Behind the Scenes of September 5: How the Acclaimed Film Re-Creates ABC Sports' Historic Live Coverage of the Munich Massacre Original footage, vintage gear help tell the story from control-room and studio perspective By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S. Friday, December 13, 2024 - 3:05 pm
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September 5, the new historical drama from Paramount Pictures, chronicles the decisive moment that forever changed media coverage and continues to impact live news coverage today. Set during the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, the Golden Globe-nominated film - which arrives in limited theaters today and expands nationwide on Jan. 17 - follows the ABC Sports production team, who quickly shifted from sports reporting to live coverage of the Israeli athletes taken hostage.
In addition to offering an important perspective on the live broadcast seen globally by millions of people, September 5 provides one of the most realistic behind-the-scenes depictions of a live-TV control room ever put on film. SVG had the opportunity to chat with director Tim Fehlbaum, the cast, and co-producer Geoffrey Mason to delve into the film's development and production.
The film presents the events of Sept. 5, 1972, purely from the perspective of the ABC Sports production team, shining a light on what Fehlbaum calls a watershed moment in journalism and its influential legacy.
At the heart of the story are three Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famers - Geoff Mason (played by John Magaro), then a young and ambitious producer; his boss, legendary TV executive Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard); and his mentor, Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) - along with their German interpreter Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch). The film juxtaposes the high-tech broadcast capabilities of the time against the many lives at stake and explores the moral decisions that needed to be made in real time.
The live broadcasts marked a turning point in media reporting, bringing a new dimension to how such incidents are seen and understood by the public, says Fehlbaum. When the attack begins, a team of American sports reporters are suddenly responsible for the subsequent 22 hours of live coverage, switching their responsibilities from sporting events to geopolitics. I was interested in the unprecedented situation that the media faced: this was the first time an event of this nature was covered by a live broadcast.
Watch SVG's extended interview with Geoffrey Mason recounting his experience in 1972 and his work on the film:
On Tuesday, Dec. 17, The SVG Summit will feature a session titled The Munich Massacre: When Sports Became News, featuring Magaro, Mason, and Sean McManus and moderated by Lesley Visser. CLICK HERE for more information.
The Mission: Re-Create a Turning Point in Media Reporting' Fehlbaum and his team spoke extensively with ABC Sports crew members who were on the ground in Munich, extracting details about their experience in that control room. As a result of the research, the director decided early on to narrate the film purely from the viewpoint of the control room.
We are constantly in the TV studio, almost like in a chamber play, the cameras the only eyes cast on the tragic events unfolding before us, he says. The spatial limitation of the narrative world to the ABC Sports TV studio means that we are confronted with the moral, ethical, professional, and, ultimately, psychological dilemmas of journalists who become aware of their responsibility only when switching from sports to crisis news.
When Israeli athletes were suddenly taken hostage, the ABC Sports broadcast team had to shift from sports reporting to live news coverage. Besides the horrors of witnessing and airing a terrorist attack live to millions of people, they also faced the possibility of inadvertently sharing law enforcement's plans and movements with the terrorists themselves - who were thought to be able to watch the coverage within the Olympic Village - and potentially derailing the rescue mission.
As a filmmaker, says Fehlbaum, I felt an affinity with the complexity of the situation. On the one hand, I was critical of tragic events being processed as sensations. But, on the other, I was fascinated by the ambitions and dilemmas of the journalists to tell the story accurately.
Script Development: A Story for the Big Screen Steven Spielberg's Munich recounts the aftermath of the event, but September 5's Munich-based producers - Thomas Wo bke and Philipp Trauer of film-production company BerghausWo bke - believed that there was more to this story and it was ripe to be told for the big screen. Writer/director Moritz Binder and Fehlbaum were enlisted to write the screenplay, along with co-writer Alex David.
The producers soon discovered an article written by Jimmy Schaeffler, a production runner on that day, who spoke highly of Mason. They met with Mason, a Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer, who described in vivid detail the experience of producing that 22 hours of live coverage.
Mason, who came on board as a co-producer of the film, was impressed by the depth of the research and the power of the script. After I read early versions, I was impressed by how deeply personal the experience was, not only to those of us involved in that production but in telling the story of what transpired. This is a story about the people in that control room and how we all reacted to what was happening in front of us. I am blessed to be one of the very few people still around to help tell that story.
The filmmakers also drew on biographies of Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famers Roone Arledge and Jim McKay and other ABC executives and crew. In addition, Schaeffler - the runner, who, disguised as an athlete, had smuggled film footage past the police cordons - offered first-hand insights, along
