O n Sept. Mason was working in a control room for ABC Sports in Munich while 12 hostages, including several members of the Israeli Olympic delegation, were being held in a building nearby. Directed by Tim Fehlbaum, the drama recounts how journalists broadcast the act of terror live to millions.
And the film One Day in September won the Oscar for best documentary feature. But unlike those films, September 5 is, like Spotlight , The Post , and She Said in recent years, a journalism movie at heart. Mason, one of the producers calling the shots that day, played in the movie by Past Lives actor John Magaro , consulted on the script co-written by Fehlbaum, Moritz Binder, and Alex David.
The hostage crisis took place five years after Israel had demonstrated its military superiority in the Six-Day War, and Palestinian militants relied on hijackings and terrorist attacks to draw attention to their cause. On that late-summer day in , the Palestinian militant group known as the Black September Organization called for the release of prisonersβsome of whom had been imprisoned for years in Israeli and German jails, threatening to kill one hostage every hour until their demand was met.
They wanted to look like the new, joyful Germanyβtransparent, democratic, open. Mason was just one of several journalists who expected to be covering sports that day in Munich but were suddenly called upon to redirect their training toward reporting on an act of terrorism. One colleague, Marvin Bader played by Ben Chaplin in the movie , was a Jewish American journalist for whom an assignment in the country where the Holocaust took place brought deep discomfort.
The drama ended with the deaths of the remaining nine in a botched rescue attempt that night, at an airfield. These young people were just trying to represent their country and to pursue excellence in front of the world, and they were deprived of that opportunity. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, Israel responded by launching air attacks and bombings against Palestine Liberation Organization targets in Lebanon and Syria. After the historic broadcast, Mason continued to work as a producer in sports broadcasting, accumulating a total of nine Olympic Games and half a dozen FIFA World Cups under his belt.
