The sights and sounds of ‘September 5’: How the newsroom thriller painstakingly recreated a game-changing broadcast
Like many first ideas, Tim Fehlbaum’s initial vision for “September 5” was wider in scope. Broadly speaking, the film is about the hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The Swiss director’s original script, which he co-wrote with Moritz Binder, told the story from the perspectives of reporters, politicians, and police.
But then he talked to Geoffrey Mason, one of the producers behind ABC Sports’ live 22-hour coverage of the ordeal.
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“We started to learn more and more what an important role the media played on that day,” Fehlbaum tells Gold Derby. “And then listening to Geoffrey Mason and his stories of what they experienced as a crew, what challenges they faced … we said, ‘Maybe you can entirely tell it from that perspective.'”
Fehlbaum and Binder streamlined the script to focus solely on the ABC Sports team making on-the-fly decisions after Palestinian militant organization Black September killed two members of the Israel Olympic team in the Olympic Village. The group held nine more hostage and killed them as well later at an airport.
John Magaro plays Mason, a young producer filling in for the A-team of Don Ohlmeyer & Co., expecting a low-key day of boxing and soccer before gunshots go off in the distance. He quickly must switch gears to oversee ABC Sports’ coverage of the unfolding saga when TV executive Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) refuses to hand off the story to ABC News. The team, which includes VP of Olympic Operations Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) and German interpreter Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), a composite character, finds itself in the middle of an unprecedented broadcast, weighing the journalistic responsibility of reporting the story against the moral responsibility of possibly airing graphic violence live. The Munich Olympics was the first games to air live globally via satellite, creating a perfect storm for ABC’s broadcast.
“Can we show someone being shot on live television?” Mason asks Arledge.
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In terms of the film, the question might be “Will it show someone being shot?” For Fehlbaum, the answer was a resounding no. Once he landed on the exclusive POV of the ABC Sports team, “September 5” never leaves the ABC studio, with most of the action, so to speak, taking place in the control room as the team awaits on-the-ground reporting from Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) and later Gebhardt.
“That was something that I found an interesting challenge or one of the reasons why I wanted to tell it from that perspective,” Fehlbaum says. “How do I tell a story that is taking place entirely in one location? I’m personally fascinated also with movies that achieve that.” In “September 5’s” case, it achieves that with such dynamism and suspense that it’s easy to forget it is set in one location.
“We were telling basically a story of people sitting in front of a monitor wall that could have been also very static story,” editor Hansj?rg Wei?brich says. “But I think we made it a lively experience. We tried to put the audience in the live situation. What’s the adrenaline reporting in that situation on a story like that?”
To attain that verisimilitude, everything had to be recreated in painstaking detail. With help from Mason and Sean McManus — then-chairman of CBS Sports and the son of Jim McKay, who announced the deaths of the 11 Israeli hostages that fateful day — Fehlbaum and his team got their hands on archival footage and blueprints of the ABC studio. “We decided to be very, very accurate and 100 percent precise about all the props and the technical aspects and to take a bit more creative freedom when it comes to architecture and the studio build,” production designer Julian R. Wagner says.
He designed the “natural maze” of a set with two goals in mind. The first was to give Fehlbaum and cinematographer Markus F?rderer the space to maneuver around the studio like a documentary team. The second was for the actors to feel like they were inside a real studio.
“The set became like a time machine,” Wagner says. “We made the exterior studio work from the real studio with some set decoration and set extension. And once you open the door and you get inside, you would be — I wouldn’t say lost — but you would be trapped. They could go inside and they never looked behind the curtain. If you would open a door, there was another set, another set, and even the emergency exits were integrated in the set.”
The 360-degree experience was key, he adds, because “there’s so many people running in and out of rooms with new information.”
For F?rderer, that flexibility was a godsend. “You don’t have a lot of shooting days. We knew had to be fast and efficient, and we want to give our characters that freedom to move between rooms so we can keep it visually fresh for the audience,” he says. “If you have a film that takes place in a confined space — that was my, I think, biggest challenge: How can we visually keep it fresh?”
The set was furnished with period accurate and refurbished equipment, procured from museums and collectors, that was functional, so the actors could interact with the analog tech and react to footage playing on monitors. “It was important to give today’s audience an authentic feeling of the technology back then,” Fehlbaum says. “They should very much feel that analog world, how long it still took that some of the footage still had to be developed before it could be aired.”
And the equipment was accurate down to the smallest detail. Sound designer Frank Kruse — who, like Wagner and F?rderer, worked on Fehlbaum’s 2021 sci-fi film “The Colony” — sidestepped anachronism when he asked an advisor about walkie talkies of that era.
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“There was one crucial thing I wanted to find out: Do these walkie-talkies give these somewhat cliched confirmation sounds like nowadays when you hear the beep when you know, OK, there’s a connection going on, or you let go of the press-to-talk button?” Kruse says. “But he said, at that time, there was no such thing. It was just you press the button, you speak, and then at some point, someone talks back to you. So that was a good thing to learn to avoid — these, let’s say, modern kind of film cliches that people have learned from decades of having walkie talkies in film and stuff like that.”
Sound — and the lack thereof — is vital to “September 5.” It’s a thriller in which the crisis in question is never seen onscreen. Viewers learn information along with the characters, which is mostly audibly through noise in the distance, phone calls, walkie-talkies, and the radio. Calls from Jennings reporting on the ground are patched through to broadcast on air. Kruse recorded a lot of the sounds on an FM radio transmitter.
“I wanted to keep those sounds kind of sounding rough and coming through the actual sound line,” he says, pointing to an example of Gebhardt communicating via walkie-talkie as she walks to the Olympic Village. “You hear her footsteps, walking, and her breath. That’s actually an actual recording of someone walking on the street breathing into an actual walkie-talkie that being transmitted back to my studio and me recording it over the speaker and put into the film on top of the layer of the dialogue that you hear.”
Hearing but not seeing what Jennings and Gebhardt are describing cranks up the tension tenfold. The imagination — the characters’, the audience’s — might be scarier than reality. “This movie is also a lot more about what you don’t see than about what you see,” Fehlbaum says. When the team finally develops its smuggled 16mm footage from the Village and sees the image of the masked man on the balcony that Jennings had described, the impact is even greater.
“We were always building up to the moment we were able to show the picture,” Wei?brich says. “We did work hard on getting the emotion and the atmosphere in the studio, the stress level, and the reactions of the whole team on what they are actually being told [through] a phone. And given the fact that the events were so, so tragic and shocking, I think we were able to showcase that only with the reactions of the people in the studio.”
F?rderer adjusted the flicker intensity of LED lights, which hung above the wall of vintage monitors, that mimicked the color and the feed of the images. “For low-tension scenes, it’s more quiet, but it’s always established,” he says. “When we see the masked man stepping on the balcony for the first time and everybody’s shocked by this, we go to a higher flicker of frequency. We could dynamically ramp this throughout the scene.”
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Fehlbaum recreated footage that involved the victims out of respect for their families, but one piece of archival footage unfurls on the monitors as is: McKay’s broadcast. The film features the anchor’s full statement announcing the deaths, which concluded with his solemn declaration that “they’re all gone.”
“What we could never recreate is the human element is that performance of Jim McKay on that day,” Fehlbaum says. “It was essential that this is the real Jim McKay speaking to the audience that our cast could interact in a way with a real-life person on this via these monitors on the audio level.”
At a brisk 94 minutes, “September 5” is a high-paced, taut ride. Wei?brich estimates there are 1,500-plus cuts in the film. “I love cutting those dynamic, short cuts,” he says. “But there was a thin line to find the balance to give impact to the emotional themes, like their discussions of what can they actually show on live TV [or] the moment when they actually get the news that all the hostages are gone and leading to the final historic announcement by Jim McKay that were very, very crucial moments of the story as well. So, we had to balance that out.”
“September 5” was fully edited before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 last year. “What’s happening in the world right now will have an influence on how people see this film,” Fehlbaum acknowledges, calling the ongoing war tragic. He hopes audiences can appreciate “September 5’s” laser focus on the media POV and “this turning point in media history.” About 900 million people around the world watched ABC’s game-changing broadcast of the live crisis. In the digital age, sensationalism has become ordinary.
“It is actually a film about technology and about how technology has an influence on the media, and in that sense, also has an influence on how we perceive world events,” Fehlbaum says. “Hopefully, the audience will engage with questions about our complex media environment, how we consume media, how we consume the news. And engage with questions about the importance but also the complexity of crisis reporting.”
“September 5” is now in limited release. It opens nationwide on Jan. 17.
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