The gripping movie, September 5, which opened around Israel on January 30, depicts how a group of journalists from ABC Sports covered the terror attack against the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics. No one could have predicted when they were making the film that it would be released when Israel was reeling from another terror attack.
The Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches carried out by the Palestinian Black September terrorist group was the first terror attack broadcast live on television around the world. It’s fitting that the movie is hitting screens now, in the wake of the October 7 terror attack, which was the most comprehensively recorded act of terrorism in history.
The Hamas members who perpetrated it recorded and broadcast footage on their own social media channels and their victims’ social media so that people around the world could view the horrific violence live or almost live. We only know the details of many of the killings and abductions because the terrorists chose to record and share them.
It seems that a pretty direct line can be drawn from the 1972 massacre to the 2023 one, and September 5 marks one of the first moments that terrorists were playing for the camera. That fact gives the movie special relevance.
The film’s director, Tim Fehlbaum, said in an interview with the website, The Reel Roundup, “[Today] everybody has a TV and a camera in their pocket, but what struck me was that even though the technology has changed, I think some of the bigger moral questions that you face if reporting on a crisis are probably still the same.”
Audiences today know what the outcome of the Olympic terror attack was, but the film manages to keep the tension high by telling the story from the point of view of the journalists. Those producers and crew from ABC Sports suddenly find themselves a few hundred feet away from the most brazen terror attack ever – up to that point. Remember, this was four years before the Entebbe hijacking and almost 30 years before 9/11.
For anyone who enjoys behind-the-scenes journalism movies, September 5 is a must-see, because it paints an engaging picture of how this team, who expected to be broadcasting a volleyball game and a boxing match that day, scrambled to cover the attack, with no news experience and no blueprint for what to do.
Part of September 5 plays like a dramatic version of the great TV news comedy, Broadcast News, as they are forced to wrestle with the logistical and moral dilemmas of televising this attack. It also takes inspiration from the superb docu-drama United 93 by Paul Greengrass, a movie compiled from the air traffic controllers’ logs from 9/11.
Even for this sports television team, televising the Olympics, which were being broadcast live via not especially user-friendly satellite technology in a European country where the local crews didn’t speak English or share the Americans’ work ethic, presented challenges. They could handle all that, but nothing prepared them for the moment when they heard gunshots from inside the Olympic Village.
The main characters in the story are Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the head of ABC Sports at the time and later the head of ABC News, who was in Munich to supervise the coverage; Marv Bader (Ben Chaplin), a tightly wound Jewish producer; Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), the least experienced member of the team, who rose to the occasion and then some; and Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), a young German translator – the team’s only German speaker – who was determined to prove to these Americans that she and other young Germans had nothing in common with previous antisemitic generations.
Covering the event presented them with countless moral dilemmas, such as whether it would be appropriate to keep filming if a terrorist killed a hostage live on television as it seemed at one point that they would do.
The team also had to decide how to handle unprecedented situations, such as the fact that their cameras broadcast images of German police trying to sneak into the apartments where the hostages were being held. The German police force, which Marianne suggests was simply in way over its head, did not warn them or limit their coverage and they understood that the terrorists could see the rescue attempt only after it was underway.
While the journalists make mistakes and, at times, exult in knowing how many millions around the world are watching their broadcast, they are steadfast in their understanding of what the story is: terrorists threatening the lives of civilians.
“Our job is to tell the stories of these individuals whose lives are at stake,” says Arledge. The team manages to find an interview that one of the Israeli wrestlers, American-born David Berger (Rony Herman), did shortly before the attack, and they broadcast it.
This movie is like a snapshot of the moment before the media lost its moral compass. This is made especially clear in an exchange between the producers and ABC news correspondent Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker), who cautions them that they may be seen as taking sides if they call the hostage-takers “terrorists.” When the ABC team learns that the German media are using the word, “terrorist,” they go with it. It’s an argument that presages the current use of the word “militants” to describe those who kill civilians to promote political and religious ideologies.
The new film
The film, which is mainly set in a cramped studio, portrays the surreal atmosphere during those 22 hours at the Olympics, where for most of the day, the games continued as scheduled. It also details the bungled attempt by the German police to rescue the hostages before they boarded a plane with the terrorists bound for Egypt, where the negotiations were to have continued, which was initially reported as a success.
All over the world, including in Israel, people heard that the hostages had been saved, and the film shows that this was due to a German official telling them this without knowing the real outcome. The ABC team decides to hedge their bets with some ambiguous wording, and the awful truth soon becomes known.
Actual footage of ABC sports correspondent Jim McKay is shown, as he delivers the tragic news: “When I was a kid, my father used to say, ‘Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized.’ Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They’ve now said that there were 11 hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning, nine were killed at the airport tonight. They’re all gone.”
By telling this story through the eyes of the sports journalists and the translator who are stunned and appalled by the violence and who instinctively and unambiguously identify with the hostages, Fehlbaum finds a crucial way to frame the narrative for international viewers.
In Israel, we still remember the Olympic massacre and know that it was a tragic story of terrorists and their victims, but now that October 7 has been repackaged by certain elements of the media as “resistance,” it’s especially important that September 5 be seen around the world.