The murderous attack by Palestinian terrorists on the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics was unprecedented in many ways. The new drama “September 5” explores one of the less-considered ways it altered our world: It changed forever the way news outlets cover breaking news. Peter Sarsgaard stars as Roone Arledge, the man responsible for the way the story unfolded on television sets around the world. At the time, Arledge was president of ABC Sports, which was in Munich to broadcast the Olympics. According to the film, when the terrorists took over the Israeli rooms in the Olympic Village, Arledge successfully argued with the network’s top executives that his sports crew should cover the story. The news crew, he pointed out, was half a world away while his team was right there. “I think there was a notion that he was trying to step into the news, and that the news was more serious than sports, right? And that the obligation was to be faithful to the events as they happen, no matter what — that telling the story as it unfolded was the only way to go,” Sarsgaard says.
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Peter Sarsgaard as Roone Arledge, left, addresses the ABC Sports production team in “September 5.” The drama tells the story of Palestinian terrorists’ attack on the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics through the eyes of the ABC Sports crew that was there to cover the games. The Emmy-nominated actor spent his early childhood in the St. Louis area. He was born at Scott Air Force Base, where his father was stationed. Later, when his father went to work for Monsanto, the family moved to Creve Coeur, Olivette and Clayton (the answer to the St. Louis Question is Glenridge Elementary School in Clayton). Later, he returned to the area to attend Washington University, graduating in 1993 with a degree in history. Sarsgaard, 53, is married to the actress Maggie Gyllenhaal. Their oldest daughter lives in a dorm room above the Roone Arledge Cinema at Columbia University. Gyllenhaal’s brother is Jake Gyllenhaal, with whom Sarsgaard co-starred in “Jarhead,” one of his biggest hits, a 2005 film about the Gulf War. He made his first big splash in 1999 as the killer of a trans man in “Boys Don’t Cry.” Hilary Swank won the Oscar for best actress as his victim in the film. Sarsgaard won his first Golden Globe nomination with a starring turn in “Shattered Glass,” a 2003 drama about a real-life journalism scandal. Though he often acts in smaller films, many of them highly regarded such as the 2009 coming-of-age drama “An Education,” he also appears in box office-friendly action films such as “Flightplan,” from 2005, and the 2010 hit “Knight and Day,” with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. When not in front of a camera, he can usually be found on a stage. He has performed in several Chekhov plays, along with “Hamlet” — he played Hamlet — and many other works. “September 5” takes place over about 22 hours, almost all of it set in and around the ABC Sports control room in Munich. The decision to present it like that helps to focus the story, but it also added an element of controlled chaos to the process of shooting it. “The filmmaking was almost like having a really rambunctious documentary film crew in the room with you all the time, with two cameras, two focus-pullers, two people wrangling electric and then all these other actors ducking under the camera and moving around,” Sarsgaard says. It was difficult, but it also reflected the circumstances and attitudes of the movie’s subjects themselves. “A lot of people seem to like this movie, and I think a lot of it has to do with that human element of coming together to get through a crisis,” he says. During the 1972 Olympics hostage situation, the ABC Sports crew had to decide immediately about how they were going to cover the news. Geoffrey Mason, a 32-year-old coordinating producer played by John Magaro, had the brilliant idea to move a heavy live camera outside their building so they could broadcast an image of the Olympic Village as everything was happening. That idea — a decision made on the fly — changed forever the way television covers events. But it prompts a moral discussion inside the control room: Should they broadcast everything live when, at any moment, a hostage may be killed in front of the cameras? And what if the hostages’ families were watching, as they almost certainly were? Things have changed now, in part because of the innovations created during the Olympics hostage crisis. “We watched Daniel Pearl get beheaded online, we had a congressman who shot himself on live TV. We see people in the process of dying, and images coming all the time from wars going on in Ukraine and Gaza. It’s become very common. And I wonder if the saturation of violence has made us more empathetic or more inured to it,” Sarsgaard says. One of the most memorable aspects of the ABC Sports coverage of the Israeli athletes’ hostage crisis was the cool-yet-empathetic demeanor of Jim McKay, who served as the impromptu anchor. McKay was best known at the time as the host of “ABC’s Wild World of Sports,” and his performance under pressure was as solidly professional as anything the regular news anchors could have done. The movie’s director, Tim Fehlbaum, chose not to have an actor portray McKay; instead, he used the actual broadcast footage of McKay giving the news throughout the crisis. “That’s the thing that made me want to do the film,” Sarsgaard says. “I looked at the footage and I said, ‘That’s what integrity looks like.’”
What is it about a good news-gathering movie? The pleasure of watching skilled, doggedly determined people coming together to tell a story, to shape the chaos of the world into something comprehensible makes for evergreen cinematic fodder, from “All the President’s Men” to “The Insider” to “Spotlight.” Add “September 5” to that list, which tackles the slippery madness of live television ...
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