‘September 5:’ Chilling Recreation of the First Live TV Broadcast of Terrorism

The classic 1970s-era ABC TV brand is followed by an introductory clip with a hippie 1970s-style storyteller telling the house viewers that the 1972 Munich summertime Olympics were” the start of a peaceful postwar Germany to reveal itself with the world,” according to” September 5″, which is currently available on Blu-ray and streaming on Paramount+. The speaker beams with business confidence, explaining the basics of how satellite TV works, and that ABC cameras are everywhere during the games, “including on the Olympic building, which gives us a great overview of the Olympic community”. Unrelated to this, there is a simple picture of the World Trade Center in New York, which illustrates how the pictures are being broadcast throughout the world. ( It’s a bit of an anachronism since construction of the two towers was not yet complete in 1972, but it works as a subliminal hint of the menace to come and as a callback to the ending of Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film,” Munich”. ) &nbsp,

Also not coincidentally, the clip ends with the fire of a basic handgun, the most harmless use of a weapon that will be seen in the movie. The medley appears to be something the ABC Sports moguls may have produced in 1972, but according to Hansjörg Weissbrich, the film’s editor, “actually, it’s not a network promo.” It’s pieced along by us. We had a few different options for the film’s opening, but ultimately we decided that starting with that promo would set all the necessary information up, such as where we are, what it’s about, and whether or not it’s going to be broadcast live; we even wanted to set the tone light at the beginning to set the scene for what would come after. The clip explains the mechanics of how the men who were covering a sports event—a bit of sunshine entertainment for the viewers back in the U. S. —would had to switch on the fly to covering the first criminal attack always broadcast live on television.

Once the montage is over, the focus shifts to the men in ABC’s control booth in Munich, where they show the fundamentals of a live multi-camera shoot ( in this case, U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz versus his German counterpart ) and how the director abruptly decides which shot to take the lead.

After the night crew winds down and begins to prep the control room for another day’s broadcasting, gunshots are heard outside the studio. The Israeli suburbs of the Olympic Village are now under the control of the Palestinian terrorists. &nbsp,

Budget restrictions made a more focused, tight story.

” September 5″ exists because Tim Fehlbaum, its 42-year old Swiss director, wanted to make a film about the terrorist attack, but found that actually filming it would be far too expensive for the budget he could hope to raise:

The Swiss writer-director — he previously directed two independent sci-fi movies— had a really big beginning. He was going to capture from every angle that fateful day of Sept. 5, 1972, when eight terrorists from the Palestinian militant group Black September infiltrated Munich’s Olympic Village and attacked Israeli athletes, killing two and taking nine hostage. ( All would ultimately perish. )

Police officers, Olympians, journalists, civilians, government diplomats — Fehlbaum and his co-writers Moritz Binder and Alex David would cut between them all, creating a Rashomon for the Olympic era. A significant cinematic treatment was required by the seismic event, which was a brutal act of evil on the biggest stage in history. Fehlbaum would give it nothing less.

However, a phony voice called financial reality appeared. ” We had a script and I think it was quite good”, Fehlbaum says. However, I looked at Philipp Trauer, his producer, and said,” How are we going to do this?” There was simply no one who was going to trust me with the kind of budget we needed to make a movie like this”.

When ambition meets disappointment, movies depict this. And Fehlbaum had just suffered a head-on collision.

A 91-minute bullet train about media ethics, entitled September 5, the film’s inspiration, which was released in Telluride, sparked an acquisition boom, and rose to the top of THR’s Feinberg Forecast best picture list, where it is still sitting in advance of its limited release by Paramount on December 13. But the road from there was filled with more speeding obstacles than the Autobahn.

The budget Fehlbaum could have forced him to choose a smaller, more intimate setting instead of” a big cinematic treatment.” He eventually found Geoff Mason, now 83, but in 1972, a young producer for ABC Sports who was manning the control room in Munich when he heard the first gunshots. In 1972, Fehlbaum and his production team would record numerous Zoom calls with Mason, who explained the operation of live television.

Depicting a sharp contrast to today’s ubiquitous social media

And those logistics seem utterly primitive in today’s world of ubiquitous smartphones and social media. Almost everyone now carries around in their pocket a camera capable of near-cinematic levels of detail. However, color TV cameras were widespread in 1972 and viewed as comparatively crude. To supplant the basic images of talking heads and athletes in the stadiums those studio cameras were recording, ABC Sports also employed portable 16mm film cameras – film that needed to be developed in a lab. The brief ad that the crew cut to a commercial is for a Kodak Super 8 movie camera, another once-requested device that is now included in the iPhone and doesn’t require the user to drop off film at Fotomat for development. &nbsp,

The production design and prop department of the movie do a fantastic job of replicating 1972’s state-of-the-art, no-cost-spared network broadcasting technology, tacitly highlighting how crude and out-of-date it is today. A supporting actress in” September 5″ has the full-time job of moving around white letters on a black background to create the names that would superimpose on top of each on-air reporter, a technique that would soon be replaced by increasingly sophisticated computer systems.

Surprisingly well done, the actors ‘ interactions with vintage videotape of Jim McKay reporting from Munich in 1972 are captured on film. Regarding the cast, the Hollywood Reporter notes:

Casting presented its own challenge. Filmmakers needed actors who resonated with modern audiences but also brought an air of ‘ 70s grit. In Shattered Glass, Peter Sarsgaard, a quiet journalistic authority, would play Arledge. ” Actors like to act and show off, but the piece did not call for that”, Sarsgaard says. There is a more powerful type of authority where you can be confident that you have the authority without having to demonstrate it.

British actor Ben Chaplin fit the bill as Marvin Bader, a real-life Olympics operations maven who as the son of Holocaust survivors carried some baggage into the control room, he says he identified with the tension of shouldering another’s pain as you also try to shed it. Bader proved to be a fitting film because it maneuvers thrillingly through every moral and character flaw and hurdle.

German actress Leonie Benesch would be cast as Marianne — a young, dedicated production assistant who would not just serve as the linguistic link between the U. S. team and German locals but as a thematic fulcrum as well, representing a new fresh-faced Germany that in its futility to stop the attack is suddenly showing its wrinkles. Although she is a composite character, Benesch notes that “marianne had a very real feeling that not being able to show that Germany was in a new place.”

And then there was Mason. John Magaro, a workaday actor renowned for his violent but sensitive role in Orange Is the New Black and his indie roles like Past Lives and First Cow, was not a clear choice. Then again, the real-life Mason was not an obvious choice either — a workaday type himself thrust into the spotlight. The production had its Mason and the match took place.

The real-life Mason was trying to make tough moral choices on the fly while also attempting to seize the moment, and Magaro latched on to the tension. Geoff claims that he was trying to make his way in the business, and one way to do that is to lean into the sensational while the other is to be a journalist in a true form like Marvin Bader. ” This gray area was a rich thing to play”.

Judith Miller wrote in her review of the film in her review at Tablet: Despite its retro art design, the producers couldn’t have known how contemporary a movie they were making.

The film was in post-production when Oct. 7 took place. No one associated with the movie, according to Fehlbaum, has said in interviews that no one has predicted that it will be released as Israel is suffering from this even more harrowing attack. But the Hamas terrorists had clearly absorbed the lessons of Sept. 5. They desired that their slaughter be witnessed, almost live, and honored. In fact, much of what we know about the massacre and abductions that day initially came from what the attackers themselves recorded, broadcast, and boasted about on their own social media. A direct correlation can be drawn between the 1972 Munich Olympics, when ABC covered the terrorists, and October 7, when the terrorists dispensed with their media intermediaries and recorded the massacre themselves. Both generations of terrorists were performing for the camera. And as Fehlbaum is well aware, viewers can’t turn their backs on him.

But leftist critics and awards bookers certainly could. Scott Feinberg of the Hollywood Reporter wrote about the Toronto International Film Festival last year in September.

But for the most part, the humdrumness of this year’s fest feels like the result of self-inflicted injuries— and not just the silly festival-exclusivity policy.

According to what I understand, TIFF completely rejected September 5, the hottest salesman at the Venice and Telluride film festivals, and it has since moved to Paramount, allegedly because it might stir up controversy related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So, fearing a backlash, the fest did not screen a film that is going to get a best picture Oscar nomination and maybe even win — it could have done so on opening night, which was, appropriately enough, Sept. 5— but did screen Russians at War, a documentary that’s sympathetic portrayal of Russians involved in the Ukraine conflict did result in protests of such a scale that the fest ended up pulling the film.

Seth Mandel of Commentary wrote in January that young leftists at the Brooklyn Alamo Drafthouse theater were tasked with presenting” September 5″ to audiences that day.

Many of its own employees, organizing under its union, were outraged. They asked their employers to stop broadcasting the movie. Alamo appears, as of this writing, to have ignored them.

However, the petition itself must be read to be believed, which of course quickly attracted the signatures of a wide range of local organizers. Calling the film” Zionist propaganda”, it reads, in part:

The Western media has made an attempt to push its imperialist and racist agenda, evoking the well-worn pattern seen since September 5 and allowing for the continued genocide and cultural destruction of Palestine and its peoples. It is quintessential Orientalism: Depicting Arabs and brown people as evil, antisemitic terrorists, while lionizing the very newsrooms that provide political cover and, in many cases, cheer for endless wars and genocide. We’re certain that Alamo’s eccentric pre-show won’t provide this context.

The movie “depicts” Arabs as “antisemitic terrorists”? The movie is about a real-life incident where Arab anti-Semitic terrorists carried out heinous terrorist acts. What’s more, the film is about the coverage itself—because a fair amount of what happened was broadcast. People viewed it. This was a historical event that happened, like the moon landing.

More from the petition:” We, NYC Alamo United, utterly reject the Alamo’s desire to profit from the genocide of Palestine.”

So we have two principles undergirding the opposition to the film. The first is that any depiction of Israelis or Palestinians “profits ] off the genocide of Palestine,” and the second is that the literal history as it happened is” Zionist propaganda.”

Speaking of the moon landing, near the end of” September 5″, when it looks like a happy ending is imminent, Peter Sarsgaard’s Roone Arledge says to Ben Chaplin’s Marvin Bader, that the president of ABC told him that more people watched their coverage of the Munich terrorists” than Armstrong stepping on the moon”. ” September 5″ resembles Ron Howard’s classic” Apollo 13″ movie from the mirror universe in a lot. The mostly male characters in garish early 1970s togs and fat sideburns grimace around a minefield of television monitors in the hopes that the men they’re watching on their TV screens will survive their missions. It’s a testament to both films ‘ writing, acting, directing, and editing that both are thrilling and incredibly watchable movies. If you’ve made it this far, you’ll know that” September 5 won’t end on a happy note. And from that perspective, and its sad and agonizingly contemporary theme,” September 5″ is highly recommended.

Source credit