September 5 (now streaming on Paramount+) shows live-TV producers switching from this angle to that angle and then the other angle, giving viewers a fresh angle on the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. That international tragedy – and stories from its aftermath – has been the subject of other movies, but this one, from director Tim Fehlbaum, dramatizes how the ABC Sports crew reported the events of that fateful day. Fehlbaum and co-writers Moritz Binder and Alex David an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, which is especially notable, considering how their stripped-down approach to the story sidesteps many discussions of politics and ethics, allowing us to carry that burden as we mull over the implications.
The Gist: Of course the air conditioning is broken – fait accompli for a news team crammed into a tight room. A news team that’s about to be crammed into a tight room for nearly 20 hours, making live-TV history as they sweat extra hard during a tense series of events. But right now, they don’t know that yet. They just know that their alarms are going off about an hour before zero-dark so they can broadcast coverage of the Munich Olympics to the entire world, live via satellite. Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) commands the control room, directing techs to switch from one feed to another, to zoom in here and zoom out there and cue the talking-head hosts and fade to commercial. He works with producer Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) and ABC Sports president Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) to run a smooth ship. They debate the tone and context of things like interviewing Jewish-American swimmer Mark Spitz about the Holocaust or a potentially politically charged showdown between American and Cuban teams, and Arledge quips, “It’s not about politics. It’s about emotions.”
It’s business as usual until German translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) hears pop-pop-pop from the Olympic village. Soon they learn that five members of Palestinian terrorist organization Black September broke into the housing center and took 11 Israeli athletes and coaches hostage. They’ve already killed two hostages, and threaten to kill one an hour until the Israeli government releases 200 Palestinian prisoners. Arledge negotiates for airtime and asserts to ABC honchos that the sports crew will handle the coverage, since they’re on site, and the experienced news team is thousands of miles away. He oversees Mason’s handling of pragmatic concerns, including lugging a clunky studio camera outside to get a shot of the housing quarters and sending reporter Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) to a neighboring building so he can get eyes on the window of the room where the hostages are being held.
It’s Bader’s job to advise Mason and Arledge that this is hard, hard news they’re covering. It’s not volleyball. Lives are at stake. And what happens if terrorists kill a hostage on live TV? Arledge asserts that they’ll follow the story wherever it leads. There’s debate over terminology – they use the phrase “what we’re hearing” when reporting what’s essentially rumors, and do they refer to the Black September members as “terrorists”? All hands are on deck. They’re in if-you-can-hold-a-camera-then-get-out-there mode. One crew member dons a fake ID so he can pass security and shepherd cans of film between locations. Another rigs a phone receiver to function as a microphone so Jennings can call in reports to the command center. Another fiddles with a letter board for on-screen graphics. Mason communicates through his headset, on walkie talkies, over the phone (“You got it, Kubrick,” a voice on the communique says in reply to a series of orders). He mans the station as ABC broadcasts to hundreds of millions of viewers images of German police on rooftops trying to sneak up on the terrorists – then realizes that the terrorists are watching that very same broadcast.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: September 5 is like Good Night, and Good Luck crossed with The Post. Munich dramatized Israel’s revenge campaign in the wake of the tragedy, and One Day in September is the Oscar-winning documentary about the events. Oh, and not to trivialize the film, but the last time we watched high-wire backstage drama fictionalizing true events? Saturday Night.
Performance Worth Watching: Magaro continues to prove he’s one of the most underrated film actors out there – proof is right here in this outstanding dramatic-anchor job, as well as in First Cow, Past Lives and a handful of other films. He and inspired supporting player Benesch interact poignantly in a few key moments, giving this procedural the emotional handholds it needs.
Memorable Dialogue: Bader: “If they shoot someone on television, whose story is that? Is it ours or is it theirs?”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Some will ding September 5 for its myopic focus on the drama inside the cramped, sweaty ABC control room, and not taking a wider view – the film doesn’t seem interested in how its relevance is underscored by the awful events occurring in Gaza today. Others will appreciate how its procedural M.O. often inelegantly collides with thorny topics, essentially laying the tarot cards out on the table for us to interpret. I fall into the latter camp, where we finish the movie and roll up our intellectual sleeves to wrestle with big questions: How did ABC’s coverage – the first time a terrorist attack was broadcast on live TV – influence news coverage for the next 50 years? How were journalistic ethics adhered to and violated in this instance? What happens when the media covering the story inadvertently becomes part of the story? What is compassionate journalism, and does it jibe or clash with long-held reporting practices? Can we realistically expect journalists to set aside their individual biases and emotions in the quest for straight-on-the-nose reporting?
I feel like I’m writing a test for a high-school civics class. That’s not a bad thing. Especially considering most movies stretching out high-wire tension for an impressively lean 95 minutes tend to be wholly fictional Frank Grillo-led B-crime capers, not riveting true-story docudramas. Fehlbaum cuts September 5 like a thriller, and the film comes alive via its technical brilliance. It’s an editing-room masterpiece, splicing archival footage into dramatizations, with post-productions manipulations rendering the film’s overall look gritty, grainy and period-authentic. And the cast is game and fully committed, with strong work from underappreciated talents like Magaro, Chaplin and Benesch, with Sarsgaard’s steely performance existing in a gray area, leaving us with the uncomfortable feeling that his concern for doing the right thing for its own sake is rooted in self-interest (the real-life Arledge was subsequently promoted to the head of ABC News).
Although we know the sad conclusion to this story, Fehlbaum draws out the suspense by chaining together dozens of on-the-fly decisions made by TV producers who are barely keeping their heads above water, doing their damnedest to be responsible journalists while under intense scrutiny, and living, nerves wracked, at the fulcrum between big-ratings entertainment and ethical news coverage. There are no bad actors in this ABC command center – these are good people trying to do their best under extreme pressure, holding out hope for the situation to resolve peacefully while making professional choices with repercussions that still reverberate today, 53 years later. There’s no time for political discourse when you’re working your ass off.
Our Call: The can of worms is now open; feel free to dump it out if you wish. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.