Spoiler alert! We will talk about the details of the movie “September Five” (now in theaters), which depicts the hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Summer Games. Please be careful if you haven’t seen it yet.
Movies based on real events have to walk a fine line between documented truth and storytelling needs. It becomes especially difficult when the subject matter involves crime.
“September 5” was a close call to reenacting the story of September 5, 1972, when eight Palestinian black terrorists took 11 Israeli hostages at the Munich Summer Games. The terrorists demanded the release of more than 300 Palestinians and non-Arabs imprisoned in Israel on various charges. In the end, all five terrorists and 11 players and coaches were killed. The movie depicts something very close to what happened on that day, but the timeline is compressed.
“If we had made this movie in real time, it would have been 22 hours long,” says director Tim Fehrbaum.
The filmmakers decided to relive that terrifying day in a tense 95 minutes, focusing specifically on how the ABC Sports team pivoted to horrifying news stories over the years.
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Were Rune Arlidge and Jeff Mason real ABC Sports staffers?
yes. Rune Arledge became a legend at ABC, ultimately overseeing the station’s news division until his death in 2002 at the age of 71. Jeffrey Mason has won dozens of Emmy Awards for his work in producing sporting events and has worked for various networks over the years. career.
In September Five, Arlidge was played by Peter Sarsgaard and Mason was played by John Magaro. Mr. Fehrbaum says Mr. Mason provided invaluable assistance to his film.
However, some characters in the drama are composites, decisions made to keep the story moving. For example, a German staffer named Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) hired by ABC Sports proves invaluable as she is able to translate German radio coverage of the ongoing crisis. However, Fehrbaum said the work was actually performed by a variety of employees that day.
“Certain roles[in television production]were often filled by different people,” he says.
Did Rune Arledge really defy orders from ABC headquarters to hand over the story to New York?
yes. The ABC Sports team was in a position to cover the Olympics when news of the hostage crisis broke, but after some initial reporting, Arlidge was instructed to hand over the story to the network’s New York headquarters.
But Mr. Arlidge, whose quick thinking helped him find success in ABC’s news division, resisted. He ordered a huge camera connected to the street by a long cable to better photograph the hostage area. Officials were given the green light to smuggle footage into and out of the Olympic Village while posing as Olympic athletes. And pushed away orders to abandon the story to a news desk 4,000 miles away as the drama unfolded within sight.
Is that the real ABC sportscaster Jim McKay from “September Five”?
Actual ABC footage of legendary sports host Jim McKay is woven into the film.
This primarily occurs when TV monitors in ABC Sports’ Munich control room are showing the same events that aired on the network in 1972, including updates and interviews by McKay.
Benjamin Walker plays the only news reporter, Peter Jennings, who later becomes an anchor for ABC News, and there is a scene where he insists that he be sent to the scene near the apartment complex where the hostages are being held.
Did news reports incorrectly say the hostages were released?
yes. Around midnight on September 5, German authorities falsely announced that a police operation had been successful at a nearby air base and that the hostages and kidnappers had arrived to board a plane to Cairo.
But hours later, Reuters and other news agencies had to correct that information. The hostage and the terrorist were reportedly killed in a gunfight with German police at the airfield.
McKay told a worldwide audience: “They’re all gone.”
Is the broadcasting equipment shown in “September 5th” real?
The film’s greatest sleight of hand comes from production designer Julian Wagner, who scoured the Internet to purchase as much pre-1972 equipment as possible; It was no easy task as it had been scrapped ten years ago.
“None of the things we found worked, so we had to renovate everything to make it work,” Wagner says. “For a while, I was worried that (the equipment) would explode on camera or be too loud while filming. But it worked. At one point, I told the team “Do you have everything?” I asked. And they said, “There’s nothing else in this world that we don’t have.” So it felt good. ”
Does “September Five” show actual footage of the 1972 Munich Summer Games hostage crisis?
In addition to recreating the team’s cramped newsroom, Wagner also created a small room where Fehrbaum could “lock the actors in” for heated discussions in the heat of the broadcast.
Some of those talks ranged from whether live cameras monitoring potentially deadly scenes should actually be installed to whether showing terrorist activity actually influences terrorist desires. Some focus on big-picture issues in journalism, even debates.
According to Wagner, when it came to showing footage of the terrorists in “September 5,” Fehrbaum decided to combine now-famous footage of the actual incident with filmed reenactments. That’s what it means.
“It was such a wild combination that some of the actors didn’t even know which was which,” Wagner says. “But we don’t see their actual images because we felt we had a responsibility to the real victims. It was the only right thing to do.”