In the early morning of September 6, 1972, the ABC Sports broadcast control room in Munich, West Germany went quiet. Led by a young Geoffrey Mason, a tense silence paralyzed the crew for a brief moment as they came to the stark realization that their earlier reporting of a successful hostage negotiation and the end of the Black September-instigated terrorist attack during the 1972 Olympics had been incorrect.
Mason, who had drawn the graveyard shift short straw that evening due to his relative greenness, hit the intercom button to speak into American sports journalist Jim McKay's ear: this was going to be a tough one, Jim, we were wrong, and the hostages have not been freed. In fact, all 11 hostages were now dead: two killed the morning prior in a hotel room inside Olympic Village, and nine that evening at Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base, where a shootout between the militant group and law enforcement took place.
As McKay uttered the words, "They're all gone," Mason took off his headset. What was meant to be an unremarkable night of Olympic coverage became a shift filled with Mason and his colleagues pondering questions like, "Can we show someone being shot on live television?"
"This moment is so present still in his mind. It was life-changing for him, career-changing," actor John Magaro tells Exclaim! during a video interview. In his latest film, September 5, directed by Tim Fehlbaum, Magaro portrays Mason at a defining moment in the young producer's life and a pivotal moment in world and television history.
While McKay, along with Toronto-born Peter Jennings, had been the de facto faces of the tragedy as the only broadcast team on the ground in Munich, three men — Mason, then-president of ABC Sports Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), and head of operations Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) — were the decision-makers behind the camera, weighing ethics against ratings in what would be the first televised terrorist attack.
September 5 provides an addendum of sorts to Steven Spielberg's 2005 film, Munich, which dramatized the terrorist attack itself. Fehlbaum's film takes the sole perspective of Mason and the broadcast team, navigating the unprecedented decisions before them. (Coincidentally, Magaro appears briefly in Munich as a background actor, unceremoniously uncredited.)
Given the gravity of the unfolding events within the film, unlike previous roles where Magaro portrayed characters based on real-life people (Lansky, The Big Short, Big George Foreman), the actor approached Mason with less focus on perfecting physical mannerisms and speech patterns. Rather, Magaro honed in on Mason's place within the control room.
"The pressure in this wasn't about being Geoff; it was about being authentic to his experience. That was very important to Geoff — getting the tone right, what they went through, honouring those people who were in that room and honouring the victims," he explains.
He adds, "We didn't want it to be Hollywood: us judging, reaching for things that weren't supposed to happen or sacrificing things that did happen."
Today, Mason is considered one of American sports television's most accomplished executives, having been inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 2010 after an illustrious career spanning four decades. Although it'd be easy to assume Mason's memory of the events may be slightly blurred given the amount of time passed and how early the Munich Olympics were in his career, Magaro is adamant that such assumptions are misguided.
"This is a singular day. If you talk to Geoff Mason about other events down the road, you could talk about mixed perspectives or things like that, but this wasn't the case," Magaro insists, likening Mason's experience to how our generation so vividly recalls 9/11. "Sometimes, you have these moments that are just indelibly marked on you. I think that's what it was for Geoff."
The strongest moments of the film come from the argument between Mason, Arledge and Bader over what McKay should report and what interviews should air. The issues discussed among the men draw poignant parallels to contemporary journalism: against a new technological landscape, prioritizing being first over being accurate takes on new meaning. This significance is not lost on the film or Magaro.
"This is a moment in history where sensationalism trumped what it meant to be an ethical journalist," Magaro says. "We're not being delicate about that. They were just doing their job, but it's not about pulling punches. It's about being as authentic and real to what happened as possible."
Because of this desire for authenticity, September 5 becomes a powerful reminder as to the standards society placed upon journalism — and, more importantly, why those lofty expectations were once deemed necessary.