Lessons from the Script: 'September 5' and an Inside View of Tragedy

A gun raised in the air goes off with a bang.

This is the first image in the Golden Globe-nominated thriller September 5. It turns out to be harmless—the starting signal for a swimming race—yet the gun also foreshadows the violence to come.

Directed by Tim Fehlbaum, September 5 dramatizes the heartbreaking events at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, where a militant Palestinian group burst into the Olympic Village and took the Israeli team hostage. After an hours-long standoff, eleven Israeli athletes and coaches died, as did most of their captors and a German police officer.

Several films have covered these events, from documentaries to dramas such as director Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005). Yet instead of going wide, September 5 narrows the perspective, much like that closeup opening shot. It focuses solely on the ABC Sports crew who found themselves working a story that forever changed broadcast television.

“In a time where everyone has a camera and a TV in their pocket, and that we can livestream a lot of things at any time, I think it’s interesting to take a step back and see how for the first time a tragic event like this was on live television,” Fehlbaum has said.

Films based on true events present a challenge for screenwriters who might struggle with how much context or backstory to put on the page. While this varies depending on the project and the feedback, the screenplay for September 5 offers a few lessons on how to integrate exposition and use an audience’s expectations to heighten the drama and tension.

Immersive Research and a Clear Point of View

Fehlbaum co-wrote the screenplay with Moritz Binder and Alex David. The filmmaker, who was born in Switzerland, has shared in interviews how he attended film school in Munich, where student housing occupies the Olympic Village where the tragedy occurred.

“In that city, this tragedy after all these years feels very present,” Fehlbaum has said.

The filmmakers’ copious research and the production design help bring to life the ABC Sports studio—with its bulky cameras, film canisters, tape reels, handheld radios, and nests of cables—that at the time sat about 100 yards away from the hostage situation.

In the script and the film, only a handful of scenes occur outside the studio. All the action otherwise occurs in the control booth, hallway, or other rooms, a contained perspective that invests an audience. This viewpoint also adds suspense, doling out information almost as if in real-time and helping viewers empathize with the characters’ stress and adrenaline.

“I wanted it to have this claustrophobic feeling and shoot it as if we ourselves would be a documentary crew or a broadcast team in that room who are observing those people observing the monitors,” Fehlbaum has said.

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A Writing Voice That Includes Asides

The script for September 5 is full of writing that crackles, showing off an omniscient writing voice that doesn’t hesitate to add some attitude or guidance for readers. Geoff Mason (John Magaro), the junior producer who winds up coordinating the coverage once the hostage situation occurs, enters the film with Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” on a car radio and donning a pre-tied tie. The script says he’s “determined to keep climbing the ladder. He’s energetic. Smart. And yes, a bit arrogant, but his enthusiasm is so contagious, that you can’t help but like him.”

The script describes the broadcast booth as “the heart of a huge machine,” albeit a messy one. A “cloud of nicotine” follows one character down a hallway, and Geoff scrounges up coffee at a “table with lousy catering.”

Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the president of ABC Sports at the time, first enters the script as a voice at the back of the broadcast booth during the opening swimming match. He tells the cameras to focus first on the defeated German swimmer, then push in on exuberant American medalist Mark Spitz.

Roone is “a visionary storyteller who knows how to captivate his audience. He speaks quietly and rarely, so his words have power. There is, however, something fragile about him,” the script’s description reads.

More of Roone’s personality pops up later, when ABC Sports Operations VP Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) argues against aiming live cameras at the apartment where the hostages are. What if the gunmen shoot someone on the air?

“Okay, okay. Hallway,” Roone says, indicating he wants to talk to Bader in private.

“Roone hates being second-guessed in public,” the script notes.

Let Readers Fill in the Blanks

In researching the events, the filmmakers gained access to ABC’s original tapes, including footage and audio. This enables the editors to integrate real people recorded at the studio into the film, creating verisimilitude.

For instance, Geoff and the others cut to legendary sportscaster Jim McKay, who at one point interviewed an Israeli coach who escaped the gunmen. Veteran journalist Peter Jennings provides voiceover as he did that day through phone calls from the scene, observing from a nearby balcony. (Benjamin Walker plays Jennings in brief moments at the studio as Jennings heads to and from the scene.)

During these moments, the script doesn’t state outright where the archive footage or recordings are, likely because Fehlbaum as the director knew that already. (It sets any dialogue broadcast from these recordings in italics, though.)

Treating all of this as contemporaneous further enhances the urgency and involves the audience.

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“We know what happened at Munich, yet we find ourselves living through the events as if their outcome was unwritten. … [T]he incorporation is so thorough, so constant, that the movie starts to feel like a conversation with the past,” noted New York magazine in its review, calling the film “[t]ight as a drum and almost nauseatingly suspenseful.”

The script also trusts readers to have enough foreknowledge to recognize certain images without describing them in depth, such as the black-and-white shot of the masked gunman on the athletes’ balcony. Instead, it evokes feeling, such as the chill of seeing this image for the first time, like so:

Then a hectic SWISH PAN -- ZOOM to 31’s balcony door just as it opens -- a figure steps out -- so blurry he almost looks like a ghost --

Then the camera focuses on an image that would become the day’s most famous one.

An image that would be burnt into the collective consciousness. A symbol of this atrocity. An icon of terror:

The masked man on the balcony.

All eyes are fixed on the monitor. Fascinated and unsettled simultaneously.

No one can speak.

After a catastrophic shootout ends the hostage situation, the perspective changes again, starting wide with the ABC Sports ensemble, stunned and tearful as McKay gently told viewers what happened by famously saying, “Our worst fears have been realized tonight.”

Then it narrows, bringing home the emotion and the sad significance: This was the first broadcast terrorist act.

On the final pages, Geoff steps outside the studio, almost twenty-four hours since his shift and this ordeal began.

“The night is clear like yesterday,” the script notes. “But the world is different.”

Then he drops into his rental car and closes his eyes.