If “September 5” had been released in St. Louis in December, it would have owned the top spot on my Best Movies Of 2024 list. But since it’s not hitting screens here until tomorrow, it will be the leading contender for Best Movie Of 2025.
It follows the ABC Sports crew who were covering the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich when a horrific incident suddenly occurred. Armed members of a Palestinian group called Black September got into the athletes’ village and were holding members of the Israeli team hostage.
ABC personnel, led by Roone Arledge (Peter Saarsgard), had to slowly figure out what was going on, then tell and show as much of the story on the air as possible. Tim Fehlbaum, who directed “September 5,” does a brilliant job capturing the crew as it tries to cover the crisis, despite being inside the control room with limited technology of the time. They only knew something had happened because they had a door propped open and heard the gunshots from 100 yards away.
There were no handheld cameras, no drones, nothing that allowed them to go live from a camera in the field. Instead, 16mm film had to be run back from athlete’s village and developed before being edited for air. Names superimposed on the screen had to be assembled by hand with those tiny letters that used to be on diner menus above the counter. Same with inserting the ABC bug in the corner of the picture.
Arledge oversaw everything, arranging for satellite time, and telling ABC News in New York he would not cede the airwaves and let them take the story away — particularly since they knew nothing more than his colleagues in Munich and would only fill time with talking heads discussing the situation with no new information.
While he handled that, Arledge put Goeff Mason (John Magaro) in charge of the control room, deciding how to use their limited resources to report the story. He brought in Jim McKay (seen in archival footage) to anchor — and stay on the air for fourteen hours straight. He also had Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) — at the time a foreign correspondent and later anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight” — reporting by phone from another building in the Olympic village where he could see the Black September leader emerge to negotiate with Munich authorities.
Meanwhile, in the ABC facility, there were discussions of what they should and shouldn’t show, including if their cameras caught someone being shot and killed. At one point, an ABC live shot showed images of police creeping up on the Black September terrorists (a word that had never been used on American TV before), not knowing they could see the coverage in the Israeli athletes’ rooms because local police hadn’t turned off power to the dorms.
In an era long before the internet, when there were only three national news networks, it’s estimated 900 million people — including the hostages’ families — watched ABC’s coverage, as it was the only network with access. ABC won 29 Emmys for its coverage, including one for McKay.
I was among those viewers, glued to the television hour after hour, waiting for the next piece of information to be reported. Watching “September 5,” I vividly remembered McKay’s calm demeanor and the sadness in his eyes. The saga choked me up in 1972, and again in 2024.
As a lifelong broadcaster with a wife who worked in TV news control rooms for years, I was pleasantly surprised at how well Fehlbaum captured every aspect of what went on in there, and the professional way everyone involved did their jobs. It plays as a tense thriller and a lesson in how to pull together every available resource to broadcast a story no one had ever covered before.
There’s not a weak link in the direction, the screenplay (by Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum, and Alex David), or the cast. Among the standouts in a supporting role is Leonie Benesch (who got a lot of attention last year for the movie “The Teachers’ Lounge”) as freelancer Marianne Gebhardt, the only staffer in the ABC control room who spoke German and could translate official statements from the authorities.
It’s a little odd seeing this movie at a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been back in the news. The movie serves as a reminder that hostilities in that part of the world are not a twenty-first century deveopment.
“September 5” is second only to “Apollo 13” on any list of movies about real-life crises, showing the processes and people involved. I don’t have a single bad thing to say about it, so I’m giving it a 10 out of 10. Opens tomorrow in theaters.