Write On: 'Masters of the Air' Co-Executive Producer and Writer John Orloff

“I always go back to theme. Why are you writing this story? What
is that final couple of minutes of the movie and what do you want
the audience to feel? I kind of always build backward from that
in some ways. In a movie, how do I make the 118 minutes
preceding those two minutes build to those last
two minutes? To me that’s a really good film. And anything
that's not helping build to those last two minutes, throw it
out!,” says John Orloff, writer/creator of Masters of the Air,
the new nine-part series streaming on AppleTV+. 


In this episode, Orloff talks about being an un-produced writer
and the unusual way he landed the job writing for HBO’s Band of
Brothers. 


He learned a lot from Executive Producer Tom Hanks:


“One of the things [Tom Hanks] said to me is, ‘We're going to
reveal character through procedure.’ That means how you get a
plane ready to go, it means pushing buttons, how you do all that
stuff. I will take you back to Apollo 13. That is about three
guys in a room the size of a bathtub – just pushing buttons. And
yet we know and care about them. And so, the procedures of
getting an airplane in the air was an opportunity to remind the
audience that okay, there's no magic buttons to push in 1943 to
get an airplane in the air… Let's capture that and let's explain
that to the audience early on in the first episode or two and
then they'll know that that happens every time,” says John. 


For a deeper dive into the show Masters of the Air, now streaming
on AppleTV+, listen to the podcast.