A terror attack, 900 million viewers, and the news crew between them

Image: The cast gathers in the control room in September 5 (Paramount Pictures).

It’s a striking premise — a television crew that has no experience in breaking news coverage gets swept up in the coverage of an international, life-or-death story. As they’re reporting on it, the team is also inadvertently shaping the story’s trajectory. This is the pitch for September 5, released last month from Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum. Like most new films, this one’s based on a true story: the actual hostage crisis that overshadowed the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Following the ABC Sports team stationed in Germany for the Games as they try to learn what’s going on next door at the Olympic Village, September 5 is a dramatic retelling of one of the darkest days in Olympic history. The film translates the gravity of having to cover these events in real time, transporting you through each flash of the camera and flick of the control board switch. 

Fehlbaum primes the viewer for this political spectacle by highlighting the “unprecedented technical” achievement that live-broadcasting the Olympics an ocean away to a stateside audience was five decades ago. (Disclaimer: I worked in the newsroom of an ABC affiliate up until last year. Hope you can still count me as an objective viewer.) When, in the wee hours of Sept. 5, 1972, the American sports crew learns something involving gunfire happened across the street at the Olympic Village, the ability to send live images back to the United States becomes a powerful part of the immediacy of this developing situation. It’s the first time an act of terrorism was covered live on TV (so claims the film in its epilogue). September 5 juxtaposes the dual narratives coming out of this Olympics — the sports and, now, the hostage crisis — by focusing on the humanity of the athletes held at gunpoint.

A documentary shown alongside the sports coverage reminds us of the recency of World War II and the millions killed during the Holocaust while advertising the democratic transformation of post-war West Germany. In it, Israeli athletes and German officials highlight the momentousness of these Games in Germany’s ability to move past years of state-sanctioned antisemitism, which were still within living memory. An interview from that documentary, featuring an American-Israeli weightlifter now being held hostage, is repurposed as part of the news coverage. It’s indicative of the methods the TV crew were using to tell this story on television while underscoring the eventual failure of Germany, yet again, to protect Jewish people inside its borders. 

The principal players include Geoffrey Mason (played by John Magaro), the rookie head of the Munich control room; Marianna Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), a local translator hired by ABC; and Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) as the then-president of ABC Sports. Arledge’s insistence that the sports team not cede this story to their news counterparts back in New York sets us up for the improvised, almost-guerilla reporting tactics this team takes up. Geoffrey’s use of short-range receivers to talk with off-site crew members builds the suspense of their actions, like sneaking into the Village disguised as an athlete. Marianne’s expertise as a native not only on the German language but also its politics and cultural context develop the stakes of this deadly situation, lamenting the limits her own people have in stopping it. The drama hits a high note when police storm the control room, demanding the crew stop their broadcast because the terrorists are monitoring police actions by watching ABC’s coverage. It’s a powerful confluence of independent journalism, the democratic state, and those who wish to harness panic and death — now being broadcast to the world — for political ends.

I was fascinated with the realistic portrayal of how a television crew acts (at least in my experience) during wall-to-wall coverage. Aside from key moments, everyone remained outwardly calm, diligently going about their various jobs: directing cameras, reading the teleprompter, developing film, creating captions. I especially got flashbacks to covering the Trump rally this past summer in nearby Butler, Pennsylvania, where one bystander died and another two were injured. July 13 was similar to Sept. 5 from a journalistic perspective: Lives were at stake, and we knew all eyes were on our coverage. Inside the newsroom, we were focused and determined, realizing the international weight of the story we were telling. One of the best parts of September 5 is its depiction of a sports broadcasting team transforming into a hard-news operation in real time while facing unthinkable tragedy.

And that depiction does not shy away from the pitfalls in covering a hostage situation without hard-news training. At one point, Arledge and the directors discuss whether to live-broadcast the terrorists with the hostages on the hotel balconies. It made me cringe, thinking about how gruesome, unproductive, and downright wrong it would be to show an innocent person getting killed in real time. Thankfully, Geoffrey responds with the appropriate call, to film any action on the balconies and run it back to edit out, if necessary, anyone being shot. Another pitfall: getting it wrong. Late in the movie, Geoffrey relies on reporter rumors around a possible hostage release, jumping the gun and running this information without confirming it. I won’t spoil too much of a historic event for you, but you can tell by the end of September 5 that Geoffrey and Arledge will always have regrets about how they directed the course of that day’s coverage.

Despite sharing a particular perspective on this blighted day, Fehlbaum is less interested in telling stories of individual personalities within the control room — ironic, giving the emphasis placed on sharing the stories of those held hostage. Perhaps that was the whole point, to cement focus on the athletes impacted and the human toll of this act of terror. Still, this lack of character investigation results in a 95-minute runtime that left me surprised when the movie wrapped up. I felt at distance from who the TV crew members were outside their actions on this day. On the other hand, do I want that exposition? Or am I simply used to the current cinematic trend of bloating every scene with backstory — how this character got their job, how this character’s mother in Schenectady is doing, what music so-and-so was listening to when they met their significant other? I’m not sure. I’m convinced, then, that Fehlbaum made a good call in limiting the emotional scope of the screenplay to those with most at risk — we can and should empathize with the decisions made in the control room, but only as they relate to the necessity of what was happening on the ground to these hostages. 

Television has long presented itself as the most personal medium for telling the news. Here, we see a team at the nexus of reporting the news while also becoming the news themselves. In that, I loved the use of archival footage alongside the movie’s analog look, placing the audience in the warm, saturated feel of 1970s film production. You really get the sense you’re right there in Munich, in the director’s chair, trying not to panic as one attempt after another fails to get these Olympic athletes to safety. It makes no small impression that this movie came out at the tail-end of a new war where tens of thousands of civilians have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced in and around Gaza; the central conflict between Israel, its Middle Eastern neighbors, and the Palestinian people was not resolved in 1972. This movie is an exercise in humanization in the face of continued acts of terror, in an era where we are used to seeing these kinds of things on repeat on every screen. September 5 was a rewarding, if sobering, reflection on both this history as well as my own time as a newsroom editor — and, hopefully, for anyone pessimistic about the current state of journalism, a reaffirming glance into the human influence within the news.