On a day when the world woke up to a nightmare in progress, they were in the control room

The morning of Sept. 5, 1972, began like any other for producer Geoffrey Mason and his ABC Sports team in Munich: another day of capturing the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” at the Summer Olympic Games. What to watch this holiday season: ‘Dear Santa,’ musical variety shows and a cute little owl From Billie Eilish to Metallica: 10 must-see concerts this holiday season “At one point, the doors of the control room busted open and the German police came in, armed with machine guns, and told us to turn the camera off,” Mason, now 84 and the only surviving member of the core ABC team, recalled on a recent afternoon over Zoom from his home in Naples, Fla. “That was a seminal moment because we realized what we were doing was having real impact.” Hours later, the situation reached a tragic climax when a failed rescue attempt at a nearby airfield led to the deaths of all the hostages, along with five of the attackers and a West German police officer. While earlier films like the Oscar-winning 1999 documentary “One Day in September” and Steven Spielberg’s 2005 “Munich” have chronicled the events from a broader perspective, director Tim Fehlbaum confines the entire story to the claustrophobic control room, with John Magaro and Peter Sarsgaard heading up the ensemble cast as Mason and ABC Sports president Roone Arledge, respectively, as the ABC team grapples with unprecedented ethical dilemmas and technical hurdles under intense pressure. “I liked the challenge of telling the story just from that room with the cameras as the only eye to the outside world,” says the Swiss-born Fehlbaum, who previously helmed the 2021 sci-fi thriller “Tides.” “I would never compare myself with Hitchcock, but it’s almost like ‘Rear Window.’ Ultimately, it became a movie about the power of images.” A scene in the control room from the movie “September 5.” “September 5,” which has earned strong buzz since its back-to-back premieres at the Venice and Telluride film festivals, has only become more timely in the wake of last year’s Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks on Israel that sparked the ongoing war in Gaza. Magaro as ABC Sports producer Geoffrey Mason in the movie “September 5.” While “September 5” has assumed new, and not entirely welcome, resonance since Oct. 7, its meticulous production was years in the making.