News media has always walked a tightrope of balanced accurate reporting and high ratings. Every story needs an angle and a strong hook to get viewers watching. What if a news broadcast team had to alternate between filming Olympics sporting events and the hostage crisis in real time? Now that’s a point of view we rarely see.
September 5, co-written and directed by Tim Fehlbaum (Colony, Hell) shows this terrifying story of the abducted Israeli athletes through the lens of ABC Sports as they retooled their live coverage of the 1972 Munich Olympics to track these events in real time. The film stars Peter Sarsgaard as Roone Arledge, the President of ABC Sports chasing the ratings, John Magaro as Geoffrey Mason, the Head of the Control Room in Munich in search of the truth, and Ben Chaplin as Marvin Bader, Head of Operations at ABC Sports in this tense political thriller.
Fehlbaum meticulously researched the ABC Sports reporting in order to present a unique perspective distinct from telling the story from the kidnappers and hostages’ perspective. He describes this approach as a “turning point in media history.”
The filmmaker’s background includes documentary filmmaking often about sensitive and uncomfortable subjects.
He continues how media shapes public perceptions of world events – although today it’s happening at increasingly breakneck speeds with varying degrees of accuracy. The wider question remains whether broadcasting live events is a manipulation or a simple reporting of actual events. We can transmit vast amounts of information in a short space of time, so we need some editorial framework to streamline the narrative. And that is exactly what the ABC Sports Team did.
Media Bias
News coverage inherently has a bias in selecting which events are reported and how as soon as the transmit button is pressed. Is it censorship or fair reporting? This was as important then as it is today despite the rapidly expanding mountain of information dumped on viewers.
Since not every second of the hostage drama could be captured and reported on, both ABC Sports and Fehlbaum carefully balanced reporting actual events accurately with dramatic storytelling to engage audiences.
Tim Fehlbaum. Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures
“We try to stay as accurate as possible on what we learned. We talked to three eyewitnesses, in the control room of ABC Sports, including Jeffrey Mason and Sean McManus, the son of the host Jim McKay who was there as a teenager while his father was hosting.” The team also spoke with Jimmy Shaeffler, who was called “the mule” because he allegedly smuggled film footage past the police barricades. Then there was all the recorded footage to reference in making September 5 accurate.
Tim Fehlbaum maintains he made a feature film rather than a documentary, so there are certain creative liberties that were taken mainly for clarity and conciseness.
For starters, the events took place over 22 hours and had to be contracted to 90 minutes. Geoffrey Mason’s screen character is a composite of several people who were in the control room at the time. Various unnecessary events weren’t mentioned and some scenes were cut during the editing process to further streamline the story.
The filmmaker strived of be as objective as possible, but contends that “the moment when you position a camera and point it at somewhere, you’re not objective anymore.” However, the filmmaker leaned into his documentary roots to dictate the authentic and immediate style of September 5. He describes himself as a “storytelling technician.”
Writing September 5
September 5 is ostensibly a drama with thriller elements. With so much action during the actual events, Fehlbaum was more focused on the plot and the consequences of the hostage drama. But it did need a specific tone and feel to capture the tension and energy of the broadcast control room at the time as well as the field journalists covering the Olympics and the hostage drama. Many ethical conversations about what to broadcast made it into the film to examine the theme of how media shapes public opinions.
“We put the actors inside the shoes of these people to show everything through their perspective from their eyes. Sometimes our movie gets its strength from what you don’t see rather than what you do see. But that doesn’t make a thing less full of tension?”
The editing also taps into the constant switch from reporting on the Olympics to reporting on the hostage crisis to ensure the tension kept simmering. ABC Sports didn’t have a specific political agenda, but they did face certain dilemmas. “They have this almost innocent view of their questions a few hours before they were covering a swim race. Suddenly they have to decide what to do if something violent happens in front of the camera. That offers an interesting premise to confront them.”
Shaping The Characters
Traditional stories are generally propelled more by character than plot. September 5, however, takes a different tack in that the actual events lead the narrative spine. Ostensibly, the main characters in the film are Roone and Geoffrey sparring over news integrity, morality, emotions, and sensationalism. However, Fehlbaum insisted the characters didn’t have any “private stories or character arcs” during the development process which would detract from the main story. “We only show these people and their conflicts during that day in the studio in their professional environment,” asserts Fehlbaum. “There’s a bigger story going on and we are telling it from the perspective of people that are not directly affected by it.”
