At the 1972 Munich Olympics, ABC Sports broadcasters became live news reporters when the Israeli team was taken hostage. Screen charts the journey of their story in September 5.
“They’re all gone,” said TV presenter Jim McKay when he famously relayed the grim news that all 11 Israeli team members kidnapped during the 1972 Munich Olympics had been massacred.
This was a crisis played out on live television in front of a global audience of an estimated 900 million people. The athletes and coaches had been taken hostage by the Palestinian militant group Black September. Two were killed in their rooms and nine died when the West German police made a disastrous attempt to rescue them at the airport.
This tragic incident forms the backdrop to Paramount’s September 5, from Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum, which emerged from Telluride Film Festival as a sleeper awards candidate and went on to pick up two Critics Choice Awards nominations, plus a Golden Globe nod for best drama.
The film tells the story of the hostage drama entirely from the viewpoint of the ABC Sports broadcasting team. Real-life footage of presenter McKay is intercut with dramatised scenes featuring rookie ABC producer Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and his boss Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) trying to keep the 22-hour broadcast going.
Although the traumatic events of 52 years ago still cast a shadow, the September 5 filmmaking team felt the details have been lost to younger generations. Munich-based producer Philipp Trauer explains that he cycles past the Olympic village daily: “Of course I was aware that something happened there and I knew this image of the masked man on the balcony, but I did not have the full picture of what happened that day. When we came up with the idea to dig deep into the story, that was completely new to me.”
“This is not a story that Germany is proud of,” adds Fehlbaum. “The investigation is still going on today about what really happened. But it was also an unprecedented situation. They didn’t have any armed police and they didn’t have a special unit for this kind of case.”
Today, the apartments in the Olympic village where the athletes were kept hostage are used as student housing. “We used to shoot student movies there because this whole architecture had an interesting look,” says Fehlbaum, recalling his time at the University of Television and Film Munich, where he studied directing from 2002-09.
Following graduation, Fehlbaum was spotted as an emerging talent by producer Thomas Wöbke, who produced his first feature, the 2011 apocalyptic thriller Hell. In 2013, Wöbke co-founded Munich-based banner BerghausWöbke Filmproduktion, which he runs together with Trauer and Roland Emmerich. BerghausWöbke partnered with Fehlbaum on his second feature, dystopian sci-fi thriller Tides (aka The Colony), which premiered at the Berlinale in 2021.
The producers and the young Swiss director began to brainstorm potential future subjects — and the 50th anniversary of the 1972 Olympics was around the corner at that time. “I had been interested in the topic for quite some time,” says Fehlbaum of the 1972 tragedy. “In Munich, the whole topic still feels very present.” Years before, when he was still at school in Basel, he had seen Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning documentary about the massacre, One Day In September.
The 1999 film, with its use of rollicking rock music and Michael Douglas’s voiceover, and its imagery of US swimmer Mark Spitz winning gold medals or athletes playing table tennis a few hundred metres from where the Israelis were being held captive, made a huge impression on the filmmaker. “It completely changed what I thought of as documentary,” explains Fehlbaum. “It blew me away.”
Beginning his own research, Fehlbaum found that the more he learned about the massacre, the more he realised “what an important part the media played that day”.
Geoffrey Mason, who had been a young ABC producer in 1972, emerged as an important source. “You’ve got to talk to Mason,” insisted Jimmy Schaeffler, a runner for ABC who had written an article about how he smuggled film past police barriers. In an initial Zoom conversation, the filmmakers “just listened”, rapt, as Mason told them all about his experiences in Munich. “That was the moment the spark was ignited to tell the story entirely from their [the ABC broadcasters’] perspective,” says Fehlbaum.
Mason was on shift when the hostage crisis began to unfold, and he was thrust into a position of huge responsibility and moral complexity. It was now his call “whether to show someone being shot on live television”, says Fehlbaum. Five decades later, the well-connected producer was crucial in helping the filmmakers access the original ABC footage, connecting them to recently returned Disney chief Bob Iger.
Partnering up
From early script stage, the German producers were also talking to Paramount. “We had the feeling they liked the story. We were talking and sending scripts. It took a while,” producer Trauer says of the US major whose Republic Pictures label took global sales rights (excluding Germany, Switzerland and Austria) to the film in July 2024 and whose decision to handle worldwide distribution itself was finally announced in September 2024. Paramount began in North America with a platform release on December 13.
However, September 5 remained “an entirely German production”, says Trauer — shot on a modest budget in 32 days in the spring of 2023 on a soundstage in Munich. Constantin Film, which also partnered on Fehlbaum’s Tides, is handling the January release in German-speaking territories and is a financier and co-producer on the film.
Fehlbaum co-scripted with German screenwriter Moritz Binder, a former documentary student at the University of Television and Film Munich who shared his obsessive approach to research. The filmmakers decided they also needed “an American ear” to make sure they got the dialogue right, and they invited in as co-writer Alex David, who had worked with both Wöbke and Constantin Films in the past.
For the shoot, the bunker-like ABC TV studio could have been recreated anywhere. “For us, it was clear that we wanted to shoot the film in Munich,” says Fehlbaum. After all, the producers are based in the city, the events of the film took place there, and the director knew the region intimately. “The American actors would confirm, it just felt different to be in the city where it happened,” he explains. “But it was also clear to us that even though it takes place in Germany, it is an American story because it’s an American sports broadcast. So we needed an American perspective on it. That’s where Sean Penn and his company [Projected Picture Works] came into play.”
The link with Penn came through Fehlbaum’s cinematographer Markus Förderer, who had shot Netflix action comedy Red Notice, co-produced by John Wildermuth, one of Penn’s producing partners. “He [Förderer] said they have this production company that’s interested to make a movie in Europe and that Sean Penn also is interested in political topics,” explains Fehlbaum. “He has a thing for the ’70s…”
Penn — who produces alongside Projected Picture Works’ John Ira Palmer — was heavily involved “at every stage”, adds Fehlbaum. “Sometimes, when you’re a European production and you try to get US cast, it is not easy. Of course, it helped that we had Sean Penn because he is such a well-respected name.”
Fehlbaum and his casting directors veered away from chasing star names. “We never wanted the character to be bigger than the story,” explains the filmmaker. “This is very much a story about people in their professional environment, and it’s an ensemble film.”
Magaro, for example, felt the right fit for the role of the rookie producer. The stage and screen actor had delivered acclaimed performances in US indie films such as Past Lives and First Cow but the filmmakers knew that, with him, “it would never become about the star performing”.
A multinational main cast is rounded out with the UK’s Ben Chaplin as head of operations for ABC Sports Marvin Bader, Germany’s Leonie Benesch (The Teachers’ Lounge) as translator Marianne Gebhardt, and France’s Zinedine Soualem as ABC European sports director Jacques Lesgards.
“An American story shot in Germany,” comments Fehlbaum on the parallels between his film and the events it depicts. “In a way, that was also what the Olympics were about. People from all over the world came together on that one location.”
Echoes through time
Today, the filmmakers recognise that September 5 has a fresh contemporary resonance. “When we decided to make a movie about the journalists and the media perspective on that day, we knew it’s a conflict that is still there. The story takes place 50 years ago but we’re still handling the same political situation,” says Trauer. “But we would never expect it would escalate so much on October 7 [2023, the date of the Hamas-led attack on Israel]. That was crazy to see and just terrifying.”
“Even though the technology has changed, the ethical questions are still the same,” adds Fehlbaum. “Also, from a filmmaking point of view, I was intrigued by the challenge of how I can tell a story that takes place entirely in that one studio with the monitors as the only window to the outside world. I thought that was an interesting premise… that is also the irony. Although they are so close, they are in this completely different world. If you have ever been to a TV studio, it is a complete parallel world in a way — dark, tight rooms…”
Fehlbaum cites Wolfgang Petersen’s submarine classic Das Boot (1981) as one key inspiration. “Das Boot is also a movie about the dynamics of the crew, trapped in a tight space with a very important event going on at the surface but all they can see of that is through their camera and sonars.”
The team, led by production designer Julian R Wagner, relished the opportunity to recreate the look and feel of a 1970s news control room. Phones ring for real, and walkie talkies and other equipment from the period were sourced from museums, archives and private collections.
September 5 premiered without much fanfare on August 29 in Venice’s relatively obscure Horizons Extra sidebar, overshadowed by films playing in Competition and elsewhere in the programme. But after making more of a splash at Telluride and Zurich, the film gradually began to be noticed.
“It’s quite an incredible journey that we’ve had and, yes, we started as an underdog,” the director says of how September 5 has now become both an Oscar and Bafta contender and part of the official public discussion of the Munich massacre.
In April 2023, German federal minister of the interior Nancy Faeser appointed a commission to reappraise the attack at the Munich Olympics. “They watched our movie and said we did a good job,” says Trauer.
In Zurich, the filmmakers were approached by an Israeli runner who had competed in the 1972 Olympics. “That is exactly how I remember that day,” she told them, giving the filmmakers what they regard as a high compliment for their hyper-realistic approach.
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