‘September 5,’ which follows an ABC News broadcast team covering the 1972 Olympic hostage crisis, is in select theaters now
Peter Sarsgaard’s latest movie looks back at a turning point in live television history.
The actor’s new thriller September 5 depicts the Israeli hostage crisis at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany from the perspective of American sports journalists. Sarsgaard, 53, tells PEOPLE the film, from director Tim Fehlbaum, powerfully recounts ABC News’ difficult decision to roll cameras throughout the incident.
“When I came across the script, I was really blown away by the fact that these sports journalists had to — it’s not just like sports journalists covering news,” Sarsgaard says. “Even for news journalists, the ethics of dealing with this live camera and the decisions that were being made would’ve been challenging for them as well.”
Sarsgaard stars in September 5 as former ABC News executive Roone Arledge, who was overseeing the network’s Olympics coverage in Berlin when a Palestinian militant group, known as the Black September Organization, killed two members of Israel’s Olympic team and took nine others hostage at the athletes’ village. ABC News was broadcasting live from nearby, close enough that Arledge and his team made a then-unprecedented decision to train its cameras on the very apartment where hostages were held throughout the attack.
The hostage incident resulted in the death of 11 Israelis, five Palestinians and a West German officer.
Peter Sarsgaard on Dec. 11, 2024.
Theo Wargo/Getty
“The problem with rolling live news is that they make mistakes all the time and then have to correct themselves later because real objectivity requires not just the distance of space, but I think time,” Sarsgaard says. “As much as we want to know the fastest, that’s some desire that doesn’t deserve satiating.”
Sarsgaard says he spoke to a number of people who knew Arledge, who died at 71 in 2002, and read the two chapters Arledge dedicated to the Munich Olympics incident in his posthumously released book Roone: A Memoir.
“There was something about the way that he led, from what I gathered about his leadership style, [it] was strong, but he was not a screamer,” Sarsgaard says of Arledge’s dedication to staying in the television studio throughout the ordeal, as depicted in the film. “That way of leading by example on some level. ‘I’m still going to be here. We’re all going to be here, we’re all going to work on it every single moment,’ you know?”
Peter Sarsgaard on Nov. 19, 2024.
Slaven Vlasic/Getty
At the center of Sarsgaard’s new film is the decision to show displays of extreme violence on live television, an ethical question nationally televised broadcasts had not fully confronted by 1972. “We all have to admit that we do have some taste for violence. That’s why we’re obsessed with it,” he says.
September 5 is in select theaters now.
