No More Games: “September 5’s” Oscar-Nominated Writers on the Day Terror Took Center Stage
The thriller September 5, directed and co-written by Tim Fehlbaum, revisits the day the Palestinian militant group Black September took nine Israeli athletes hostage during the 1972 Munich Olympics. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, the script, which Fehlbaum wrote with Moritz Binder, is a tightly-paced journalism procedural centered on the ABC Sports studio’s broadcast of the attack as it happened.
Peter Sarsgaard stars as Roone Arledge, the television executive overseeing the busy control room headed on the ground by Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), who makes the key decision to have the crew cover the hostage crisis as it unfolds. In Munich to report on events like swimming and track and field, the ABC Sports team winds up becoming the sole broadcaster of the hostage situation, which, in both reality and noted in the film, was watched by approximately 900 million people.
September 5 conveys the events of the day with a pressing immediacy, yet we understand them almost entirely through the lens of the studio, a setting Fehlbaum likened to a submarine. He and Binder had started off broadly researching aspects like police files. It was during that process that they came to understand the importance of the media’s role that day—at one point, the ABC team realizes the terrorists are watching their broadcast, possibly foiling a rescue—and an eyewitness they spoke with suggested contacting ABC’s Geoffrey Mason.
“The way he told his 22 hours was so intriguing, and so thrilling, that after that two hours, Tim and I looked at each other and said, well, maybe it’s not about the media. Maybe it’s about that room,” Binder said. Making a movie almost entirely set in the ABC Sports studio appealed to Fehlbaum. “I admire a movie that draws certain strength from a limitation in perspective and location and time,” he said.
After hearing gunshots and listening to a police broadcast, the ABC team gets a crew member into the restricted Olympic Village where the hostages are being held, negotiates for a better time slot with their network, and even sends German translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) to the nearby military airport where the hostages have been taken by their captors. The mood in the control room is initially intense but exhilarated, as the crew gears up to cover the situation and then comes to believe, incorrectly, that the hostages have been saved.
“There was one moment that was crucial, actually, in that very first conversation that we had with Geoffrey Mason when we asked him how it felt for them, how he experienced those 22 hours. And he said for them, it was a complete rush. They didn’t reflect too much because there was no time for that,” Fehlbaum said. Mason told the writers that they were focused on reacting to events as they unfolded, and it was only afterward that reflection came. “And that made it clear for us that our film should feel the same,” Fehlbaum added.
Early on, the writers also knew they wanted September 5 to focus on the control room’s environment. Visually, the production is a testament to the analog age, a tactile jumble of monitors and dials and phones and paper. “We wanted to portray a whole apparatus, that whole machinery of that studio that was just reporting a few hours before on a serene Olympics and is now reporting on this crisis,” the director said. To further drive home the reality of the studio, he and Binder also wrote an entire background script for the extras and any cast without lines. “They needed names, they needed a profession, and they needed to know what they’re doing so that they’re not just scrambling some paper in the background. They really have purpose in every scene,” Binder said.
Among September 5’s main characters, almost everyone represents a real person who was there that day, with a few small details changed (it wasn’t really Geoffrey Mason’s first day on the job, for example). But Marianne, the studio’s local German translator, is semi-fictional. “We found out that that day, ABC really tried to grab every German they could grab. They even had Roone Arledge’s driver do some translations and get some information,” Binder said. The writers condensed these experiences into the character of Marianne, whom they also imbued with the forward-looking mindset of a younger German generation who had put such high hopes into the Munich Olympics. Binder’s parents are from Munich, and would have been the same age as Marianne at the time of the 1972 Olympics. “They really took me through their experience back then, their hopes and their devastation when this tragedy happened,” he said.
September 5 isn’t the first movie about the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes that day (as well as one West German police officer and five members of Black September). Fehlbaum acknowledges being inspired by Kevin Macdonald’s One Day in September when he saw it in a Basel cinema as a teenager. Of course, he and Binder are familiar with Steven Spielberg’s Munich. What sets this film apart is its tight focus on what was also a turning point in media history. When the ABC crew finally learns their reporting that the hostages have been freed is incorrect, Marianne mourns the loss of life. Mason has the broadcast corrected. But in terms of the events within the studio itself, Arledge essentially commends a job well done.
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Featured image: L-r, Gladys Deist (Georgina Rich), Hank Hanson (Corey Johnson, Geoff Mason (John Magaro), Jacques Lesgardes (Zinedine Soualem) star in Paramount Pictures’ “SEPTEMBER 5,” the film that unveils the decisive moment that forever changed media coverage and continues to impact live news today, set during the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics.
