Breaking Baz: ‘September 5’ Vividly Recalls Tragedy Of The 1972 Olympics Massacre & Jim McKay’s Haunting Announcement, “They’re All Gone” — Venice Film Festival
EXCLUSIVE: “They’re all gone.” Those were the harrowing, unforgettable words, delivered by ABC TV’s Wide World of Sports host Jim McKay that 11 Israeli athletes had been slaughtered by Black September terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
McKay’s marathon 16-hour stint anchoring the shattering incident has long been held as a milestone in broadcast history. It was the first breaking news story to be beamed live globally in an unfettered way. Cameras had lenses trained on the balcony of the apartment where the Palestinian gunmen were holding the Israeli sportsmen hostage.
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The cruel irony was that the Black September guerrillas were inside watching ABC’s coverage of their heinous act.
Also the families of the Israeli athletes and coaches and trainers being held at gunpoint were watching.
September 5, directed by Swiss filmmaker Tim Fehlbaum, opens the Venice Film Festival’s Horizon Extra sidebar on Thursday. It grippingly explores how ABC Sports, led by its swashbuckling supremo Roone Arledge, switched its coverage from sports to news as the tragedy unfolded in the Olympic Village.
The film also gives a sense of the moral and ethical discussions that took place that September day 52 years ago. One brilliant scene has the ABC Sports executives arguing whether it would be right to show live footage of someone being shot. Those arguments haven’t gone away.
However, it’s McKay’s very human response during the crisis that is at the center of the film.
Just as Arledge judged that McKay’s commanding presence and reporting chops were what was required to anchor the live telecast, Fehlbaum saw that McKay’s work in Munich was “like the key element of the whole film.” But first, he and the film’s producers — Oscar-winning actor and activist Sean Penn is a producer — had to secure rights and permissions from ABC to use the McKay ‘72 Olympics tapes.
While Peter Sarsgaard would be cast as Arledge; John Magaro would portray Geoffrey Mason, the ABC Sports producer, now a giant in the TV industry, who was doing the night shift; Ben Chaplin as Marvin Bader the ABC Sports operations manager in the Olympic Village; and Benjamin Walker as ace ABC News correspondent Peter Jennings, who’d been “borrowed” from news to report on any sporty-newsy packages linked to the games, Fehlbaum felt in his gut that no actor would be able to replicate how McKay anchored the terrorist outrage.
“I think he had such a unique way of being empathetic with the audience and still be professional,” the director says.
Sarsgaard and Magaro worked together on Maggie Gyllenhaal’s big studio feature The Bride.
Leonie Benesch, star of Ilker ?atak’s Oscar-nominated The Teacher’s Lounge, rounds out the main cast playing Marianne, an interpreter in the ABC Sports bureau. It must be noted that the supporting cast and the background artists all get time to shine. Not a single actor is left behind.
Benesch’s role is a key one because her character represents Germany’s post-war generation.
Fehlbaum, whose films include sci-fi titles The Colony and Hell, seemed an unlikely choice to helm this unbelievably gripping tale.
Actually, the filmmaker studied cinema in Munich and was cinematographer on a fellow student’s short that was filmed in the Olympic Village. He was also a fan of Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning 1999 documentary One Day in September, which explored in depth the background to what had occurred in Munich.
Originally, Fehlbaum and co-screenwriter Moritz Binder, had wanted to to tell the story of the ‘72 hostage crisis from different perspectives “like from the police side, from the victim side, from the perpetrator side and one storyline already on our mind was the media. And we did our research and came across Geoffrey Mason. And we were having our very first conversation with him and that was actually when the idea came to me because he was telling us how he experienced this 22-hour marathon in the ABC control room. He was on the night shift, and shots were heard.”
Suddenly, Fehlbaum thought, ”Oh wow, that’s actually the most interesting angle to tell the story from.” He began to envisage a movie that would encapsulate how a group of professionals went into an area outside of their expertise and how they were able to overcome that using skills that would later revolutionize TV news.
“I personally like movies that draw strength from limiting the locations, like 12 Angry Men. Those kind of movies take place in a very narrow space, so I liked the cinematic concept of that,” he says while noting other factors that underpinned what he and his colleagues wanted to explore.
“We learned also that sports TV was much more ahead of its time in making things more entertaining,” and, says the director, Arledge already had broken through with the Wide World of Sports program at ABC.
It was a groundbreaking show presented by McKay whereas over at ABC News “it was just someone reading a bit of paper,” says Fehlbaum, while on the sports side Arledge was a visionary storyteller who tasked his staff with telling a story by using multiple camera setups to push a story in new directions.
The technology ABC Sports used in ‘72 was ahead of its time; the access to satellites hadn’t been used in that way before. Now satellites are used 24/7 at the drop of a hat, we have cell phones, we have WhatsApp, we have text messages, have social media — none of that stuff existed at all. ABC had to share satellite with other broadcasters, notably CBS in this case, though ABC got around that in an ingenious way.
One has to smile at the ingenuity of the media world’s analog past.
Fehlbaum was aware of that and charged his production designers with acquiring TV equipment and monitors from the era.
He also kept coming back to McKay’s Munich reporting and watched and rewatched his seminal “They’re all gone” moment.
The simplicity of how McKay framed his words is a part of why they’re so powerful.
“When I was a kid, my father used to say, ‘Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized.’ Our worst fears have been realized tonight,” McKay says to the broadcasters sitting in the studio with him.
He then looked straight into the camera. “They have now said that there were 11 hostages. Two were killed in their rooms. … Nine others were killed at the airport tonight. They’re all gone,” his anguished voice proclaimed.
That moment “was really crucial to us,” says Fehlbaum. And we had a really long process. And I must say the producers did a really great job, and I’m very grateful that they could gain ABC’s trust for the project.”
However, Geoffrey Mason was pivotal in ensuring the filmmakers could access all of McKay’s Munich clips.
One day while Fehlbaum was visiting CBS Sports, the director realized that Sean McManus, then CBS Sports chairman — he retired in April — was on the floor and that he was Jim McKay’s son.
“And I went to him and said, ‘Look, we have a project, we’d like footage of your father. Can I tell you more about it? Can we talk? Could you give us your blessing?’
“He is a very busy man, obviously. And then I quickly talked to him and good that I could talk to him face to face. And then I got half an hour to talk to him over Zoom. and he told me about their whole experience in Munich. He was a teenager and was there.
“And then I asked him again to help us and support us in the project to get the rights. And he did that. And I’m very thankful for that,” Fehlbaum says.
Much later on, Magaro also met with Mason — the man he would portray — and proceeded to coach him about everything that happened in the control room on the fateful day in Munich.
The actor also was invited into the CBS Sunday football control room. “I was really lucky, having Geoff behind this film, because he still has a lot of connections with reporting and television sports journalists. So I was invited into the CBS Sunday football room for several weeks, and I would go there and watch the producers and the production and the directors.” And being a Steelers fan, he was chuffed to get to meet former Steelers head coach Bill Cowher, now a CBS Sports NFL analyst.
Magaro would head to CBS Sports to “shadow them and watch what they were doing, go all over the CBS soundstage on the west side of Manhattan where they shoot it, see all the wires every which way and how it is that all this is comes from this little studio and is transmitted across the globe, and how you cut the story together from all these points of view.“
The actor was impressed watching the producers and directors, and it was “incredibly helpful watching these people and watching how smooth they are and how they just have an economy of language and it is just like its own thing. They become one organism, and everyone is so focused while they’re on air.”
His sessions with the sports broadcasters were to prove invaluable when shooting. “One day we found ourselves finding language that wasn’t in the script because we were actually calling the show as it went.“
I asked Magaro what it was like to whisper into Jim McKay’s ear, when we spoke in London where Magaro’s filming The Agency, the English-language version of The Bureau.
“I actually loved it.” he says. “And again, we’re so fortunate to have the actual footage, so it was strange. I’m watching him and he becomes my other actor, and it’s Jim McKay from the ’70s, and he is not talking to me, but I get to see how he reacts and temper how I’m saying it to him based on how he reacts. And it was actually a fun challenge to get to play with the ghost of Jim McKay.’
The crucial things that Mason shared with Magaro were that there was no time for him to think: ”We didn’t think. We just did. There was no time to think. You were just in the moment, and you had to keep that story going, and you had to keep something on the air. We couldn’t give them a blank screen. So that was our focus. When it was done, when you went back to the hotel is when you cried. That’s when you had a lot of drinks to erase the pain.”
Magaro ponders on how reporters cover major breaking-news stories.
In a sense, the Munich Olympics massacre was the first time terrorist assassins were able to manipulate the media.
“I don’t know how news reporters do it, “ says Magaro, shaking his head. “And oftentimes when I watch them cover a school shooting or a bombing or whatever, I sometimes feel like these reporters today maybe don’t have that moral compass anymore.
“Now it is just about getting the sensationalism out there,” he adds. “I like that Geoff is grappling with that because in my mind, Roone is maybe this modern twist of just get the story out, doesn’t matter. And then Ben’s [Chaplin] character Marv is a little more the angel on the shoulder. And I love that Geoff as a young man is trying to make the right decisions but also keep his career going and really battling it.”
Magaro raised the topic of mountaineer and caver Floyd Collins, who became “the first media sensation” in 1925 when he became stuck in a cave in what is now the Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. The Collins story became the inspiration for Billy Wilder’s biting 1951 picture Ace in the Hole.
Similarly, Sarsgaard, who portrays Arledge, spoke of the frenzied media circus surrounding Jessica McClure, better known as “Baby Jessica.” In 1987, the 18-month-old toddler became trapped in a shaft 22 feet below ground. It triggered a frantic rescue effort for the next 58 hours. “Remember that story, and the way that they just had 24/7, the lights and cameras on the well?
“A dead child could have been brought up from that well at any moment, and it gets everyone’s heart going. We’re such thrill junkies that I think instead of using it to understand things better, we’re using it as a kind of drug,” Sarsgaard argues.
The actor viewed lots of footage of Arledge, but he does not impersonate him; rather, he captures the essence of the man. As one who used to see Arledge around and about town at events whilst living in New York in the early 1980s, I felt Sarsgaard nails him, especially as a TV warrior who saw the opportunity in the awful tragedy in Munich.
He admits to being aware of the swagger. “Yeah, his swagger. Anyone who’s got a job like that has got some swagger. Right? I mean, you’re a leader.“
As an aside, Sarsgaard mentions that his daughter would be studying at Columbia University, “and when we first went to go visit, they put us all in the Roone Arledge Auditorium. Oh yeah. Always a man about town for sure.”
My view of September 5 is ruled by something Arledge says in the movie about following the story, wherever it goes — which, by the way, is the same mantra employed by Hansj?rg Wei?brich, the film’s editor.
“These were also very na?ve sort of times,” Sarsgaard says. “This is the first time, really, that a live feed was used to cover a news event. It was also one of the first times a live feed was used to cover a sporting event. So all they did was just turn on the cameras. And I mean, the thing that always fascinated me about the story is what does it do to the event itself when you put a camera on it? To me, it changes things. So the way that we participate, the way the journalists participate in the events that they cover, whether they like it or not. And that idea was something that I found really, really interesting. That there’s no way to be impartial. There’s no way not to affect the events even. I mean, in this particular situation, quite literally, the Palestinians that were taking the Israelis hostage were watching the live feed of the Germans coming up the outside of the building.”
The German side of the tragedy is tackled via encounters the ABC team has with the German officials, although it’s Marianne, Benesch’s character, who is our link to them.
“The idea with that character is to have someone that I guess is a kind of representative for that generation that is trying to acknowledge what happened but also try and move past it,” Benesch told us from Venice, where she is readying for Thursday night’s world premiere.
“I didn’t really know about this incident growing up,” she tells us, “but I think that’s also because I grew up without TV and my parents got their news from newspapers. We just didn’t have TV in our lives, so I suppose I later heard about it at some point in history lessons at school.”
When she grew up, she joked, “I went the opposite way. … I’m definitely sure that part of my fascination for film and TV does stem from the fact that I was not allowed to have it as a child, and I was fascinated by how it’s made.”
Benesch says that it took a while during rehearsals and via discussions on set to come up with the right tone for a film that deals with a tragedy that is being turned into entertainment; albeit one as splendidly made as September 5.
Tone is important because of what’s happening now in the Middle East, and there also are the sensitivities about Germany’s role in World War II .
There’s another vital moment where tone was to prove important.
I’m almost reluctant to mention it because it comes at the end of the film. It’s not really a spoiler. It’s something that emerges from a conversation Magaro’s Geoffrey Mason has with Marianne about what took place that day and Marianne wonders, bitterly, why did the cameras need to be there “to take a picture of it.”
Those words are delivered with such acidity and scorn that they made me sit up straight and ponder why one of the year’s best films has been pushed into a sidebar at the Venice Film Festival. Well, the film’s for sale. I just pray it gets into the right hands.
Should the cameras have been there in September 1972 to bring us the horrible news instantly? As a young teen, I watched as much as the BBC and ITV were broadcasting. And, yes, I caught a glimpse of Jim McKay — and, by the way, over in Washington, reporters at the Washington Post were investigating a break in at DNC headquarters at the Watergate.
The point is, I watched. I was riveted. The thrill of a big news story is exciting, I’m sorry to say. I’ve covered my share of them from way back when. I was thrilled to be involved. But, yes, once I got home I would sometimes wonder what I’d been doing there.
Over half a century later, Leonie Bensch is posing the ”big question” that September 5 is raising.
“Where is the line between reporting and exploiting?”
An announcement about the North American premiere of September 5 will be made Thursday.
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