How September 5 Recreates a Historic News Broadcast

“They’re all gone.”

When the sports broadcaster Jim McKay announced the deaths of 11 Israeli Olympic team members taken hostage by the Palestinian militant group Black September at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, it was a sentence freighted with emotion and instantly became a part of broadcast history.

In the new film “September 5,” there is no actor playing McKay, who instead “plays” himself through archival footage woven throughout the drama, which focuses almost entirely on the ABC Sports control room as it retells the saga that unfolded that day.

As the dramatized ABC Sports team pivots from the Olympics to breaking news, the real footage unspools on actual monitors from the era: “September 5” features a painstakingly recreated control room with 1970s technology restored to working order.

The broadcasters weren’t the focus when the director, Tim Fehlbaum, and his team started their research in 2020, poring over police files and archival collections. But the ethical issues remain, more than half a century later. Fehlbaum said getting the details right was important.

“The technology obviously has changed,” he said. “Maybe the bigger questions are still the same.”

The 1972 Olympics have been covered multiple times on the big screen before, in movies like Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” (2005) and the documentary “One Day in September” (2000). The episode had long intrigued Fehlbaum, a Swiss director who went to film school in Munich and worked on many student films shot at the former Olympic Village.

But it was only after talking to people who were in Munich at the time that they found their protagonist in Geoffrey Mason. In 1972 he was a young producer for ABC Sports thrust into a position of responsibility shortly after hearing gunshots in the distance. Mason had to weigh guidance from his superiors — the “Wide World of Sports” creator Roone Arledge (played by Peter Sarsgaard) and the longtime producer Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) — and quickly come up with answers to difficult ethical questions like how to respond to potential graphic violence on a live broadcast watched by millions.

Mason said that after initial misgivings about being the center of the film, he was impressed by the production’s focus on authenticity.

“They wanted the telling of this story to be legit,” he said. “They wanted it to not be a hoked up, Hollywood-ization of an event in history.”

That meant working with the actor who would play him, John Magaro. Mason, who went on to a respected career in sports broadcasting at ABC and ESPN, arranged for Magaro to observe the CBS Sunday football control room to get a sense of what the work was like. That access was granted by the then-chairman of CBS Sports, Sean McManus, who is also McKay’s son and was in Munich when his father (who died in 2008) found himself anchoring the news.

Magaro said the most helpful advice from Mason was on his state of mind as the situation unfolded.

“There was no time to think,” Magaro said. “Once the clock was running, they had to do a job, they had to stay on task, they had to keep themselves on the air. And they had to keep the story interesting.”

That the archival footage is in the film at all is also thanks to Mason, still well-connected in the broadcast industry. He helped broker an appeal to ABC’s parent, Disney, by delivering a letter from the production to the company’s chief executive, Bob Iger.

Mason also consulted on the script for accuracy, suggesting shorter lines to better capture the terse broadcast dialect he remembers using in a room under pressure. For other notes, like the specific placement of equipment, he drew from photographs he took at the time.

“Sometimes we looked at the reference shots that we had and the footage and we couldn’t tell the difference,” said the film’s production designer, Julian R. Wagner.

Wagner had worked on the director’s previous film, “The Colony” (2021), and other science-fiction productions like it. Ahead of “September 5,” he recalled the director asking him, “I know you really love creating these fictional worlds, but could you create something authentic, just for once?”

He could. In “September 5,” the control room is the center of the entire story, with the hostage situation and other developments taking place elsewhere patched into the action via video feeds and phone calls. To make the room believable, the technology needed to work: telephones had to ring, switchboards had to light up, and in one particularly analog touch, labels and captions had to be loaded onto physical title cards that were filmed and superimposed on the footage.

For slow-motion footage, the tapes were manipulated by hand and slowly fed through the playback machine’s rollers. Someone from the fire department was stationed on set in case the tapes caught fire, Fehlbaum said.

The control room is as close to an exact replica as they could get, said Wagner, but the architecture of the studio was altered slightly to create forced-perspective tension and to allow the actors to walk freely from room to room while the camera followed, shooting them documentary-style.

Longtime technicians who worked on the same models in the 1970s were brought in to rewire buttons and restore vintage monitors to working condition, so the actors could call the broadcasts as if they were in real time. It made for an uncanny but refreshing acting experience on set. “Jim McKay is a great scene partner,” Magaro said.

The equipment was sourced from a hodgepodge of museums and aficionados who had squirreled away pieces of broadcasting history. “Germans love to collect,” said Philipp Trauer, a producer on the film.

That detailed approach to history, though, has also meant an unavoidable connection with current events. “September 5” is arriving in theaters after more than a year of war between Israel and Hamas that has killed tens of thousands in Gaza and stoked widespread protests. The film is bound to be dissected for its handling of the massacre, and reviews have noted that its tight focus on the TV coverage makes the actual events seem distant.

Fehlbaum said that while the continuing conflict was tragic, the film’s focus on the media perspective was deliberate. “This is more about the importance and the complexity of reporting on a crisis situation,” he said.

Editing was finished last fall, just before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, producers said. Though the filmmakers talked at length as the news of the attack and Israel’s response unfolded, they said they did not go back into editing to change anything in the film.

“The question was always, ‘Would we have made a different movie knowing now what we didn’t know then?’” said the producer John Ira Palmer. “The consensus has always been no.”