'September 5' review: ABC Sports team gets serious in a pulse-pounding look back at '72 Olympics crisis
When I think of the best movies about television journalism, personal favorites include “Network” (1976), “The China Syndrome” (1979), “Broadcast News” (1987), “The Insider” (1999) and “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005). I’m now adding to that shortlist the engrossing and pulse-pounding procedural “September 5,” which takes us into the heart of the ABC control booth as a team of sports journalists is tasked with covering the unfolding events of the Munich Massacre at the 1972 Olympic Games.
We know the tragic outcome of the terrorist attack by militants from a group calling itself Black September, who murdered 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team. We’ve seen excellent films about this horrific event, including the Academy Award-winning documentary “One Day in September” from 1999, and Steven Spielberg’s historical drama “Munich” (2005), which focused on the Mossad assassinations following the Munich massacre.
What makes “September 5” unique is the P.O.V., with director Tim Fehlbaum, cinematographer Markus Förderer and the production design team re-creating the ABC Sports broadcast facility control room in sets built at the Bavaria Studios in Munich, and additional filming taking place in the city. Add to that the use of anamorphic lenses, a handheld docudrama style and a seamless blending of dramatic re-creations and real ABC footage from the time, and “September 5” envelopes you in its storytelling technique.
Even though events have been compressed to fit a 22-hour timeline into a 94-minute movie, and some conversations and characters are fictional, there’s never a moment when it feels as if events have been amped up or overcooked.
The 1972 Summer Olympics in West Germany were of monumental importance to the hosts, who were hoping to put further distance between the modern era and the darkness surrounding the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936. On a relatively light day of competition, several ABC Sports higher-ups are taking a well-deserved break, and it’s business as usual at the network’s temporary headquarters when gunshots are heard at the Olympic Village, which is just blocks away.
It's up to a young producer named Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) to take control of the fluid situation and marshal the troops, as they begin to realize the magnitude of the crisis and decide how to cover the story. Magaro figures out a way to move the bulky studio cameras outside to capture images of the Olympic Village and even devises a way to smuggle reels of film from the sequestered village back to the newsroom by forging a fake Olympic athlete ID for a temp employee named Gary Slaughter (Daniel Adeosun) who duct-tapes the canisters to his torso. He’s born to the challenge.
Peter Sarsgaard is an electric presence as president of ABC Sports Roone Arledge, who refuses to hand over the coverage to the news division because unlike the ABC News division, ABC Sports isn’t in New York, it's right there, on the scene. Benjamin Walker does fine work as Peter Jennings, who had established ABC’s Middle East Bureau in 1969. He was on the scene in Munich and managed to sneak into the Italian athletes’ compound, which was near the Israeli residence, and provide eyewitness accounts.
(Other real-life on-air personalities, including the great Jim McKay, who became an ad-hoc news anchor during the crisis, are depicted only on monitors, in real news footage. It’s the right touch.)
Director Fehlbaum, who co-wrote the script with Mortiz Binder and Alex David, makes room for just the right amount of cultural and political insight, as represented in such characters as Marvin Bader (a very good Ben Chaplin), the Jewish American vice-president of operations, and the fictional construct Marianne Gebhardt (a wonderful Leonie Benesch), a young German production assistant who becomes a key asset due to her translating abilities, even as she’s subjected to casual sexism from some of the men in the control room.
Mason gets so caught up in capturing the intense and riveting visuals that one staffer sarcastically calls him “Kubrick,” while Bader becomes the moral conscience. They are covering this act of terrorism in real time, with family members of hostages watching; what happens if a masked gunman takes a hostage out on a balcony and shoots him? Do they cut away? There’s a stunning moment when the team realizes the terrorists are also watching the coverage, thus keeping them abreast of the West German police’s strategy. By going live, were they endangering lives? Tough calls had to be made, time and again, over those agonizingly tense 22 hours.
As evidenced by the coverage — professional and amateur — of the horrific fires in Los Angeles on mainstream and social media, these days virtually all major events are shared in real time, with analysis and context coming later. But in 1972, covering an act of terrorism as it unfolded was a new challenge, and as “September 5” so brilliantly illustrates, the men and women of ABC Sports proved to be more than up to the task.