The events of September 5, 1972 have lingered with director Tim Fehlbaum since the start of his career: Studying film in Munich, he hung out and shot films in a neighborhood that was the site of one of history’s most notorious terror attacks.
The so-called “student city” had served as the Olympic Village when Munich tried to rebrand Germany as a place of peace and love with the 1972 Summer Olympic Games, and erase the memories of Adolf Hitler’s propagandized 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. But dreams of a utopian competition were destroyed when members of a pro-Palestinian terror group killed 11 members of the Israeli team.
Since making September 5, Fehlbaum has shown it to many audiences, some of whom watched the drama play out on live television half a century ago, and some of whom only know it from the 1999 documentary One Day in September, or Steven Spielberg’s 2005 Munich — if they know the story at all.
But almost everyone, Fehlbaum says, knows the televised image of one of the masked terrorists, looking out from the balcony of the Olympic Village apartment where the athletes were held hostage.
“You would always know, ‘Oh, but this is actually the apartment where the tragedy happened. This is this balcony where the masked man stepped out.’ I was always interested in that image,” Fehlbaum tells MovieMaker.
“I was surprised how many people didn’t know what happened on that day, or just vaguely knew it. But I was also surprised that what everybody seemed to know was that black-and-white image of that masked person on the balcony. And this, of course, says something about one of the topics of our film — the power of images.”
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Fehlbaum’s interest was fueled by One Day in September, the Oscar-winning film directed by Kevin MacDonald. Fehlbaum made several successful horror and sci-fi movies before he felt ready to make a film about the terror attack.
September 5 takes us back to a time when many now-familiar realities were new: the ability to cover breaking news live; questions of journalistic responsibility when bad actors may be trying to use news media to their advantage; and even the use of the word “terrorist” to describe people who try to instill terror for political means.
Early in the development of September 5, the Swiss-born Fehlbaum began working with a writer from Munich, Moritz Binder, who shared his interest. (Soon Alex David joined the writing team as well.)
As he sought a new approach to the story, he talked with Geoffrey Mason, an ABC sports producer who found himself at the center of the breaking news story on September 5, 1972.
“We thought, ‘OK, we’re going to hop on a Zoom for like 20 minutes or so and listen a little bit to his stories,” Fehlbaum recalls. “But two hours or so later we hung up, and the writer and I and the creative producers who were involved from the very beginning, we all said in our group: ‘I think there was just our movie that we heard, right?'”
Mason is played in the film by John Magaro, one of a small core cast that also includes Peter Saarsgard as ABC executive Roone Alredge. The film takes place almost entirely in a control room from which they watch the terror unfold — and worry that they’re contributing to it.
Tim Fehlbaum on September 5 and the Modern News Media
The film’s questions of whether reporters should just transmit events, or edit them in search of better context, are very resonant today, when everyone with a phone has the power to spread information or misinformation. (On the day of our talk, The New York Times was covering a news conference by President-elect Trump, fact-checking him as quickly as possible.)
The film investigates how the passive act of reporting events can become an active role in potentially disastrous ways: At one point, the ABC team worries that the terrorists can see their broadcast of police moving in against them.
But Fehlbaum, like September 5, avoids dictating lessons.
“I’m a little bit hesitant with trying to give clear messages or takeaways. We would rather raise a lot of questions, but not try to give clear answers, because for a lot of these questions, I wouldn’t know the answers,” the director says.
“But I’ve watched the film with a lot of people that work in the news, in today’s newsrooms, and they came up to me afterwards and a lot of them said it was striking — obviously, technology is different — but the bigger questions that they discuss every day are the same that they discussed in that control room at ABC Sports: ‘What can we show? Which words do we use? How fast do we get out with the news?'”
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For all the criticism of the modern mainstream news media, many self-styled journalists — shooting out their so-called reporting on social channels — spent little if any time worrying about ethical questions.
Fehlbaum was born in 1982, and still remembers the analog age (“the first films I did, I cut with two VCRs,” he notes). So he shares a sense of nostalgia for the pre-internet era that serves the aesthetic of September 5.
The ABC control room in the film — where journalists experience chaos and fear via screens, out of harm’s way — can feel like a metaphor for the way we all can experience distant dramas today.
“For me, one of the reasons to make the movie was that challenge of… ‘How do I tell a story that takes place entirely in one room?’ It’s a very Hitchcockian idea. He was obsessed with the idea of shooting a film entirely in a phone booth, actually,” says Fehlbaum. “I admire films that draw the strength from a certain limitation — time, space and and perspective. I think sometimes this can be more interesting.
He noted that control rooms can feel, to TV journalists, like a “parallel world.”
“Sometimes I think it’s almost like a vampire movie,” he said. “Because they don’t go into the real light.”
September 5 is now in theaters, from Paramount Pictures.
Main image: Director Tim Fehlbaum on the set of September 5. Paramount Pictures.
Editor’s Note: Corrects photo.
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