Roone Arledge: “I know it might not feel like it, but you did a hell of a job.”
Geoffrey Mason: “It was a catastrophe.”
Tim Fehlbaum’s newsroom drama of underprepared ABC sports reporters at the 1972 Munich Olympics grappling with the Israeli hostage crisis ends without taking a victory lap. Peter Sarsgaard’s Roone Arledge is backslapping a group of men and women for getting their logo on the broadcast and negotiating satellite time. For being there and getting the footage. For being honest-to-God journalists. Roone’s response earlier in the night when his colleagues were debating the ethics of showing certain images or using specific language was that it is his job to tell the story of the people and let ‘news’ work out what it all means later. “It’s not about politics, it’s about emotions,” he said when directing a reporter to ask Jewish American swimmer Mark Spitz what it was like winning a Gold Medal in Hitler’s backyard.
The Munich Olympics in 1972 were supposed to be a beacon of hope and healing between Germany and other nations. A joyous, light, symbolic gesture of a country committed to peace and fellowship. Two things marked the occasion’s worldwide significance. The first live television broadcast of any Olympic games via satellite with over four thousand reporters onsite from across the globe. The second was the attendance in Munich of the Israeli Olympians, many of whom lost family in the Holocaust. ABC VP of Olympics Operations, Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) is uncomfortable and a little cynical about Germany’s open hand and Roone’s somewhat cavalier “play up the Jewish angle for ratings” attitude.
Marvin retreats to a back room and watched Israeli American weightlifter David Berger visiting Dachau and speaking about the spirit of moving on. Sitting quietly is young German translator, Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch). “It’s what we want too, to move on,” she tells Marv. Marv sighs and says, “I guess your parents didn’t know anything was happening, either” highlighting that the trauma is very much present for Jewish people like himself. She reminds him that she is not her parents – and the question of perpetual war hangs in the air as another perpetual war is about to make its presence felt.
It's 4am and the B team is on board. The producer is the relatively inexperienced Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) a native New Yorker about to undergo a baptism of fire as what he assumed would be a standard shift covering less prestigious sports soon turns into him co-ordinating the coverage of the kidnapping and death of Israeli athletes taken hostage by members of Black Saturday. The first gunshots are heard coming from the purpose-built Olympic village and Geoff along with a team including a French-Algerian technician, Jacques Lesgards (Zinedine Soualem), cameramen and runners Carter Jeffrey (Marcus Rutherford), Gary Slaughter (Daniel Adeosun), ABC News reporter Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) and others need to make sense of what is happening. The only person who can translate what is being said is Marianne and she takes on the mantle of on-the-ground asset.
Journalistic ethics are brought up in half-finished conversations. Geoff and Peter Jennings question the language they should use. Marv questions if they should be showing images of Jewish people being attacked in Germany. No-one really knows what they’re doing and only Roone Arledge appears certain that they get the footage and keep it with veteran sports reporter Jim McKay (shown via the real telecasts) addressing America and the world as the crisis unfolds.
September 5 uses the confusion of the ABC sports team as the template of the story. They’re watching things unfold and reporting with limited knowledge. Jennings gets to the Olympic Village before it is cordoned off by German police and reports back via two-way radio or phone. One of the team, Gary, dresses as an Olympian with a fake pass so he can run 16mm film back and from the studio. Marianne listens to the police scanner trying to understand who has been taken. They watch the hostage negotiator, and the undertrained German police attempt amateurish rescue attempts. The penny drops at one point that no one thought to cut off the live television feed to the Olympic village and Black Saturday were watching what news organisations were filming. “Is this our fault?” someone asks as one attempt fails because the kidnappers knew what was happening. “Are we giving them what they want? Media coverage?” another person asks.
The answers to those questions have been investigated for years, especially in Kevin Macdonald's award-winning 1999 documentary One Day in September. September 5 can’t answer such weighty questions in the moment – and the film is about the moment. It doesn’t go into the background of the Palestinian cause: although there is a stock racist and sexist character, Hank Hanson (Corey Johnson) who talks about the Arabs and sends Marianne out to get coffee. The Americans ask why the German Army isn’t getting involved. There is news that the IDF has been refused access. Golda Meir’s name is mentioned once. September 5 does what it can to use the maxim, “It’s not about the politics, it’s about the people.” Despite there being no real way to separate the political context in a narrative about a coordinated act of terrorism with the weight of century’s worth of colonial oppression behind it, Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum isn’t drawing from outside the frame of what the people within it are experiencing.
What they’re experiencing is inadequacy. A claustrophobic environment where they’re all running blind and are cobbling information from unreliable sources, including the German Government. Geoff and Marianne are the main points of focus. Geoff desperately thinking if he can report the news better, get the right angles, the right images and interviews, he can somehow change the tragedy unfolding in real time. Marianne hoping that somehow Germany will not allow Israeli people once again to be killed on German soil. John Magaro’s emotional state as he thinks the hostages have been released is elation, when he realises he has reported a rumour he is broken. He’s also blamed by Marv for doing so despite other news sources picking up the story and German spokesperson Conrad Ahlers broadcasting the same.
Capturing an event where the outcome is already a known quantity can be a difficult enterprise. September 5 isn’t about unsung heroes in the newsroom, because ABC were one of several networks using the satellite and there were often more reporters on the ground during the hostage crisis than there were operational police. “If they (Black September) shoot someone on live television, is it our story or is it theirs?” is one of the questions asked. Jim McKay famously said that he didn’t know what the Twentieth Olympiad meant going forward. “What will happen to the course of world history, we don’t know.”
Eleven Israeli coaches and athletes died, including David Berger. Marianne laments Germany’s failures. Geoff shirks off Roone’s “Attaboy, you did it,” compliment – a man he had been hoping to impress. All that remains is a sense of dour defeat. John Magaro’s Geoff Mason’s burden was to witness events he could not change, and the actor encapsulates how excruciating it was to learn about the people who thought they were gathering in celebration only to see on a global scale the fragility of peace.
Seamlessly edited with archive footage and dramatic recreation, September 5 is a difficult and painful film. A tense and excellently acted piece of cinema about a horrific moment in history witnessed by nine million people, some of whom had bought a television specifically to watch the Olympics. In September 1972 a group of people used to filming and staging the simple ‘Triumph or Loss’ narrative of sports reporting captured a militant attack that reached from the Olympic village to Fürstenfeldbruck airbase and far beyond. Today the story continues and perhaps we have lost our ability to be appalled by death the same way some refused to cancel the remaining Munich Olympics. Bear witness and push for peace instead of the necessity for monuments for the dead.
Director: Tim Fehlbaum
Cast: John Magaro, Peter Sarsgaard, Leonie Benesch
Writers: Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum, Alex David
Producers: Mark Nolting, John Ira Palmer, Sean Penn, Philipp Trauer, John Wildermuth, Thomas Wöbke
Music: Lorenz Dangel
Cinematography: Markus Förderer
Editing: Hansjörg Weißbrich
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