September 5, 1972, is etched in the memory of millions of people. As the world looked on, watching the 1972 Munich Olympics – which were meant to be a beacon of hope following the 1936 games in Berlin – 11 Israeli Olympic team members were killed by Palestinian Black September terrorists.
Known as the Munich massacre, eight terrorists infiltrated the Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli Olympic team and took nine hostages. All hostages, the terrorists and one German police officer were killed during a fumbled and failed rescue attempt.
Things during the Olympics were fine. The Olympic spirit was strong, the athletes were soaring, and the village was buzzing.
Until the morning on September 5, when gunshots rang out through the village.
Many movies have been made about the massacre, most notably One Day in September in 1999 and Munich in 2005.
But the latest film – September 5 – which just recently missed out on a Golden Globe, focuses on those who broke the news story, taking viewers inside the control room where sports journalists suddenly pivoted from athletics to terrorism.
The team found themselves solely in charge of broadcasting the events to the world.
When ABC sportscaster Jim McKay was summoned back to the newsroom in the early hours of the morning, he didn’t know what the next few hours would bring.
Yet there he sat, for 15 hours, covering the first live terrorism attack on television.
His words, “they’re all gone”, have become synonymous with the Munich Olympics.
For many Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora, it’s easy to draw comparisons to October 7, 2023. From the first live coverage of a terrorist attack to the latest. But September 5 had already been filmed and was in post-production at the time of the 2023 Hamas-led attack. Still, the film’s director Tim Fehlbaum believes October 7 will impact how some viewers see the film.
“I think it will certainly have an effect on how audiences will see the film, but I also think that our film is clearly about a specific moment in history, and or let’s say, even more specifically, a moment in media history, and about that turning point,” Fehlbaum said in an interview. “What I would hope is that the audience reflects on how today we consume news and about our complex media environment, through that historical lens.”
Nowadays, news teams would be accustomed to adapting to 24/7 coverage. But back in 1972, it was unheard of. And September 5 reminds viewers of this, portraying the chaos in the calm and contrasting the madness against the composed.
Indeed, September 5 dwells on another way in which the Munich attack paralleled October 7: it represented a watershed moment in the livestreaming of terrorism.
The entire tragic saga played out on live television, with ABC Sports, which was covering the games, staying on air for most of the day. The film focuses not on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict nor on the experiences of the athletes and those seeking to save them, but on the ABC reporting team that went to West Germany to cover the games and ended up in the middle of a deadly crisis.
The film depicts the split-second decisions that the reporters and producers – including Peter Jennings, who appears in the film and is also portrayed in some scenes by actor Benjamin Walker – must make while covering a hostage crisis as it plays out.
At one point, there is a debate over whether the journalists should call the Black September attackers “terrorists”. At another, a young producer asks aloud, “Can we show someone being shot on live television?” And in another scene, German police seek to crack down on coverage that shows the positions of their sharpshooters.

The story is told with uncommon tension, including the use of vintage television equipment, which the filmmakers wanted to make sure was accurate for the period, even though tracking down the right supplies was at times challenging.
“When we were making our research, we learned, more and more, the role the media played in that day,” Fehlbaum said. “Then, we were lucky enough to get in conversation with one of the eyewitnesses, who was in the control room that day, Geoffrey Mason. During this conversation, that was the moment when we finally decided that we wanted to tell the story entirely from that angle.”
The Jewish actor John Magaro plays Mason, a young ABC producer at the time who is not himself Jewish, and who is the only one of the principal figures in the film who is still alive. (He is the one who asks about showing a shooting on live TV.) Another key character is Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), a veteran ABC Sports producer who was Jewish and whose pain at covering the crisis is clear throughout.
“We learned that from Geoffrey Mason, from private conversations that he had with him, with Marvin’s background, how it still – you could tell that this was not so long after World War II that they were in Munich for the broadcast of these Olympics,” Fehlbaum said.
Despite his Ashkenazi-sounding surname, Fehlbaum, who is a native of Switzerland, does not have any Jewish ancestry. But the director went to film school in Munich, and in that city, he said, “this tragedy is still very present.”
Throughout the 1972 Olympics, to help erase the memory of the 1936 Olympics, none of the security guards carried guns and all were in suits rather than uniforms.
One through-line in the film is that the Olympics, the first to take place in Germany since the those that Hitler hosted in 1936, were meant to “welcome to the world to a new Germany”, in the words of a German official, at a time when World War II and the Holocaust were still in living memory for most people.
Mark Spitz, a Jewish American swimmer, won seven gold medals, and the producers are depicted discussing whether to ask Spitz about “winning gold in Hitler’s backyard”. Among the massive amount of archival footage in the film is one of Spitz’s wins, as well as a feature about the Israeli Olympians, including American-Israeli weightlifter David Berger, visiting Dachau days before they met their deaths.
Peter Sarsgaard plays famed ABC Sports executive Roone Arledge, while ABC anchor Jim McKay, who led the coverage that day, appears only in archival footage.
While for a younger audience this type of around-the-clock coverage is the norm, we must remember that the Munich massacre was the first time viewers had seen events unfold in real time.
Nowadays, news teams would be accustomed to adapting to 24/7 coverage. But back in 1972, it was unheard of. And September 5 reminds viewers of this, portraying the chaos in the calm and contrasting the madness against the composed. Back then, it took them time to realise that if the world could see what was going on, so too could the gunmen. This is reflected in the film perfectly in a scene where the broadcast team suddenly finds themselves face to face with German police machine guns.
The Germans were upset that a camera had been placed facing the scene, and while broadcasting what the terrorists were doing, was also broadcasting – for the world and for the terrorists to see – the positions of the sharpshooters. It’s a memory Mason still holds to this day.
September 5 steers clear of politics and history. But it excels in its portrayal of live TV journalism and the birth of live news as entertainment.
With JTA
September 5 is in cinemas from February 6.
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