On September 5, 1972, millions of people watched live on ABC television as a tense international hostage situation unfolded, when members of a Palestinian militant group calling itself Black September infiltrated the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, and took the Israeli team hostage. In the film “September 5,” we see a sports crew working for an American television network rise to the challenge of covering such a monumental event. Whether their decision was good or bad (and rest assured, the film leaves room for debate), it was a historic decision, capturing media attention and making ABC the first television network to broadcast a terrorist act live.
Even those who weren’t alive at the time probably have a good idea of what happened, thanks to Steven Spielberg, whose Munich begins with a reenactment of the same massacre. In the unnerving opening minutes of that film—the second most serious of Spielberg’s career, after Schindler’s List—the Jewish director points out one of the main reasons why Swiss director Tim Fellbaum’s focus on the media makes sense here: ABC’s live television coverage was so comprehensive that the terrorists and the hostage families could follow in real time, and see what the authorities were doing on the broadcast.
Details like these raise important ethical questions about the incident that still resonate today, as countless crises since have received similarly tough journalistic judgments—though none have yielded the 29 Emmys (a mix of sports and news awards) that ABC collected for its coverage. Those awards celebrate achievement, but they sidestep some of the more delicate philosophical aspects of the conflict in the control room, which Fellbaum weaves into his 94-minute economic docudrama. The film’s relevance also underscores the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, as the fallout from last year’s Oct. 6 attack continues to unfold.
Fellbaum’s blunt, straightforward treatment, co-written with Munich-born Moritz Binder, is unconcerned with the politics of the massacre. Indeed, those interested in what happened (and hoping for a Munich-like approach, perhaps) may be surprised to find that the film’s reenactment doesn’t depict Black September at all, but rather what the ABC Sports team was doing all along. The film most closely resembles “The Post,” in its attempt to act responsibly amid the enormous pressures of a breaking news environment.
The veteran decision-maker in this film is Ron Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), who springs into action the moment shots are fired offscreen, insisting that “this story is not going to be played by the news media…it’s going to be played by the sports media.” Thirty years later, The New York Times described Arledge in its obituary as “the most important behind-the-scenes figure in television coverage of major events in the past half-century, from the Olympics to Muhammad Ali’s boxing matches in the 1960s to the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 and ’80.”
“September 5th” takes us behind the scenes of the 17-hour ordeal to see why that was true, starting shortly before the attack and continuing after the tragic end, when “Wide World of Sports” host Jim McKay confirmed the terrifying news live on air, “They’re all gone.” However, as a straightforward account of how ABC Sports handled the story, the film focuses primarily on an ambitious young producer (played by a period-appropriate John Magaro) whose actions are directly influenced by veteran sportscaster Jeffrey Mason’s recollections of the events.
The ABC Sports team is small and almost entirely male, save for a German-speaking crew member named Marianne (The Teacher’s Lounge’s Leonie Benesch), who plays an important role throughout the film. The way she is treated—and repeatedly belittled—because of her gender adds another layer of criticism to the film’s complex power dynamics, which extend upward to more cautious corporate players, such as COO Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin).
ABC Sports may have gotten the story, but it also got it wrong, prematurely repeating an unconfirmed report that the hostages had been safely rescued. Moritz and Fehlbaum’s realistic script lacks the slapstick quality of baseball series like “The Morning Show” or Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night,” which can make one feel as if the real story is happening elsewhere—and it is, because news crews can’t make out many details from a telephoto lens pointed at a distant balcony.
When events like this happen live, our imaginations tend to fill in the unseen with the worst. In this case, looking back half a century later, knowing what happened doesn’t stop us from wanting to know better. But this film’s insights are limited to the newsroom: the importance of the phrase “as we hear it,” versus the reality of what happened during the climactic disaster at Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base (as detailed in Kevin Macdonald’s excellent Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September).
There are so many good accounts of the Munich massacre that it’s easy to overlook the film’s blind spots. Fehlbaum presents the film as a documentary, using handheld camerawork (and a digital stage that suggests it was shot on old, high-contrast 16mm film) to create a slightly forced sense of realism. Not everyone in the cast gets the message; some of the performances feel forced against Sarsgaard and Magaro, whose characters are torn between a fear of uncertainty and a desire for precision in every moment. They’re in uncharted territory here, facing tough decisions at every turn, like, “Can we show someone being shot live?”
“This is not a competition,” the higher-ups remind us, but it’s hard to convince the athletic department of that. These are the Olympics, where everyone is determined to win and the rules are written as they are enforced.
