This is just a short post to recommend the Oscar-nominated movie, September 5. I watched it last night, and I was on the edge of my seat from beginning to end despite being very familiar with the historic event on which the movie was based.
First, let me also recommend not re-familiarizing yourself with the tragic events of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. In my opinion, knowing (or remembering) as few details as possible is the perfect frame of mind to have when watching this thriller (yes, thriller!). Do your googling after the film. You’ll thank me later.
Filmmakers have tackled the sad events surrounding the Munich Olympics several times before, most notably One Day in September (1999), which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2000, and Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated Munich (2005). But this new dramatization manages to give a whole new angle on events by presenting it through the eyes of the ABC Sports team who end up covering the crisis despite their relative lack of experience with serious news. Initially they have to fight off attempts by the ABC news division to wrest control of the story from them, but through the insistence of Roone Arledge (played by Peter Sarsgaard), the executive running the show in Munich, and the simple fact of their proximity to unfolding events, they maintain control.
Add to this classic underdog story Geoffrey Mason (played by John Magaro), who ran the control room and was himself relatively new to the job. Despite the array of characters, Mason ends up being the story’s chief protagonist. His rapid-fire decision-making and improvisation kept me on the edge of my seat, especially knowing that failures of all sorts threatened the team: would they keep the story? would the German police stop their broadcast? would technical limitations prevent them from doing the story justice?
This last one surprisingly is one of the most interesting aspects of the film for me. In some ways it’s the technology of 1972 that’s the main character of September 5. Covering a hostage crisis on live TV hadn’t been done before, and what seems now, 53 years later, like clunky tech had to be heavily MacGyvered into doing what the crew needed it to do.
The attention to detail is incredible! We watch film being developed, wires being soldered, chunky light-up buttons being stabbed by impatient fingers, toggles being flipped, and reel-to-reel tape machines being fed. Each is just a seconds-long glimpse into a vanished era, but together they vividly bring to life the 1972 setting and its technical limitations.
Perhaps my favorite peek into the cramped ABC studios was the tiny room where a female technician or graphic artist filmed a black board with white plastic letters of the kind that a restaurant uses to advertise their daily specials. This was the way they superimposed captions and logos onto the TV transmission!
From rolling a heavy behemoth of a TV camera out onto a grassy berm outside the studio to get a view of the Olympic Village to taping film canisters to the torso of a technician to surreptitiously supply a hidden camera crew inside the athlete dormitories, the technical challenges are numerous and dealing with each one becomes a triumph.
There’s plenty of character drama as well, including heavy discussions of the ethics of showing real-world violence on live television. I highly recommend September 5 as both an intense drama that is fun to watch and a depiction of a historic moment in time that’s not only important to know but highly relevant to the current state of the world.
Unfortunately.
Watch it and let me know what you think.
About Me: My name is Frank Swanson, and I’m an editor and technical writer. I have a lot of different interests: writing, reading, history, science, science-fiction, movies, philosophy, religion, and self-improvement. I’m particularly interested in stories and how they work. Whether it’s a short story, a novel, a movie or a TV show, if it does something interesting or that deeply affects me, I want to examine how it does what it does.
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