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Bowman:
This is Bowman.

Egan:
Red, Egan here. How'd the game go yesterday?

Bowman:
Not as well as we hoped.

Egan:
Was Buck in the lineup?

Bowman:
Yeah.

Egan:
We have a good game?

Bowman:
He went down swinging, John.

Egan:
Who else?

Bowman:
Most of the starting lineup.

Egan:
Is there a game tomorrow?

Bowman:
Yes.

Egan:
All right, tell Coach I'll be there by game time. And Brad, I want to pitch.

Kirk Saduski:
This is the Masters of the Air podcast from the National World War II Museum. Today we're joined by the executive producer of Masters of the Air, Gary Goetzman. Buddy, thank you for doing this.

Gary Goetzman:
Hey.

Kirk Saduski:
Really a treat.

Gary Goetzman:
Hey, great to talk to you guys.

Kirk Saduski:
Just suggest, I mean, this is the scale and scope of Masters of the Air, the development, the pre-production, production and post-production is enormous. I think in another forum you said the biggest thing that any of us have worked on, and you're including yourself, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. So that's as big as it gets. Help us understand how big this really was.

Gary Goetzman:
Well, it took us three years and we had been developing it for 10 years with you, of course, very involved, and we tackled a thing that involved 325ish speaking part cast members. That's not counting thousands of extras, about 1,200 crew a day. We filmed at maybe three locations at once on some particular days, and we were doing a story about a war in the sky, so it's about as big as it gets.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, I remember, I mean, you say we were filming, there were certain days when there was three different units going, but we had four main locations that I've suggested each of which was the size of a small municipal airport. Again, you had to kind of oversee all four because even if you weren't shooting at one of them, there were things going on. There was prep for the next day. So again, give us an idea of the logistics, and I'm going to get to the particular problems we had on that show, but give us a sense of just the logistics here.

Gary Goetzman:
I mean, it's thousands of people when you're making locations represent the 1940s, when you're building sets for this kind of magnitude of star, which is the plane and building those and extra cockpits and fuselages and tail gunner positions and things. It's just a constant moving of that, of the parts, of the munitions. We had experts for every part of flying a plane, maintenance of a plane, and of course the firing and the bombing of the munitions. It's just a big thing that everybody has overlapping things going on. There's a location being prepped, we're shooting at one and we're prepping for the next one so we can seamlessly move to the next place and get what our next scenes are supposed to represent. It's one of those where I think about it and I go, man, yeah, it was huge. I mean, we had four call sheets a day going of where people were taking care of business and rehearsals and it was huge. Now that I think about it, I kind of miss it. It was totally invigorating, but it really was huge.

Kirk Saduski:
I mean, I don't want to overdo the analogy, but it is in a way a little bit like being at war. I mean the logistics involved and the dedication that's shown. You're certainly going into battle every day.

Gary Goetzman:
Well, most movies have that anyway, right? It is going to war and you are a team and you are trying to affect things as a group. Lots of collaboration, lots of cooperation. Yeah, we probably had that in spades.

Kirk Saduski:
Very much. I think, well, you mentioned the B17 and we're not going to get into too much technical detail, but the question keeps being asked, and I know you've been asked it numerous times, did you use and if not, why not, real B17s?

Gary Goetzman:
Well, we did find about three B17s that could fly in different parts of the world and you know of the one in the southwest, one in Northern California and then in Europe there were a couple, but none of them could have held up to what we needed to do. We were able to use in the air P51s and they're smaller, easier. You could put four of them in the sky and make something out of that, but the B17s, it was better just to build one. We built two. We built a few cockpits and I talked about the other positions that we built in them.
We put them in rigs and made it so they moved and they flew and we had big screens, which helped the boys know what planes were coming by them, when and trying to really give it a very realistic feel, but the question will always be, people usually ask me, "How many B17s did you put in the air?" I like to let them just think we put all 150 of them in the air. Do you know what I mean?

Kirk Saduski:
Yeah.

Gary Goetzman:
Because that's really the greatest reaction you can have is that people think when you do these kinds of things, that there were actually a bunch of planes we put up there in the air. So I don't even want to comment on it further.

Kirk Saduski:
As we were developing this, I did take a real B17, I went up and won once. Once you do that, there's just no way. I mean, just the noise alone, you just couldn't possibly.

Gary Goetzman:
What those guys went through.

Kirk Saduski:
But we make it think, or you, we made it look like they actually did, and yes, what those guys went through. If you ever go up in a B17 and can't imagine, you did that and did it over enemy territory in the cold because when you go up in a B17 today-

Gary Goetzman:
[?] flak...

Kirk Saduski:
... they go up to 5,000 feet. That's the maximum. You're not up at 25-

Gary Goetzman:
And the Luftwaffe coming right up to you and look you in the eye and shooting. By the way, Colleen Atwood, let's just talk about that.

Kirk Saduski:
Let's talk about Colleen Atwood.

Gary Goetzman:
Colleen Atwood, four time Academy Award winner, 12 nominations, two Emmys. She just won one last week for Wednesday on Netflix, because Tim Burton directed it and they worked together quite a lot. She's just one of those iconic, amazing people who you cannot believe how warm you feel when you meet her. She just toasts the room up. She is truly one of our giants and we were so lucky to get her. It really was about the mission we were on. People think earlier things that are basically uniform that we have done.
The theory is you a warehouse with a bunch of uniforms, insignias and hats and boots, and you bring the guys in and she fits everybody. She fits every extra. She makes every actor think that he's got really his own thing inside of this identical uniform that everybody else is wearing too, and just in her fittings of them and little cock of the hat maybe a little more this way, maybe a little more cut to the jib in the jacket. Can you say that? I can't say enough about her. I love her so much and I just wish every movie I did and do, I could do with her.

Kirk Saduski:
You can see the actors, and we talked to her about this, that she was on the front lines with them. I mean, as she said, sometimes it was her and her people, the first person they see at 5:30 in the morning.

Gary Goetzman:
Oh, yeah, it is.

Kirk Saduski:
I don't think she would mind me saying this, it was a maternal thing. These are all young guys, certainly they're portraying very young men and it was like having mom there first thing in the morning, getting you ready for your very big day.

Gary Goetzman:
Well, let's say big sister, but they definitely ... she's no one to be toyed with.

Kirk Saduski:
No.

Gary Goetzman:
If there's a problem-

Kirk Saduski:
There's authority there.

Gary Goetzman:
Yeah, there is.

Kirk Saduski:
Absolutely.

Gary Goetzman:
They respect her and they all love her, and to a man, she's one thing they can all agree on. She's the den mother and a half.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, again, and I know, and Colleen talked about this, and again, I witnessed it firsthand, you were there for really every day of production and both pre and-

Gary Goetzman:
Yeah.

Kirk Saduski:
But there was something all those people, and to get the sense Playtone is your company, so normally you don't have somebody on the ground every day, not just overseeing, but inspiring. I think that's part of the point.

Gary Goetzman:
We do micromanage. No question about it, and on most of our films I'm there most of the time. What happens is when you're a company is you cannot predict when the popcorn pops, when that star on that one's available, that director over here. So sometimes, and it happened a lot to us in a few years up to this, that there would be three productions going at once and then you've got to start-

Kirk Saduski:
Oh, at Playtone?

Gary Goetzman:
Yeah, Playtone, right. So Tom and I would have to perform triage as needed on these productions. We always finished them. So on this one in particular, it was in England. We did have COVID. Tom and Steven were not going to be servicing a show during COVID in England where it was also very bad for us during the production. I think that there was no choice. You got to do what you got to do.

Kirk Saduski:
I know we don't want to talk about COVID too much, that was them, but it threw us a curveball, a unique curveball, especially a production of this size.

Gary Goetzman:
Yeah, and you don't want to spend your day or half your day every day worrying about COVID. You wake up at 5:30 in the morning and it's who's down? We did have a lot of infection of COVID on our production, and the NHS, National Health Service in the UK, very strict. If you're in a restaurant and somebody got COVID, nobody you know, 20 tables away, they would ping as many as they felt they wanted to do, and it was no joke. When they said you're confined to your house for 10 days, you were confined and they call you, they would come to your door, and everybody in the UK, in London at the time, I couldn't believe how obedient they were to the NHS. No cheating, no nothing. They were serious. It was a little bit different than how it was in the US. You'd walk your dog, you do this, you do that. They were stricter.

Kirk Saduski:
I got caught up in a quarantine and they did literally come knocking at my door. They sensed I was out of quarantine area and they 20 minutes later-

Gary Goetzman:
And they weren't bringing chocolates.

Kirk Saduski:
They were not. They were not. They were not there just to welcome me to England.

Gary Goetzman:
Yeah, no, it was very serious. Do you know, I was just gathering stats on this for another conversation, but we actually went down three weeks interspersed through the course of our production-

Kirk Saduski:
Cumulatively, yeah.

Gary Goetzman:
Yeah, and that's a lot of days at a very huge day cost today with the amount of people that I've told you were on the show. So it was something else to think about that had nothing to do with putting B17s in the air and making them feel real and majestic and whatever. You're just thinking about who am I losing today and is it enough people who will make it so we have to close down? 21 days out of our schedule that happened.

Kirk Saduski:
That's enormous. For a small movie that can be their entire shooting schedule.

Gary Goetzman:
Yeah.

Kirk Saduski:
Just about.

Gary Goetzman:
So depressing.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, let's move into post-production because, okay, we've got all this footage and we had five directors and all of this stuff and all the great effort over all those months. Then we bring it back to Los Angeles. We have to cut. Steven Rosenbaum has to do ... Talk about that process because that's half of it. That's at half of the game.

Gary Goetzman:
Always on a show like this, the biggest problem schedule buster, budget buster is the CGI, and we just had I think the genius of visual effects in Steven Rosenbaum and he-

Kirk Saduski:
Another Academy Award winner.

Gary Goetzman:
Academy Award winner, you bet. He really did a fantastic job, and so you have all this editorial going on and it has to stay very closely tied to the effects, and that's really where I felt like we got in a really good system, rhythm of how to do it. The editorial on it took a long time, it's nine hours and obviously was tons of work on CGI. There were over 3,200 CGI shots and that's a number you can't even conceive of.

Kirk Saduski:
That again, those are the visual effects, but then there's just traditional editorial. Again, we did that at Playtone. You oversaw a team of editors.

Gary Goetzman:
Well, the directors do their part, and then it turns over.

Kirk Saduski:
Tell us about the process.

Gary Goetzman:
Yeah. It really is in more of a series format than a movie format. We don't really understand series. There's people who really get a process of making television. We can only reduce it down and relate to it if we go, we're making a big movie. It's a nine-hour movie, that's what we're doing. So we do it in that kind of process. The television part of it is here's five directors, they're going to go and direct their hearts out and then they basically give a shortcut of what their visions were of what they were shooting. Of course, you were with them all the time anyway, so it's all pretty much shorthand, and then it becomes of the larger piece. Continuity and payoff, consistency in character with five different directors over nine hours, it needs a real over-

Kirk Saduski:
It needs an overseer.

Gary Goetzman:
It needs an overall cut. All the CGI coming in, there's always things that have to move and go around. Anyway, that's what happened. They're all very famous movie directors and they're doing other shows and moving on, but it's great to see them when we do.

Kirk Saduski:
And to help bring a coherence because there are five separate directors.

Gary Goetzman:
That's right.

Kirk Saduski:
So an overall dramatic coherence that's consistent in terms of characterization and story and all of that. Then let's talk about the music a little bit and our composer, Blake Neely.

Gary Goetzman:
Yeah, I'm kooky that way. You could have three composers on a show like this and we have in the past, but we decided that we were going to go with Blake Neely, who we have a good professional relationship with and is a wonderful guy and super passionate about this show, super passionate about World War II. He came with ideas of how he thought it should go. I had pretty definitive ideas myself and I really wanted it to be a big orchestral score. I didn't want to grind chains and push tones through and stuff. I really wanted it to all be performed by a very large orchestra, which means huge string section, huge percussion, huge horn section. It was important to me to have a feeling and a theme, something that we could all listen to and go, "Oh, that's what this is." So we tackled our main title theme right off the bat, which isn't playing to anything dramatic within the show.
This is just saying this is the vibe of the show. This is where we're going. I gathered a bunch of visuals that I felt were apropos for this kind of main title idea. So when you have nine hours, you can't show people tons of stuff, so you kind of have to give them an idea. I'm talking about the studio now and executives and people who need to know where the process is going and in what way. So we did a main title, and Blake wrote a fantastic piece of music and it just kind of set us off on a thing that was like, okay, we know what this has to be. He knows action, he knows, well, this is kind of, or these different moods that you do in a score, that's not the problem. The problem is what are we really saying with the music? What's it about? I still choke up when I hear some of these things.

Kirk Saduski:
As many times as I've heard it, it is stirring and emotional every time.

Gary Goetzman:
He went deep.

Kirk Saduski:
We've been in screenings where we've seen the main title sequence get its own ovation. Yeah, I know.

Gary Goetzman:
I love that.

Kirk Saduski:
I skipped something in terms of in the pre-production process. We cast this a couple years ago. There's almost a kismet here. We got very lucky. Tell us about our cast.

Gary Goetzman:
Well, where we started to get lucky was we have an incredible casting director, and Lucy Bevin, Olivia Grant, her staff, they really put together fantastic ideas of actors that would be good for every part. We were stuck in a Zoom situation, basically. Very few people did we ever see in person because of COVID, because of the distance of where we all were from each other for a period of time. It's one of those, when you look back, you go, oh, my Austin Butler was not a star when we hired him at all. Callum Turner was not. Barry Keoghan was not. Nate Mann certainly.
These guys were just getting into the business really, and you look at them all now and I just go, oh my God, we've got six, probably 20, six movie stars here now. I mean these guys are ready to roll and obviously all of Barry's success with Banshees of Inisherin and already has won a BAFTA and a Golden Globe, got nominated for an Academy Award. Austin got nominated for an Academy Award obviously for Elvis and Callum Turner just starred in a movie that George Clooney directed called Boys in the Boat that he's fantastic in, and Nate Mann was in a little movie called Licorice Pizza, had a bit part in that.

Kirk Saduski:
You know anything about that story?

Gary Goetzman:
No. Paul Thomas Anderson felt quite strongly about him when I asked him about him and what he thought. So just a pleasure to have him. Anthony Boyle has been a solid, working, starring in series, actor in the UK for a long time, and he's one of those, you drop him in the mix and he just knows what to do. He's really fantastic and we have a lot of fantastic actors. Then when we found that we actually could tie in the Tuskegees to our boys, that they had actually crossed paths in Luftwaffe Stalug III, that was like, oh my God, this really opened us up to some other incredible actors.
We hired a gentleman named Ncuti Gatwa who's now the new Doctor Who. What the heck is that about?

Kirk Saduski:
Who knew?

Gary Goetzman:
Josiah and Branden are just such wonderful actors and represent the real men in such a fantastic way. They actually have their character. So I just couldn't be happier about the cast, but that was really the thing that you just went, wow, how did this happen? Are we all so smart? No, we're not, but it really has worked out great and I do think it's luck, and I do think it's very much due to Lucy Bevin.

Kirk Saduski:
This is very much in the line with what Playtone has done. You and Tom have produced, this third of the trilogy, that you and Tom have produced, and Steven. First Band of Brothers, then The Pacific and now Masters of the Air.

Gary Goetzman:
Believe it?

Kirk Saduski:
Any comment on ... When are we doing Coast Guard?

Gary Goetzman:
Kirky, did you ever think we were going to get there?

Kirk Saduski:
Well, we have to do the Coast Guard now.

Gary Goetzman:
You know how many years of our life that these have been in our-

Kirk Saduski:
The best years of our lives.

Gary Goetzman:
The best years of our lives.

Kirk Saduski:
Any thoughts on just that heritage, that lineage?

Gary Goetzman:
Money, I'm just happy that it touches so many people. That's the thing about it. You get in a world that gets, oh, this is the latest flavor, this is the next thing. This is what we all have to do next, and you just stay on the Band of Brothers, Pacific, Masters of the Air. The stories of our earlier time, of our parents really and what they teach us and how they keep us in a place where we say when everything's going nuts, there is a center here, and I think that when we least expect it, it rears its head at the right time to center us all up again. There's subjects within Masters of the Air, obviously and the other ones too, that you go, wow, this is so much like today.

Kirk Saduski:
Something perennial.

Gary Goetzman:
Yeah, man, and that hopefully we can help the world take the high road at all times.

Kirk Saduski:
How you doing, Don?

Donald Miller:
I'm doing great today, Kirk. How about you?

Kirk Saduski:
I'm doing wonderful. We recently watched episode four. A lot of dramatic things happen in four. You open your book, Masters of the Air, with Major Egan in London, and he gets some bad news that his pal, his friend, his compatriot, Gale Cleven, has been shot down over Bremen. Why did you begin the book with this particular story when there are so many?

Donald Miller:
It's a great story because it shows you the bond between the two guys. I mean, Egan is on his first leave. They received occasional leaves, extra days perhaps for a rough mission. He's just going through a rough mission. He knows that Cleven is going to be flying and he's having a hell of a time in London. He gets up, he reads the newspaper and immediately races to the telephone, and that conversation is incredible. It really is. They're talking in code and they're talking to Red Bowman, and of course Red gives them the bad news about the entire operation, and I love that line, "Can I pitch?"
The whole idea of throwing yourself back into this thing rather than waiting, having a couple other days in London, et cetera, et cetera. I was looking for a way to bring ... as I sat there and wrote it, I thought, how can I bring these two guys together? In training? Well, that's a little artificial because we don't know. I'd rather bring them together at the height of the war. I thought, what better place than right here? Catastrophe, one friend races to the relief of another. Now they're going to fly a revenge raid, if you will. Egan has everybody pumped up.

Kirk Saduski:
One of the other things that's very difficult and almost inconceivable, and you've written about it and you and I have spoken about it, is that, even though no one ever thought they were going to die, but I've read in your book where guys understood though that you could or you could be wounded, but what seemed to be inconceivable was being captured, let alone being in captivity. Talk about that phenomenon-

Donald Miller:
Absolutely. I interviewed a guy named Hank Plume through a third bomb group, and he said, "The one thing I wasn't prepared for," well, I said, "What did you fear most?" He said, "Dismemberment. Not death, not having half a face. As a young man getting hit in the testicles, losing a leg if you're an athlete or something like that." Then I said, "Well, what was the thing you least expected?" "Being captured. Never thought about it. Thought about getting wounded, had bad dreams about it, thought about dying, and the effect it would have on my family, but nothing prepares you for the stalag. Nothing prepares you for the evasion. Do you run?" Imagine if you're a Jewish kid and you have on your tags H for Hebrew. Do you get rid of the tags, bury them? If you're captured and you don't have your tags on, you're not a combatant, you're a spy and you'll be shot. On the other hand, if you're captured with the H on, who knows. So that's big time decision there.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, we actually see that. We see one of our characters have to make that decision in episode four where Sergeant Quinn, after being shot down, has to make a decision and do I do exactly that? Do I just turn myself in, probably be thrown into a prisoner of war camp or do I try to evade capture in civilian clothes and be possibly executed? He makes the decision to try to evade capture and escape. The only reason he was able to do that is because he was helped by civilians. We portray, without getting into too much, one of the little known parts of the war, is how much the civilian population of Belgium and France and the Netherlands, how they helped the downed allied flyers. There was something called the Comet Line, which we portray in episode four, run by an extraordinary woman. Tell us about the Comet Line in Dedee.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, well, Dedee and her father ran an escape line that went from Belgium down to Paris and from Paris to Southern France across the Pyrenees. They would then hire a basque guide to take the airmen over there and hope they could get to Gibraltar and get picked up by the British, but it's run almost entirely by women. They would prep the airmen first off about how to act on a mission. Don't put your hands in a pocket and play with loose change. That was a common thing for guys to do, and you can spot it easily. Smoke your cigarette the European way with a thumb right on your mouth like that instead of smoking like that. That'll give you away. Never speak, things like that. Keep your cool under pressure. The proper shoes to wear, so they were given new outfits, they burn their old and things like that, and these women took incredible risks.

Kirk Saduski:
One of the dramatic events of episode four of course, is that we introduce a new character that will be a mainstay of the series from this point on, and that of course is Lieutenant Robert 'Rosie' Rosenthal. We talked about Cleven and Egan being the Damon and Pithias, and I know at Playtone we were developing this and we read in your book about, because he's in that first chapter as well, Rosenthal. To us, he was Sir Galahad, the perfect knight, and in this case, the perfect pilot, the perfect airman. You got to know Rosie, and the audience is going to get to know Rosie. Please tell us about your personal experience with Rosie.

Donald Miller:
Well, he was one of the main reasons I did the hundredth. I wanted him in the story. He's a modest man, very strong emotionally, steady, a lot of equal poise, and you think of him as a true leader, the kind of guy that demands respect just by his presence. He changes the atmosphere in a room when he walks in a room, and he must have had that kind of impression on people throughout his life. I mean, if you run down in a one-minute segment, you say to yourself, a kid born near Ebbets Field in Brooklyn in Flatbush, honors student in Brooklyn College, he's in the Hall of Fame, the Athletic Hall of Fame for baseball and football, honors student, graduated from Brooklyn Law, top of his class, gets a great job on Wall Street days before Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor occurs. He's one of the first to enlist on Pearl Harbor Monday. He's in the war and he's sent abroad as a replacement.

Kirk Saduski:
When we meet Rosie, there's a big celebration on base and it's to celebrate Captain Dye's crew returning from their 25th mission. Explain to us why that's such a big deal, Don, the 25th mission. We've mentioned it a few times in the podcast.

Donald Miller:
Well, that was your chance to get out of the war or to stay in the war. The 8th Air Force had been flying for, let's see, the first missions are August '42. By February, they were taking such casualties that there's pressure on Ira Acre who set a bomber command to institute a limit, and kind of arbitrarily it became 25. To make it through there, I mean, just think of this, they fly that first mission on August 17th, I think it was, on '42, and the first plane to complete 25, that doesn't occur until late May of the next year. Then right after that, the Memphis Bell. I mean, that's a long time.

Kirk Saduski:
What would happen, I know it happened with the Memphis Bell and the crew of the Memphis Bell, and then it would happen more often, when a crew reached 25 and then they were sent back to the States, we made use of them.

Donald Miller:
Well, we needed a boost because we're getting hammered in the air war. You wouldn't have known it from the newspapers because the press played kind of a self-inflicted censorship. I talked to Andy Rooney a lot about that. He said, "We censored ourselves. We didn't need sensors, and we didn't report certain kinds of things." So nobody really knows how badly the war is going, and they really needed a boost, and the Memphis Bell tour was a spectacular success.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, tell us about a tour of what? What were they trying to accomplish?

Donald Miller:
Well, the raising money for the war, war bonds, and actually later in the war, Clark Gable's wife, Carol Lombard was killed in an accident out west, an air accident, and he spun into a terrible depression and signed up for the Air Force and enlisted as a private and went through basic training, the whole thing, and really wanted to die. They said he put himself in the most dangerous spots in the plane, et cetera. Everyone thought, "Oh, Gable's over here. He's going to take a soft job somewhere around headquarters," but didn't happen. Didn't happen that way. Then he did a terrific film called Air Gunner. It wasn't released because by that time they had enough air gunners, but those films were designed to draw in recruits. The other thing was raising the money for the war. It's a costly enterprise.

Kirk Saduski:
You mentioned Clark Gable, and I guess it's hard to imagine today, but a number of huge movie stars and celebrities served in the American military, in the Marines, in the Army, the Navy, Henry Fonda was in the Navy, and Clark Gable saw combat. Yes, he made a propaganda film, a recruitment film, but he served in combat. He flew a number of missions. You write in the book that he was concerned, his biggest fear was being shot down and captured because he knew that the Nazis would essentially put him in a cage and parade him around like he was a-

Donald Miller:
Yeah, he thought, "I'm going to be a monkey, and then they'll parade me around like a circus animal," and there was a bounty put on him by Goebbels, the propaganda minister.

Kirk Saduski:
Jimmy Stewart, and that's really a story, and again, you get into it in the book because he flew, I think over 20 missions, if I'm not-

Donald Miller:
He did.

Kirk Saduski:
... incorrect, and became-

Donald Miller:
23, yeah.

Kirk Saduski:
... a squadron or a group commander.

Donald Miller:
A group commander.

Kirk Saduski:
And became eventually, was he a general during-

Donald Miller:
He was a general in the Strategic Air Force in the 1950s.

Kirk Saduski:
After the war, right.

Donald Miller:
In fact, did a film on the Strategic Air Forces.

Kirk Saduski:
After the war, Jimmy Stewart essentially was going to give up on acting, was going to retire. His point was, "After I've done and seen what I've just done and seen, what's the point of going back to acting? Anything is frivolous." Then Frank Capra very famously came to him with a script called It's a Wonderful Life where he gets to attempt suicide and there's a very dark ... that's our holiday staple now.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, it is.

Kirk Saduski:
That's a very dark movie. So you understand why that would be the story to lore Jimmy Stewart out of a premature retirement.

Donald Miller:
Absolutely. Yeah, and he was a pilot before the war as well, a civilian pilot, an older guy, and didn't pass his physical. He was too thin. He only weighed 135 pounds and had the doctor put a thumb on the scale for him, I think the third time he went in. The guy wanted in that war and he wanted into combat. The big thing was, okay, he's in, he's in uniform, but we'll keep him in the States and he'll do some bond drives and things like that, and he said, "No way. I'm going over and I'm going to fly missions." He didn't have to fly missions either as a commander.

Kirk Saduski:
We've mentioned that we were not fortunate enough to meet any of the men that we've portrayed in this, unlike the other two series, but there are some of the men of the 100th that we did get to meet, and I know you have. One of them is Bob Wolff, who is kind of a neighbor of mine in California, and I've had the pleasure of talking to and interviewing, and also John Luckadoo, who is I believe a hundred years old now. They're both-

Donald Miller:
101.

Kirk Saduski:
... still with us, 101, but tell us about, you know both. You've talked to both. Tell us about Bob Wolff and tell us about John Luckadoo.

Donald Miller:
I did my first succession of interviews down in Savannah, the 8th Air Force was having a reunion down there. I interviewed an awful lot of guys, but I did interview John Luckadoo, and what impressed me about him was the fact that if you put a sheet up, I'm looking at a sheet here in this room and you put him behind there and have him start talking, you think he's like 40, 42 years old. I mean, he was pretty incredible. He had done his duty. He was proud of what he did, and he remained one of the most loyal members of the 100th bomb group in terms of showing up at reunion and then wrote really a fantastic book. He had that captain of the football team, quarterback kind of a presence, and the kind of guy you would really look to in an emergency. Again, he lit up a room when he went into it. He had a deep gravelly voice, a nice pace to him.
I always thought fidelity when he's speaking. He never exaggerated anything, exaggerated missions, and that's what impressed me about most of these guys. Some of the guys just don't have absolute ... who has absolute recall? So when you do an interview, you have to really check it, and some people say, well, you shouldn't do interviews because a guy telling you about something that occurred 38 years before is not a reliable witness, but yes, they are in terms of their emotion. Who can forget a horrible air accident? Who can forget the death of a buddy? Who can not convey the emotion of his first mission or of completing 25? Yes, there'll be little slips here and there, which you could easily correct, but you miss so much by not having that. I like to see the guys as I write them because the kind of history that I do is the kind of films actually you guys make, which I think is a nice match.
I try to put myself behind the eyes of the participants at the moment they're making the decision because if you do it retrospectively rather than chronologically and you know the conclusion, for example, if you're writing about the Civil War and you're writing a book about how the North won the Civil War, well that misses the whole point because they could have lost it, and you lose all the sense of drama, of history and of the importance of individual decisions. Why even fight it? So I call it the fallacy of hindsight, and I think good filmmaking, good books roll out like that. I share with you guys another problem. How do you bring in interpretation to a narrative? Well, it gets pretty clumsy and political. If it's not done right, it gets really clunky. If I have one skill as a writer, I think it's the ability to weave interpretation into the narrative so that you don't lose the pacing of it.

Kirk Saduski:
Did you say if you have one skill as a writer?

Donald Miller:
That's an important thing to really tell things. That's how life is lived. One to 85, one to 65 other, who knows, we're going to walk out of this room, I'm speaking obviously, what's going to happen next? Nobody knows, and that's how life has lived.

Kirk Saduski:
I got to know a little bit, Bob Wolff and John Luckadoo because I interviewed them and a couple of things. One, in terms of Lucky's recall, we were in production in England, and we had a question that we just know John Orloff couldn't answer, none of our consultants could answer, and so we decided, John and myself, we called Lucky. I can't remember, I think it was the position of a certain plane in a formation, and he knew right away and forget 38 years ago, this was 80 years ago almost, and he immediately was able to tell us exactly what we needed to know.

Donald Miller:
That's great. I had the same experience with Armanini. We did a film called The Air War, and I didn't know him, but I called him up and I knew his story and bingo, right there. Right there. Then he came down to the museum and he was fantastic down here.

Kirk Saduski:
It was nice with Bob Wolff because like I said, he lives in Southern California as I do, and we were able to go to his home. What was nice is that he's one of the happiest people I have ever met in my life. We were talking about some pretty tough things that he had endured. He eventually was shot down and spent a long time in a POW camp and survive the war, and that's what we were talking about, and yet he did a lot of it with a smile on his face and it wasn't artificial. He had created a great life for himself, beautiful home in Oxnard, California with his wife and his children, some of whom I got to meet. So it's nice doing what we do, seeing that end of things. The audience doesn't get to see the good things that happen to a lot of these guys, and we'll get into that as we get closer to the end of the series, but to see that and to see a life well lived and well honored, it is very nice.
Joining us today is the legendary Captain Dale Dye. Dale has worked with us at Playtone on several projects as a military advisor, including on Band of Brothers and The Pacific, and was crucial to us on Masters of the Air. So it's a great honor and pleasure that I welcome Captain Dale Dye. Captain Dye, tell us about your process. How did you get the cast ready for Masters of the Air?

Dale Dye:
Well, we approached it, much like I think we had approached all of the others, Band of Brothers and The Pacific. In other words, we wanted these people to crawl, walk, and then run, and we knew going in that everyone who was involved in the air war in Europe had to first become a soldier before he became an airman. So we decided to take that particular approach. Now, we had some differences here. Because of the demand on the actor's time and because of the production scale, which was huge, as you know, we weren't able to them 24 hours a day as we had done in Band of Brothers and in The Pacific, but it occurred to us that maybe that played into the whole scheme because people who flew out of English bases in the 8th Air Force, quite frankly were eight or ten hours on a dangerous mission over Nazi occupied Europe.
Then they returned to what was a relatively placid base in England where there were barracks and bars and that sort of thing. So I said as we were going in, look, let's take advantage of that because it's really sort of what happened to the people who were flying in the bloody 100th, 100th bomb group heavy. So let's use that as part of our training. That said, we really had a long road to hoe because these young men were, some of them, just barely aware that there was such a thing as World War II, and so we had to start from a crawl position. What was the nature of the world in those days? What was the nature of the US's involvement in those days? What was the nature of the air war and why would people like this, because these are young actors who were anxious for insights like that, why were people like this so willing to be involved in that sort of extremely dangerous work?
The answer was, of course, it was the right thing to do in a world at war, and our guys knew that, but what we had to do was impart that spirit to these young men and give them some sort of understanding that would help them in their performance, and we had to start from the very beginning. The uniforms that our performers wore as airmen in the 8th Air Force were a strange beast, hadn't been seen for quite a while. So we had to do minutia such as how to tie the proper tie, how to wear the 50 mission crutch in their garrison caps that they wore. That takes a lot of maneuvering and fiddling, which the airmen did in those days, and then we began to advance that as we went on.
Well, now you know how to wear the uniform. How do you handle your body? How do you become a soldier? How do you act and portray yourself as a soldier? Now, we did that with physical training, with close order drill, that sort of thing, all of the same sort of thing that young soldiers did in the early 1940s to get themselves ready for advanced aviation training. So we went through that whole process, increasing our font of knowledge so that by the time we finished training, they had been through everything from a pre-mission briefing, positions in the aircraft, organization, technical organization of an 8th Air Force heavy bomb squadron, all the way up into their individual responsibilities of individual crew positions, what to do in emergencies at bailouts and all that sort of thing. So it was, as I said, a walk, crawl, and then run. By the end of about 10 or 12 days, we were just barely running.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, and this one in Masters of the Air as opposed to Band of Brothers and The Pacific, those two were essentially infantry, which is what the Easy Company, the 101st, and then the Marine Corps, which obviously you're very familiar with, but that's the infantry. This was the Air Force. So you and your team had to go through a little bit of basic training yourselves, right?

Dale Dye:
Yeah, we were really sort of out of our wheelhouse. Of course, when you guys call, we know better than they ever say no. So we had to fall back and say, all right, what do we know about this? Neither Mike Stokey, my executive officer, nor myself are aviators, but we've been combat veterans. So what we did is we began to talk about what do we know about this? The answer was not a whole lot because while Mike's dad had been a B29 pilot in World War II, and I had an uncle who was a reluctant tail gunner on 17s in the 8th Air Force, we had a few family stories to go on, but that was all anecdotal stuff. What we really needed was the reality of the thing, and to do that, what we did is we went back into the research libraries and we got ahold of the training manuals for young men coming through in the early 1940s.
What things did they have to know? What things were they presented? We then shuffled that cards, we shuffled the cards, and we said, all right, now if you were a young man coming into this and you didn't really know everything there was about the world around you and all that sort of thing, how do we get to that point? It was a massive amount of research. We went to a pilot. Well, fortunately we had Masters of the Air, which is exceedingly helpful, but we needed more. We needed to get into the gut of it, into the actual personal details. So we spent a lot of time reading individual memoirs by airmen who had flown in all positions in B17s so that we knew a bit about what the pilots felt like, what the navigators felt like, what the Bombardiers felt like, what the gunners in all the positions felt like, and those things were exceedingly valuable and allowed us then to take the training syllabus that we were going to present and refine it, get it down to the point where it was valuable to each individual performance.
It was one of the most interesting experiences as an amateur historian, not on Don's level, but as an amateur historian and as a military veteran that I've ever had and that Mike ever had. We really had to open up pages of history and not just read them, but make an attempt as you and John Orloff did to get inside those pages. What's written between the line? We were even fortunate to see some videos that were made by air crewmen in the 8th Air Force that gave us these little insights that told us these are the things that these people need to know. As young actors, that was fodder.
I mean, that was the grass that they wanted to feed on. They needed to know these little details. As usual, when we get into these things, we would have a period during the day, which we call Stand Down, which is a period in which for the first time, they could pull themselves out of character and ask us anything that was of interest to them. We always get the most incredible questions, stuff that we hadn't even thought about.

Kirk Saduski:
What was it? Like what?

Dale Dye:
An actor wants to know, well, what does it feel like to get injected with morphine when you're in the air? I'm not sure I know what it's like to be injected when you're on the ground.

Kirk Saduski:
Right.

Dale Dye:
So we had to discuss these things and those conversations, those question and answer periods always grew into great insights.

Kirk Saduski:
You mentioned the 12-day syllabus that you and Mike Stokey put together. Can you give us a concise description of what that was?

Dale Dye:
Sure. Each time we design one of these things, Kirk, we go at it depending on what the script demands and what the elements of history that we need to teach demand. We often thought that, look, and we've developed this over the years doing these projects, the first thing you have to do is get their attention, and sometimes they're a little bit like a mule. You have to hit them right between the eyes with a two by four and make them wake up and pay attention. This is serious stuff. We have found that since you won't allow us to hit them in the head with two by fours, no matter how much we'd like to sometimes, what we find that one of the best ways to go at this is when you own their bodies, you will eventually own their minds. So we would begin most of the training days with physical training, and this was simply a matter to focus their attention.
We would do all of the things that every military veteran is aware of, pushups, sit-ups, specific exercises, long runs, chanting and all that sort of thing, and what happens then is because you listen to the power of that unit that you're part of, what happens is that you develop this sense of the power of a group as opposed to the power of one, and with actors, that's very helpful because you need to de-focus their attention on themselves and get them focused on the story, on the unit. You need to make them understand the concept of selfless dedication to a mission and to a unit.
So we'd usually start that with PT, and then we'd pull into uniforms because every day it seemed like the wardrobe people were bringing us a new uniform of some kind. We'd already gotten through the basic service uniform. Now we had to get into these electrified undergarments that were worn at high altitude bombing missions and the leather garments and the helmets and the headsets and all of that sort of thing. So there was a period then where we learned how to wear the various kinds of uniforms. Then we would go through the classroom day, which was essentially start at the top. Start at the top of the pyramid. What was the United States Army Air Force? How was it organized? What was the 8th Air Force? How were they organized? Who were the people that you would know? Who were Twining and who were Lamet, and who were all those, and who were Jimmy Doolittle and all these people?
So they began to know the personalities involved in the history. Then we began to talk about things like the difference between the allied approach to bombing Nazi occupied Europe, which was, for the most part, a complete night and day, if you will, difference between how the British approached it and how the Americans approached it. The Brits believed in relatively low level bombing, carpet bombing at night. The Americans believed in precision bombing from high altitudes during the day. So it'd be great discussion of all of that. Then we'd begin to narrow it a bit. So how did a mission get presented? Where did the mission come from? How was the target picked? Once the target was picked, what did we know about it? How was intelligence developed? We would go through these hour after hour after weary hour every day until they would get what they did, but what we needed them to get. The interesting part about this, and I think the most valuable part about this was not only was it a history lesson, but it was an insight into the people who performed those missions.

Kirk Saduski:
You wrote that, I'm going to quote you now, "The nut of the issue in training was trying to put a crew of young, mostly British and mostly inexperienced actors into the proper mindset." Ultimately, that's your goal. How would you define the proper mindset?

Dale Dye:
Yes, and that's really an interesting question. The proper mindset is something, and in many cases with our young men and women in society today is a completely alien concept. It was about selflessness. It was not about you the individual. It was about your contribution to a unit and to the mission of that unit. When you start with young actors who are more worried about how many lines do they have and how's my hair and all that sort of thing, that's an alien concept. So you've got to go through it and you've got to say, look, the right mindset is this. It's not about you. It's about the mission, and by extension, that mission's impact on the overall goals of the 8th Air Force, of the United States Army Air Forces, and of the allies in World War II to begin with. So there's a lot to gather, and what you should take away is that you're not really very important.
You are a cog in a machine, and it's the functioning of that machine that is important, and you have to adopt that mindset. Now, the interesting thing was, despite the fact that we had so many officers, we did a great group of enlisted men who played sergeant gunners, for instance, and I was really impressed during training with young Raff Law who played the senior mechanic on the flight line.

Kirk Saduski:
Yeah, Ken Lemmons.

Dale Dye:
Yeah. He just soaked this stuff up absolutely immediately. He soaked it up like a young sponge. The only thing we had trouble convincing him about was he understood that this aircraft, and in his case, because he was a senior sergeant, many aircraft and their maintenance and their upkeep and their readiness to fly was his responsibility. He got all that, but I said, "Look, here's the deal. You are an unsung hero, and you'll always be just like maintainers everywhere whether you're maintaining a Jeep or a tank or an aircraft, you're the unsung hero. The pilot and the copilot get all of the glory, and you have to operate on that premise.
You have to understand that your work is absolutely vital, and you must do that work with the absolute most conscientious manner that you can, but you're not going to get the glory. Nobody's going to stand there with a on you and say, oh, look at all our maintenance guys. You're always going to be an afterthought." Once he adopted that, once Raff Law adopted that, he played it absolutely grand. He's just the kind of understated focus on the mission sort of thing that you would see in any senior sergeant on any flight line today.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, yes, he did, and I want to say you just get such a great description of the crushing responsibility that he had and that he was a senior sergeant, but remind us how old he was.

Dale Dye:
He was just barely 20, and to have advanced to senior sergeant, spoke a lot about what ... Lemmons was really good at, what he did, and more importantly, for a man of that age, he understood the responsibilities. So this is a young man who literally stepped up and he was so good at what he was doing that the 100th bomb group said, "Hey, I'm not sure who that kid is, but he's great. Let's give him more responsibility," and they did. So by the end of the war, he was a master sergeant and was in charge of 17 or 18 aircraft maintenance crews on each of them. So this was a capable man who understood his responsibilities.

Kirk Saduski:
How long did you have these guys before we went into production?

Dale Dye:
Well, we had them for almost two weeks, but what happened was, because we were constantly getting new people in who were new gunners, all of a sudden would show up, and we had finished our formal training program. So what we would constantly have to do was pick them up and dribs and drabs, and then take them over and do a sort of a mini version of the full immersion that we had given the guys who had been in the regulation of training with us. So it was a constant flow of young actors that needed to be trained and indoctrinated. We found crazy ways to do that. In one of the big sound stages, we taped out the outline of a B17 and then put these young men in the position to where they would be within that outline, and then had them point to where it was two o'clock, where it was 11 o'clock, where it was 11 o'clock low, where it was five o'clock high.
They would do all of these things, and that would help them get into the mindset, and then we would have to take them into the fuselage portions, you'll recall, and hopefully people will later find out. We had B17 sections starting from the nose and the mid-fuselage and the back fuselage. We had all these in on sound stages mounted on gimbals so that the young men could get in their positions and we could poke cameras in there. So part of the training was simply to get you in the position where you would normally fly and then let you operate the pneumatically powered 50 caliber machine guns and give you an idea of what that's all about, and that went on constantly throughout the, I think, 10 and a half or 11 months that I was in UK doing this project.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, let's talk about that a little bit, Dale, in the sense of, a lot of people think, okay, you and your team go there, you have these guys for a couple of weeks, you put them through their paces, you get them as prepared as you can, and that's it. Well, that isn't true. You guys stay, you and your team are with us the entire time. Talk about once we're in production, give us an idea of what you guys had to do then.

Dale Dye:
Well, I mentioned the fact that we were constantly being bombarded with new people to train. So we always had to have somebody that was training at that particular point, and then we had to be there for the directors because like many other miniseries that we have all made with Playtone and Amblin and that sort of thing, you guys insist on hot and cold running directors. I guess that makes sense if you've got nine episodes and nobody's going to give you that much of their life. So we always had to also train the directors as they came in. They would want to know, "Well, do these guys know that?" Yeah, they know that. "Well, does this look right?" Yeah, it looks right or let me fix it and I'll show you how this happens. Some directors, because they're dramatists and that's why we hire them, come in with high-flown notions that they can do whatever they think the drama demands regardless of what's on the script or what's historically correct.
You've got to be able to put the brakes on that. You've got to say, listen, the tradition with us, with Amblin, Playtone and Band of Brothers and The Pacific, we don't play fast and loose with history.

Kirk Saduski:
No, we don't.

Dale Dye:
So while that's really dramatic, and while it's really a cool idea, there is just no way in hell that could have happened and we can't do that. Now the good news is that most of the directors that we had, in fact all of the directors that we had understood that going in. So there were very few flights of fancy. There were a couple of times we had to grab somebody and say, "Listen, no, you can't do that," and we did that as much, as politely and as nicely as we could.

Kirk Saduski:
You did a good job of that, you and you guys. I know that was a tough part because yes, that is the philosophy and that is the guiding directive. So thank you for, on a daily basis, keeping the plane in the air. How did our guys in the 100th and the 332nd measure?

Dale Dye:
Look, I just think they were brilliant. We worried for a while because you're in a classroom environment and you don't have as much of the hands-on field experience as we had on Band of Brothers and The Pacific. So you often wonder, you find yourself wondering, are they absorbing this or are they just trying to get their way through until the bell rings and they're at recess time or something like that. Are they getting this? You always wonder that and there's very little way to really test it. You try with exams and that sort of and exercise that they have to go through to demonstrate their knowledge, but you always wonder, are we reaching below the surface here? Do they get this? I always wondered about those guys. We had up to 50 of them in a classroom every day and all of them had specific questions about their specific roles and so on and so forth.
Now we had to sideline those and keep their focus where it needed to be as we built this knowledge. So I always wondered, are we getting to them? Frankly, we were through about three episodes when I began to look around and I said, well, I haven't seen a mistake yet. I haven't seen one of them drop out of character. I haven't seen one of them become the boys on the block. I haven't seen one of them using rap lyrics and all that sort of thing. They're into it. So apparently what we did worked and continued to work. Now that's not to say that we didn't have to babysit and to make sure they didn't drop out of those things, but it was clear after about three episodes that what we had done was effective and these kids were turning it into a brilliant performance.

Kirk Saduski:
I'm going to close, not with a question, but an observation. I've known Captain Dye for a long time. As we've said, we've worked on a few projects together and I've had the opportunity to see how the men afterwards, when we're offset, when the production's done, how they still respond to Captain Dye. I saw it a couple years ago when we were down at the World War II Museum when we did the 20th anniversary of Band of Brothers with the Men from Easy Company and they still treat you like their commanding officer. We saw it the other night as we had the premier in Los Angeles of Masters of the Air, and again, the enormous respect and the fact that they immediately snap into military bearing when they're in your presence. So I think there just can be no greater tribute, Captain, than how the men continue to deal-

Dale Dye:
Well, it certainly is humbling. When I look around at all of the young men and women that we've trained over the years and they all seem to maintain that connection with me and my guys. A, we were effective, and B, they get it and they understand and that makes a real family relationship, and to this day, I'm very proud of that.

Kirk Saduski:
We were talking to Anthony Boyle the other day and he was telling us about the whole process and this relationship with you, and he did a wonderful impression, the kind of impression of your dad setting you straight about something and it was obviously done with such great respect and affection. Captain Dye, thank you for joining us. This has really been a pleasure.

Dale Dye:
Kirk, it was a delight and I can't wait to see the audience. I mean everybody's all over us right now about what can we say about this thing and we're going to try. We're going to try to get them out there to see this because it's important to us historically.

Kirk Saduski:
Absolutely. Thank you Captain Dye.

Dale Dye:
My pleasure.

Kirk Saduski:
In the next podcast, we talk to historian Conrad Crane to discuss one of the most consequential missions of the 100th bomb group, and we also speak to directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

Anna Boden:
It was also very challenging to shoot inside these very small planes and trying to squeeze crew and cameras inside of them, but that also I think lends to some of that feeling of the authenticity and the kind of feeling very constricted in the claustrophobia of it.

Ryan Fleck:
The first episodes really felt like action sequences to us. You're dealing with a bunch of different planes and for us we were like, well, what if this was more of a horror film? We were playing The Shining, the opening music from The Shining score in the cockpit, so the guys had that sort of heavy vibe hanging over them as they were taking off into the sky.

Kirk Saduski:
Masters of the Air is an Apple original series from executive producers Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman. Join us again next week after a new episode of Masters of the Air on Apple TV Plus, and be sure to join us each week on this podcast from the National World War II Museum.