“The games must go on” – Avery Brundage, Chairman of the International Olympic Committee
September 5 is a film telling the story of what the sports journalists of ABC went through to tell the story of what happened after Palestinian terrorists took Israelis hostage in the Olympic village at the 1972 Summer Games being held in Munich.
The film opens in the ABC control room with Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) heading off to sleep and leaving instructions not to call them before 10 AM. Then gunshots are heard coming from the Olympic village and the man now in charge of the control room, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) soon learns that Israeli athletes had been taken hostage.
The “head honchos” at ABC want their news operation to take over coverage of this crisis, but Arledge refuses. He has the personnel and resources to cover the situation live and he refuses to give the story to the news people.
There are logistical challenges. The athlete’s village had been sealed off by the German police. An ABC employee posed as an athlete to get film into and out of the village. There is a fear that Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) may be removed from the village but that doesn’t happen. His prior experience as a news anchor and foreign correspondent gave the coverage of the crisis more credibility.
The ending of the crisis is well-known to history. The initial reports that the hostages were all safe turned out to be incorrect. There were no highly trained counterterrorism units as there are today, with the exception of Israel’s Sayeret Matkal. In the end, all of the hostages and five of the eight terrorists, along with a West German police office died.
Writer/director Tim Fehlbaum has crafted a docudrama that maintains a very high level of tension while exploring the ethical considerations of covering such events on live television. The acting is excellent with John Magaro’s performance is terrific.
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