September 5th, 1972 — looking at it now — was not much different than October 7, 2023.
On the first date, Arab terrorists called Black September kidnapped and killed the 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team at the Munich games. It was a savage act, chronicled in the Steven Spielberg movie, “Munich” and Kevin MacDonald’s documentary, “One Day in September.”
Now we’ve got another point of view of the Munich massacre in Tim Fehlbaum’s “September 5th.” This film, concise and nail biting, is about how ABC Sports, led by Roone Arledge, Peter Jennings, and Jim McKay covered the attack instantly, live, from their Olympic headquarters in Munich — and kept it away from the news department.
“September 5th” is a short, ferocious movie that also brings up a lot of bad memories, not all of them 52 years old. You can’t not think about the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Jews at a music festival on October 7th, 2023. (The horrors are paralleled even though they’re not mentioned, of course, in the Fehlbaum film.)
The new film is a showcase memoir from ABC producer Geoff Mason, who’s still alive and was there when all hell broke loose. He’s played with wit and compassion by John Magaro, the 31 year old actor who recalls Dustin Hoffman or Richard Dreyfus and has already established quite a resume. Mason went on to collect 26 Emmy Awards and is a member of the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame. But he’s our go to guy as we meet Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) who would become a TV network titan, as well as a young Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker), producer Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) and the German interpreter who helped save the day (an astonishing Marianne Gebhardt).
So what happened on international TV when there was only room for one network at a time on a single satellite? When there were no cell phones, and no ProTools? When film had to be developed and then manually edited? When there was no Google for fact checking? Fehlbaum underscores the stark reality of how dogged journalism used to work by seamlessly including archival footage. Former ABC Wide World of Sports star Jim McKay, who’s been dead since 2008, for example, becomes a key supporting player.
Apart from the terrorism being no less psychotic than it is today, these are the questions answered by “September 5,” which feels like a child of “Spotlight” and “Lou Grant.” Fehlbaum conveys the immediacy of the unknown threat, knowing how it will turn out. But the terrorism is never far from our minds, and the connection to October 7th is unavoidable. Nothing has changed in 50 years.
Sarsgaard’s Arledge is solid, and only can indicate how in the future this TV exec would become a legend thanks to abrasive confidence. Magaro’s Mason is written as the central character, and the actor gets high marks for leading us through the emergency. He’s our guide. Benesch is the bright light of the film as interpreter Gebhardt who is pressed into service and becomes they key member of the group without warning.
There is no happy ending. But “September 5” will be revelatory to younger generations to see how the world operated without digital equipment. It’s not just how the news was gathered and sent back to the US on the spot, but also how certain analogue things we take for granted — like AM Radio — shouldn’t be eliminated so quickly. If it weren’t for German AM Radio, the ABC Sports producers would have been in the dark.
