The True Story Behind Munich Olympics Journalism Drama September 5
On Sept. 5, 1972, a 32-year-old producer named Geoffrey S. Mason was working in a control room for ABC Sports in Munich while 12 hostages, including several members of the Israeli Olympic delegation, were being held in a building nearby. As Mason’s team was in the midst of covering the breaking news—having pivoted from their regularly scheduled athletic programming—the doors suddenly burst open and Mason found himself staring through the cigarette haze at German police machine guns pointed straight at his face. The Germans were upset that one of the network’s cameras was showing that German sharpshooters had taken positions on the roof above the hostages, threatening to thwart a rescue effort.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The camera was quickly turned off, but Mason’s indelible memory of that confrontation lives on, not only in his mind but also in the new movie September 5, in limited theaters Dec. 13. Directed by Tim Fehlbaum, the drama recounts how journalists broadcast the act of terror live to millions. It’s the second feature film released this century about the Munich massacre, following Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated 2005 historical epic Munich. And the 1999 film One Day in September won the Oscar for best documentary feature. But unlike those films, September 5 is, like Spotlight, The Post, and She Said in recent years, a journalism movie at heart. And its arrival is timely, given the prominent role of hostages in Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
The movie is constructed around the ABC Sports team’s about-face from athletics to terrorism, centering the perspective of the broadcasters who sneaked cameras into the Olympic Village to film the frenetic scene. Mason, one of the producers calling the shots that day, played in the movie by Past Lives actor John Magaro, consulted on the script co-written by Fehlbaum, Moritz Binder, and Alex David. As he recalls, “I remember thinking, good Lord: We’re supposed to be watching Mark Spitz go for seven gold medals and Olga Korbut—the new face of Russian gymnastics—and I’m now watching people crawl across a roof getting ready to stage a military assault on terrorists.”
The 1972 hostage crisis took place five years after Israel had demonstrated its military superiority in the Six-Day War, and Palestinian militants relied on hijackings and terrorist attacks to draw attention to their cause. On that late-summer day in 1972, the Palestinian militant group known as the Black September Organization called for the release of 234 prisoners—some of whom had been imprisoned for years in Israeli and German jails, threatening to kill one hostage every hour until their demand was met.
The goal of the Munich attack “was to put the Palestinian situation on the largest possible world stage,” says David Clay Large, author of Munich 1972: Tragedy, Terror, and Triumph at the Olympic Games. “The Olympics would do just that.” Meanwhile, in addition to inflicting a devastating loss of life, the hostage crisis would become a major source of embarrassment for Germany, less than three decades after the end of the Holocaust. As Large explains, “One of the most pressing concerns for the Munich organizers was not to look like the old Germany—of concentration camps and watch towers—or the Berlin Games of 1936, which had heavy security, armed guards. They wanted to look like the new, joyful Germany—transparent, democratic, open.”
Mason was just one of several journalists who expected to be covering sports that day in Munich but were suddenly called upon to redirect their training toward reporting on an act of terrorism. One colleague, Marvin Bader (played by Ben Chaplin in the movie), was a Jewish American journalist for whom an assignment in the country where the Holocaust took place brought deep discomfort. According to Mason, “Marvin was a deeply religious and sensitive person, and so having spent a number of years in Germany doing shows like this—like ski jumping—to go back to Germany time and time again was not easy.”
As the movie depicts, Mason’s colleague from the news division, Peter Jennings, dressed up like an athlete with fake credentials and went undercover, sneaking into the Olympic Village so he could watch the scene unfold from the 11th floor of the Italian delegation, across the street from the Israeli team’s compound. During the course of the day, one hostage escaped through a window and two were killed as they tried to seize their captors’ weapons. The drama ended with the deaths of the remaining nine in a botched rescue attempt that night, at an airfield. ABC host Jim McKay told the world, “They’re all gone.”
After he stayed up for an entire day, Mason remembers going back to his hotel room after the crisis subsided, pouring a stiff drink, and having “a good cry.” “It was the first time that day we had been able to feel what we were involved in,” he says. He remembers thinking, “This is all so unfair. These young people were just trying to represent their country and to pursue excellence in front of the world, and they were deprived of that opportunity.”
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, Israel responded by launching air attacks and bombings against Palestine Liberation Organization targets in Lebanon and Syria. According to Large, “There was initially all kinds of sympathy for the Israelis in connection with this terrible attack, but the reprisal attacks by the Israelis were so severe and so nondiscriminating that opinion started to turn against the Israelis to some degree.” He adds, “There are a lot of parallels between then and now.” A year after the terrorist attack, in 1973, the Yom Kippur War took place, with a coalition of Arab states, led by Egypt and Syria, attacking the Sinai Peninsula in retaliation for the Israeli airstrikes.
After the historic 1972 broadcast, Mason continued to work as a producer in sports broadcasting, accumulating a total of nine Olympic Games and half a dozen FIFA World Cups under his belt. Now based in Florida, he’s the executive producer and CEO of his own production company. Consulting on September 5 has been surreal, he says: to experience being in front of the camera—at least, as portrayed by Magaro—instead of behind it. As he puts it, “I’ve been behind the scenes all these years in production, so I had to get used to working with someone who is actually playing me. That took some getting used to.”
More than anything, he hopes the dedication that he and his colleagues brought to journalism will be the main take-home message for viewers. “It was a roller-coaster ride the entire day,” Mason reflects. “We were just doing our job, and we had to get [the story] right.”