want to write another one?”Hanks and Spielberg had a specific story line in mind, to be chiseled from Miller’s mammoth book. They wanted to zero in on the friendship between Maj. John Egan (Turner) and Maj. Gale Cleven (Butler). A study in contrasts — Egan, known as Bucky, was a hard-drinking raconteur; Cleven, known as Buck, was a stoic with swagger — the two men flew mission after mission, building a reputation for leadership under heavy fire.Austin Butler, left, as Maj. Gale Cleven, a stoic with swagger. And Callum Turner as Maj. John Egan, a hard-drinking raconteur. Cleven and Egan built a reputation for leadership under heavy fire.Apple TV+After writing the first episodes and the show bible (a comprehensive guide to a TV series being pitched), Orloff was tasked with writing the entire series. Even with the names attached, it was not a sure thing to get picked up; in 2016 the “Masters” team submitted scripts for the first three episodes to HBO, which had broadcast “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific,” but the company passed on “Masters” “because of the price tag,” Spielberg said. That’s when Apple stepped in, ready to foot the bill. (HBO declined to comment; Apple would not disclose the budget.)“We were really fortunate to have Apple jump in and become our home,” Spielberg said.With intricate aerial sequences, massive sets, armies of extras and extensive research undertaken beyond the source book, the series “was a monumental undertaking,” Orloff said.“None of us thought it would take 10 years,” Orloff added. “I thought it would be a three- or four-year project, which is what ‘Band’ was and ‘The Pacific’ was, from inception to production. But this one was a bit tougher — the ambition of it, the scale of it. It was very intimidating to get this made.”For Butler, 32, and Turner, 33, the series was a chance to immerse themselves in the war’s history and the sacrifices made by the men they play. Specifically, “Masters” confronts what it meant to go “flak happy,” a phrase of the time that describes what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.“It’s atrocious what they had to face, the most violent space a human could have ever put themselves in,” Turner said in a video interview. “What our show does is explore that trauma, what that did to their mind and their body and their spirit and their soul.”Butler, in a separate video interview, recalled speaking with a 102-year-old veteran of the Bloody Hundredth who said that the air would get so cold up there that his feet would freeze to the bomber pedals and have to be chipped out. The physiological hardships only aggravated the mental strain of seeing friends blown out of the sky and never knowing if your turn might come the very next day.“One of the elements that you see in the show is them dealing with the psychological toll,” Butler added. “It was just unfathomable.”There is an aspect of World War II storytelling “that can be absolutely lost in fanciful nostalgia, which bores me to tears and, I think, also misses the point,” Tom Hanks said. Apple TV+One movie that inspired Spielberg and Hanks was “Twelve O’Clock High,” the 1949 World War II drama about a B-17 bomber unit suffering heavy losses and low morale. “That was actually one of the first films made after World War II that embraced PTSD,” Spielberg said. He added: “Even though a Flying Fortress is a heavily armed heavy bomber with 50-caliber guns all over it, it is a very thinly constructed airplane with not a lot of steel, except sometimes in the floor. Just watching the series, I had a problem with my own claustrophobia.”Dee Rees, one of the series’s five directors, was drawn largely by a story line featuring the Tuskegee Airmen, the Black pilots and airmen who formed the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of the U.S.A.A.F. The Tuskegee men are mentioned only once in Miller’s book, but Orloff felt it was important to give them airtime, especially since they wound up in the same German prisoner camp as some of the prisoners from the Eighth Air Force. President Harry Truman didn’t desegregate the Armed Services until 1948, but the Airmen earned high marks for their combat duty in World War II.“That was a big part of me wanting to do it, to tell that part of the story and do them some justice and show their bravery,” Rees said in a telephone interview. “The very thing they’re fighting for abroad is what they’re going to be denied on their home soil. These men are more American when they’re overseas than they are at home, even though they are risking their lives and doing things that are just as difficult as their white counterparts.”Stories about World War II can veer into hazy reverence for a bygone era, more fodder for the nostalgia machine. World War II, after all, has become something of a cultural industry, leaving a mountain of books, television and film. But for Hanks, this interpretation doesn’t apply here. He thinks the specific themes of “Masters of the Air” are not only resonant but also applicable to the present day.There is an aspect of World War II storytelling “that can be absolutely lost in fanciful nostalgia, which bores me to tears and, I think, also misses the point,” Hanks said by phone on Wednesday.“Here was a time in which there was just no question that a division was going to take place in the human condition,” he said. “You had truly evil empires that were murdering people and enslaving them in order to hold sway over their part of the world.” But even if today’s conflicts feel more complicated, he added, the things that matter most remain the same, like good citizenship, like civic duty and responsibility.“Of course the world is completely different now,” he said. “But you still come down to the core issue of what is the truth, and what is justice, and what is my part to play in that? Isn’t that what all literature is kind of based on one way or another? Isn’t that what all storytelling comes down to?” More

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      ‘Pariah’ at 10: When Black Lesbian Characters Had the Spotlight

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      The Dee Rees drama made waves but studios largely returned to business as usual. A new crop of filmmakers sees signs of hope.At the shimmering pink Catnip Lounge, a Brooklyn teenager, Alike, stands face to face with a dancer sliding head first down a pole. The pleasure manifesto “My Neck, My Back” from the rapper Khia booms from the speakers. Transfixed by the power of her desire, Alike discovers a physical place outside herself that can hold it. Finally.This is the bold opening of “Pariah,” the coming-of-age drama from the writer-director Dee Rees. Ten years ago it premiered to critical acclaim, first at the Sundance Film Festival, then in theaters with a limited release that December, a herculean effort for an independent film starring a then unknown Adepero Oduye as Alike (pronounced ah-LEE-kay) and made on a shoestring budget of less than $500,000.“Pariah” (available to stream on HBO Max) was the first movie about a Black queer woman to be released in theaters nationwide by a Hollywood studio. As Nelson George wrote in The Times in 2011, “No film made by a Black lesbian about being a Black lesbian has ever received the kind of attention showered on Ms. Rees’s film.” At the same time, George pointed out, “Pariah” was also part of a crop of films that pushed the boundaries of “what ‘Black film’ can be.” How Hollywood responded, then and now, has been telling.Rees tells Alike’s story with an uncompromising specificity that has etched its place in great American cinema. (This year the movie was added to the Criterion Collection.) This unflinching sensibility harks back to the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. By opening with the unfettered eroticism of the lesbian club and showing us scenes — like Alike’s awkwardly endearing dildo try-on — without explanation or apology, Rees followed in the footsteps of a group of filmmakers who refused to sanitize images of queer life to appease straight audiences. Think Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon Woman” (1996), the first narrative feature film about an out Black lesbian protagonist made by an out Black lesbian. Cheryl Dunye directed herself and Guinevere Turner, left, in “The Watermelon Woman.”First Run Features“Pariah” began making waves in 2007 when Rees released the short that would become the basis for the 2011 feature. Kebo Drew of the San Francisco film training nonprofit Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project remembers the reaction in her community of friends and colleagues. “The Blackness was just saturated, coming from the roots,” Drew recalled.After hearing word-of-mouth about the short, a screening at Outfest in Los Angeles touched the filmmaker Angela Robinson. “I felt like it was kind of opening a door that I hoped would stay open,” said Robinson. “It was such a personal story and a singular vision.”The writer-director Numa Perrier credits Rees and “Pariah” as an inspiration for her 2019 film “Jezebel.” She remembered, “The softness of how vulnerable that coming-of-age story was, I hadn’t seen that before.”Yet this fresh perspective did not lead Hollywood to greenlight more films about Black lesbians. There have been supporting characters like the passionate teacher Ms. Rain (Paula Patton) in “Precious” (2009) and the serene boxing coach Buddhakan (Sheila Atim) in Halle Berry’s directorial debut this year, “Bruised.” But over the last 10 years, not a single feature focused on Black lesbians has made it through mainstream pipelines.At the same time L.G.B.T. characters overall have become far more visible on the big and small screens. Yet according to a University of Southern California report looking at the top 100 films of 2019 (the most recent year for which figures were available), nearly 80 percent of all such characters were male-identified and 77 percent were white. The report doesn’t provide statistics on queer women of color, as a group distinct from the category “female-identified.”“It’s almost like the stars have to align before we get another Black lesbian movie,” Drew said. “But that’s a structural issue. So there has to be a more systematic approach for encouraging stories.”So “Pariah” was singular not just in its self-assurance, but in whose story it told, too: Alike and her best friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), two Black, gay and masculine-of-center best friends from working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn circa the early 2000s. Through the refuge of their friendship, they carve out space to be themselves.Sara Foster, left, Meagan Good, Devon Aoki and Jill Ritchie in “D.E.B.S.”Bruce Birmelin/Samuel Goldwyn FilmsAt a “Pariah” screening at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018, Rees told the audience, “There shouldn’t be two or three or 10. To me there should be like 200.” She added, “There’s room for so many more stories.” (Rees declined a request to be interviewed for this article.)When Black lesbian stories, and the filmmakers with the lived experience to tell them, are shut out of the larger film world, the result is systemic erasure that is by definition hard to measure.About 100 feature films have been directed by Black women since 1922, almost a third of whom are lesbians, the researcher and filmmaker Yvonne Welbon wrote in the 2018 anthology “Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making.”But the work of Black lesbian filmmakers has almost exclusively been made outside the Hollywood system and often not seen outside the film festival circuit, academia or grassroots distribution networks. Rees’s predecessors — filmmakers like Dunye, Michelle Parkerson (“A Litany for Survival”) and others — didn’t have assurances that a larger audience would even see their work; they simply made films that mattered to them, stories they wanted to see that didn’t yet exist in a film world that barely acknowledged their existence.That “Pariah” earned distribution, made back its budget and even received a glowing shout-out from Meryl Streep during her acceptance speech for “The Iron Lady” at the 2012 Golden Globes, was all monumental, even if the film didn’t garner much attention inside Hollywood.This is something the filmmaker Tina Mabry well understands, having tried, and failed, to get a theatrical release for her critically acclaimed debut feature, “Mississippi Damned,” a few years before “Pariah” came out. After seeing the short version of “Pariah,” Mabry asked Rees for an introduction to the film’s then up-and-coming cinematographer Bradford Young and hired him to shoot “Mississippi Damned.”Tessa Thompson in “Mississippi Damned.” The director, Tina Mabry, turned to the cinematographer Bradford Young after seeing his work on the “Pariah” short.Array ReleasingA coming-of-age tale starring Tessa Thompson and based on Mabry’s experience growing up in a Black working-class family in Tupelo, Miss., the movie won awards on the festival circuit, and aired on cable. Mabry said that she was told repeatedly that the movie was too similar to “Precious” and that “the market can’t handle two Black dramas.” For some distributors that focus on L.G.B.T. audiences, the movie was also perceived as not being gay enough despite a Black lesbian main character.“The distribution model failed us. The people did not,” Mabry said. She also gives a nod to Ava DuVernay, who eventually got the film released on Netflix in 2015 through the film distribution arm she founded, Array. That year Mabry also got her first television directing job (“Queen Sugar,” another DuVernay assist) and Mabry — much like Rees after “Pariah” was released — has worked steadily in Hollywood ever since.Indeed, there are signs of potential change. Mabry said she currently has feature film projects in development at four Hollywood studios, some of which center on Black queer women protagonists, although none of them are a done deal yet.Back when Robinson made her first feature, “D.E.B.S.,” a 2004 lesbian teen spy movie that has since become a cult classic, “there was still the attitude in town that if you played a lesbian, it could ruin your career,” she remembered.After Nina Jacobson, then a Disney studio executive, saw “D.E.B.S.” at the Sundance Film Festival, she hired Robinson to direct “Herbie Reloaded,” starring Lindsay Lohan. With ticket sales of $144 million, Robinson became the first Black woman director to draw at least $100 million at the box office. But despite her gratitude to Jacobson and the crew, the experience left her feeling isolated.“It was me and 200 white men,” Robinson said.That was when she pivoted to cable, accepting an offer from the showrunner Ilene Chaiken to direct episodes of the third season of “The L Word,” the groundbreaking show about the lives of high-powered lesbians in Los Angeles. Robinson hasn’t made another studio-backed film since. (Her 2017 feature “Professor Marston & the Wonder Women” was an indie.)But now, more than 15 years later, she has an all-female action movie in the works at Warner Bros., and her desire to cast women of color in the leads was met not with pushback, but enthusiasm, she said.“Warner Bros. called back and they were like, ‘Yes, we think you should make it more women of color and more queer,” Robinson said. “You have no idea how many years I have been waiting for somebody to say that.”And Robinson is more hopeful than ever. She has a lucrative television production deal with Warner Bros. and several other projects in the pipeline, including a DC Comics series, “Madame X,” and a film remake of “The Hunger.”“It’s always a tenuous time, but things have changed. I don’t feel like I have to Trojan-horse it anymore,” Robinson said, adding that it seems as if “I can just walk in the front door and say, ‘This is what I want to do.’ And I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity to do it.” More