With his latest film, Tim Fehlbaum wanted to find a way to add to our understanding of a horrific moment in history that he first learned of as a teenager watching the Oscar-winning 1999 documentary “One Day in September.”
The Swiss filmmaker and his co-screenwriter, Moritz Binder, found the story that would become “September 5” in ABC. It was the only network then with a live camera, and its sports team was thrown into becoming the globe’s real-time eyes and ears, navigating a new technology-driven and morally tricky journalism during an early-morning terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics in 1972. “They were the most important channel that day,” says the 42-year-old Fehlbaum. “I was intrigued immediately by the media aspect, to tell it entirely through the control room’s perspective.”
Meeting with eyewitness Geoffrey Mason, now a veteran sports TV executive but then a producing newbie (played in the film by John Magaro), sparked Fehlbaum’s storytelling approach: Mason described a situation that sounded to the writer-director like an ethics thriller as much as a slice of history. “I asked him if they’d reflected on the consequences of their broadcast, and he said to us simply, ‘There was no time for that. We were too busy covering what was happening in real life,’’’ recalls Fehlbaum. “We realized that’s how the movie had to feel, with these questions constantly asked against a ticking clock.”
Actors Peter Sarsgaard and John Magaro along with director Tim Fehlbaum of “September 5.”
(Annie Noelker/For The Times)
Mason’s memories also affected how Fehlbaum, who’d gone to film school in Munich, wanted to shoot the ABC control room that production designer Julian Wagner built at the city’s Bavaria Studios. “Mason told us they constantly felt trapped in that little studio,” says Fehlbaum, “so we chose to have no moving walls. We wanted everything to be close to the camera, to feel really claustrophobic. I like movies that draw their strength from a limitation of space. We wanted to shoot it as if we were a reporter team in that room that day, documentary-style. We wanted long takes, really tight, and to be able to pan anywhere.” Even the detail Mason offered up that the air conditioning wasn’t working that grim day became a point of verisimilitude for Fehlbaum, so he turned it off on the Bavaria stage. “I wanted the actors to really sweat.”
Fehlbaum also wanted to secure access to ABC’s original footage to avoid green-screen placeholders and allow his cast — including Peter Sarsgaard as Roone Arledge — to see and manipulate a bank of working monitors showing actual film and tape. The producers, benefiting from their relationship with Mason, locked up clearances just in time for the 32-day shoot.
The filmmakers didn’t want to have to cast anyone as Jim McKay, whose much-admired anchoring that day earned him a place in broadcast history and, from their perspective, was worthy of being shown in original form. “His performance is essential, a very special blend of being professional and sometimes letting emotions overcome him,” says Fehlbaum. “He was unique.”
John Magaro and Ben Chaplin as part of the ABC Sports broadcast team covering the 1972 Munich Olympics.
(Courtesy of Paramount Pictures)
Although ABC’s studio could be rebuilt from original plans, the devices — walkie-talkies, phones, tape machines, all state-of-the-art technology then — couldn’t be replicated if they were to be used accurately onscreen. Collectors helped save the day for the filmmakers. “You would be surprised how many passionate collectors there are,” Fehlbaum says. “One guy was obsessed with Munich ’72. We went to his apartment, and he had one of those huge cameras.”
Fehlbaum takes pride that viewers have praised the film for giving them a palpable sense of how “old-school television” worked, saying “United 93,” a favorite of his, similarly took him inside a plane’s inner workings as a specific frame for a tragic story. But he also knows that last year’s Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, which happened as “September 5” was in postproduction, will shade how audiences absorb his film. “Of course, our movie touches that subject, a conflict that has never ended and is relevant today,” he says. “But I’m confident it will be seen as telling a story on how to report something like that.”
Dramatizing the mix of expertise and improvisation that went into covering an unfolding nightmare has affected the filmmaker’s view of journalism. “I had a lot of respect before for it but even more now, how complex it is,” says Fehlbaum. “These were sports reporters, so they had an innocent view on questions like, ‘Can we show violence on TV?’
“A lot of the questions they raise, they didn’t know how to answer, and I wouldn’t know how to answer,” he continues. “So we wanted to tell it from that perspective.”
