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WAR IN THE LIVING ROOM
With a purported budget of $500 million (more than seven times that of Saving Private Ryan) the 10-part HBO miniseries Masters of the Air is poised to become the most expensive production in television history as Spielberg and Hanks endeavor to produce a visually stunning and at times viscerally heart-rending tribute to the brave aircrews who flew into the teeth of Nazi air defenses, suffering massive losses of aircraft and lives while helping to make the Allied invasion of Europe on D-Day possible.
The TV series, they say, will avoid using composite characters, focusing instead on the real stories of the actual figures who flew with Eighth Air Force, and in particular the "Bloody Hundredth" bomb group, one of the hardest hitting — and hardest hit — which alone lost 229 airplanes and suffered nearly 1,900 men killed or taken prisoner between June 1943 and April 1945.
The unflinching stories brought to life in your living room will be taken from the pages of the absorbing 2006 book of the same name written by historian Donald L. Miller. In it Miller chronicles not only the remarkable stories of the Eighth Air Force's aircrews, but also the people under the bombs in London, Germany and occupied Europe. Shifting deftly from finely detailed descriptions of the inner workings of a B-17 to the dreadful stories of those who died in bomb attacks, the book is an apt blueprint for an epic TV miniseries from two of Hollywood's finest storytellers.
Read more at http://www.flyingmag.com/pilots-plac...f4hUcdip1Iy.99
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