September 5 Review

In Tim Fehlbaum’s taut journalistic thriller September 5, we’re whisked back to the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany – a location that is familiar to those who have seen Steven Spielberg’s Munich or the Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September, although I somehow missed both films and also didn’t actually know how the events of this particular situation would end – to explore how the ABC Wide World of Sports team handled a first for television: broadcasting an apparent terrorist attack live on television around the world. While the facts of that day (while it began on the 5^th, it ended on the 6^th, so perhaps a bit longer than a day) have long been etched in history – members of the Palestinian militant organization Black September entered the Olympic Village (which, the film points out, lacked armed security guards), killing two members of the Israeli Olympic team immediately and taking the remaining nine members hostage – the film is less concerned with exploring why Black September did what it did or the fallout from the ultimate result of the hostage crisis and is more focused on how the broadcast was made and how certain journalistic choices impacted the events that were being reported on, for good and for ill.

The players in the film comprise the team both in studio and in the control room. On a seemingly ordinary day of Olympics coverage – the A team, headed by chief Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard, the film’s biggest named actor, but who is more supporting than the leading man here), has just handed things off to the B team, with newbie Geoff (a great John Magaro, who is the beating heart of the newsroom throughout the story) starting the day off with a rundown of the events to cover via Marvin (Ben Chaplin, stellar as the moral barometer of the piece whose own feelings occasionally overshadow the proceedings in a very true to life way) – things suddenly take a turn as gunshots are heard coming from the nearby Olympic Village. We see Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) rush to the Village with a cameraman in tow to get an up close look at the hostage crisis unfolding, but then watch as the control room has to improvise a way to get those reels of film back to the studio through the police blockade (in 1972, there wasn’t such a thing as a digital feed or cell phones, after all). We see the team debate the merits of showing a live feed of the balcony wherein the hostage situation is taking place (via a bird’s eye view camera installed prior to the Games commencement), considering that it was possible that hostages could be murdered on live television. And, in a particularly chilling moment, the team realizes that theirs is the only live feed of the situation – and there’s a television visible in the room where the hostages are being held. Is their coverage tipping off the terrorists*? Is reporting this news more important than the lives of the people they are reporting on?

*One interesting conversation within the film is over what to call the Black September members. Considering this is a team of sports journalists, save for Peter Jennings, they aren’t particularly focused on the nuances of a term like terrorist. Jennings, in a voice over that also serves to school the audience, advises against using the term (although it is used liberally on the air) and personally uses guerillas to refer to the Black September members. It’s an interesting addition to the story, one that helps put things into both a historical perspective (terrorist attacks weren’t something people saw in real time, they don’t know how to react to them) and a journalistic one (you don’t want to label something without taking the time to understand what is happening – especially when your broadcast is going to end up being the one everyone sees).

Keeping the focus on the reporting serves to present a well-known tragedy from a different vantage point – and Fehlbaum’s direction keeps things moving at a fast clip (the film clocks in at 94 minutes, which is the perfect length). The sequences in the control room are interspersed with actual archival footage of the apartment where the Black September militants were holed up and of the actual in-studio broadcast, headed up by anchor Jim McKay. The blending of the footage is seamless and for a good chunk of the film I wasn’t sure if it was archival or new footage. Walker’s Jennings is also interspersed with audio of the real Jennings at times, also seamlessly inter-cut (and Walker, while not passing visually for Jennings, definitely has the voice down). It lends a sense of honest realism to the goings on behind the scenes – if we’re seeing Geoff tell McKay something to report and then we hear him report it, it makes the fictional section of the story tie directly to the historical side of things.

The technical achievement of the film isn’t relegated to the seamless editing of archival footage to new. We also get to watch the ingenuity of the control room team in devising ways to get the necessary information on the air. From getting the film reels in and out of the Village past the police to seeing them developed in real time in the on-site film lab, you get the sense of how essential each technician is to making sure the broadcast could get on the air. When ABC is about to lose control of a satellite that beams their feed out to rival CBS (the idea that there’s one satellite and networks fought over access is something crazy to think of today), the news team devises a way to share their broadcast while continuing to let viewers know it’s ABC’s content, not CBS’. As the sole German on the team (and one of the few women), the character of Marianne (a great Leonie Benesch) proves to be indispensable even as some of her American colleagues treat her with casual sexism – although they do later work alongside her for the key reporting at the close of the film. These seemingly minor bits of storytelling enhance the feeling of how each team member is necessary to drive a story across the finish line – another allusion to the Olympic games the team initially was reporting on.

Of course, most people will head into the film knowing the tragic outcome. So, the key moment in the story – when Geoff is asked to make a decision between putting a rumor on air despite it not being verified by the requisite two independent sources – won’t necessarily hit as hard as it could. But seeing how the live coverage unfolds, how the journalists weigh the choices they have to make in how far they can go to chase this crucial story, and what to do when a story becomes less about finding the answers and more about reporting on a terrible tragedy makes September 5 something worth watching. And yes, in the current Israel-Palestine conflict, this particular story hits a bit differently than it would in the past, but the film isn’t outwardly concerned with commenting on the political environment of the film (and today). The way the storytelling unfolds allows the audience to draw their own conclusions about the actions of the journalists in how they presented the story as well as on the conflict as a whole.

September 5 was screened at the Chicago Film Festival. The film will receive a limited release on November 29, with a wide release set for December 13.