By Kirsten Coachman
On September 5, 1972, the landscape of live broadcasting was forever changed.
Opening in San Francisco this weekend is “September 5,” the newest film from writer/director Tim Fehlbaum (“The Colony”). The film is based on the true events of the “Munich Massacre” that unfolded in the wake of a terrorist attack when members of the Israeli team were taken hostage at the Olympic village during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany. Stationed a few hundred yards from the village was the ABC Sports studio and members of the broadcast team who pivoted from their regular sports coverage to an unplanned 22 hours of live news coverage.
Set within the ABC Sports studio, audiences watch the key players of the day react as news comes in. This includes an ambitious young producer, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro, “Past Lives”), his mentor Marvin Bader (Ben Chapin, “Murder By Numbers”), storied producer Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard, “Memory”), and translater Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch, “The White Ribbon”). Reporter Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker, “Jessica Jones”) was reporting live outside of the studio with an assist from Gary Slaughter (Daniel Adeosun, “Andor”), who posed as an athlete to get Jennings’ reporting team film and supplies to get past Olympic village security. Additionally, the film utilizes archive footage of broadcaster Jim McKay.
As the ABC Sports team reports on the ongoing crisis happening on the world stage, they’re faced with snap decisions, like appropriate word choice to describe the perpetrators and what images they can and cannot air over live broadcast. Riveting, and at times, overwhelming, “September 5” provides fascinating insight to a horrific moment in history and how those who were on the ground were able to document it for all to see.
In December, Art U News had the opportunity to sit down with Fehlbaum and Magaro during a San Francisco press stop to talk about the making of their new film. They touched on speaking with Mason firsthand and how shadowing broadcast control rooms impacted the film to Magaro’s experience performing opposite archive footage.
Congratulations on this film. It’s thrilling and intense, and I really enjoyed learning what that day kind of looked like inside the control room. In the midst of doing your research and getting to talk with Geoff Mason, how soon after he explained kind of the chaos of that day of what that looked like for him did you know that this was the story that you wanted to tell?
Tim Fehlbaum (TH): First, I’m glad that you felt like you learned something. In a way, that’s also what we wanted to do. We wanted to give today’s audience a feeling of that world back then, also of the analog world back then. And there was recently a screening that we had in London where a woman who back then already was working in live television, and she, after the screening, came to me and said, this movie, for her, [was] like 90 minutes going back to work. [Laughs]. That was one of the biggest compliments so far because it is also a movie about people in their professional environment—much more than about personal stories. And we wanted to portray this really accurately.
And to get back to your question, it was a conversation that, the very first conversation actually, that we had with Geoffrey Mason that sparked the idea, or that made us confident and that we can entirely tell the story from that perspective because listening to what he experienced, what challenges they faced, for example, that the police came into the studio at a certain point and told them to turn off the cameras. That’s what made us, for the first time, think that maybe we can tell it entirely from that perspective.
Can you talk a little about the decision to keep the story centered in the broadcast studio?
TH: I think if you’re gonna have a cinematic concept like that, then you also gotta go really through with it, right? So, the only glimpse that we get from the outside is when [Geoff] once opens the door. … And, in a way, this movie is also about what they don’t see, right? Even though they are so close, because everything they see, they only see it through their cameras, partly compared to a submarine movie, you know? They’re also trapped in that dark space with telescopes and sonars as the only connection to the outside world.
In getting the opportunity to also speak with Geoff as you get to portray him, was there something within your conversations with him, like maybe a certain quality, that you wanted to make sure was shared on screen with viewers?
John Magaro (JM): Yeah, in the conversations with Geoff, a few things struck me. First of all, his clarity of what happened that day. It was very precise, and very objective, and very thorough. But I think what was discovered from those conversations was probably the same as what Tim found out in the conversations, is that on the day, the focus was to do their job. There was no time to think; it was stay on the air, leave emotion out of it. But that’s not something necessarily that you can portray in a performance. But that gives you a focus, at least. But in the conversations with him, I did discover not that, again, not that there was any pressure to imitate Geoff or anything like that because no one really knows what he looks like, what he sounds like. But there’s a quality in him, an innovative spirit, a sense of wonder, and I think also a sense of humor. And I think that’s why he’s so beloved in the sports broadcasting community. And I did want that quality to be present in my portrayal of Geoff.
To prepare, I understand that you sat in on some live broadcasts. Was there something that you were surprised to learn about what takes place during a live broadcast?
JM: I think for me, it was the quiet of it all. I think stereotypically in films or television when you see a broadcast control room, people are shouting all the time, and it’s loud. And it’s not like that. There’s an intensity, there’s an adrenaline as soon as they go on the air and you sense that’s why they love it, especially in sports broadcasting, because sports inherently is hopefully exciting. And when they’re calling a show or a game or match or whatever, there’s an excitement in the calling of it, but it’s a quiet, precise art form. And that was striking to me.
TF: I was fascinated. As John said, we visited a lot of control rooms. Just this morning, we’ve been to CBS Morning News, and I’m always fascinated with that whole apparatus. How it is such a perfectly working machine, and how everything is timed down to the second, and how many people are involved, how complicated the whole communications are, and that this works, right? In our movie, even though they are reporting on this crisis, and it is a very tragic situation in a way, it is also a tribute to the world of live television.
In thinking about what you said about real-life control rooms being quiet, this movie is anything but. There’s a lot of sound happening. Even if nobody’s talking, you’ve got cross conversations, you’ve got footsteps, you’ve got phones, you’ve got wires coming in. Can you share a little about how you approached layering sound in the film?
TF: I love that question, but because it was really important to us that you feel, not only on the visual level but also on the audio level, that you really feel that whole machinery.
It felt very immersive.
TF: Yeah. Yeah. And then you should always have that. And you, in a way, also still feel the analog world. So you hear the 60mm footage running through the rollers. You hear the squeaking of the tape machines when they slow those machines down. You should hear the noisy quality of the walkie-talkie. The sound designers did a lot of recordings when Peter Jennings was reporting from outside to the studio, the way he then recorded it, he actually chased these audio signals through real devices from back then and rerecorded it because it should have that dirty quality also to it, same as we wanted the picture to have that feeling of these monitors back then. And I think for me, one of the strongest moments in the movie actually is at the very end when, on a sound level, when his character turns off these machines, the whole room, and for the first time, you suddenly hear the quiet, the whole machinery is turned off. And this only feels so strong because, before that, you had what you just described, this complete overkill, so to say, of silence coming to you.
The film also uses archival footage of actual reporting from September 5, 1972. John, what was it like for you to perform and react to this footage?
JM: It was fun. It was a great challenge and something that you don’t often get. I’ve done a lot of films where you have TVs or monitors that you’re reacting to, and, you know, 90%, maybe more, 99% of the time, it’s either a green screen or not the footage you’re gonna be using, just sort of a marker for you. This time, it was pretty much all the real stuff besides a few shots that they had to shoot later at the Olympic Village because they didn’t have access to it until later in the shoot. But all the Jim McKay stuff was the real stuff, the hostage being interviewed [at the ABC Sports studio] was the real stuff. I mean, just so much of it was real. … It was great.
And playing off of the real Jim McKay is a challenge in a way, but it was also kind of fun because I had the base of learning how to call a show. So I felt the confidence in that after shadowing for a couple months in sports broadcast rooms. But what we all understood was that Jim McKay is Jim McKay, and he’s just real, and it really made us have to rise to the challenge of being as authentic as possible. Because if we weren’t as authentic as he was then everything about the movie would fall apart. The whole conceit would be gone. It really made us all step up our game.
“September 5” is now playing in San Francisco.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.