Hampered by Prolonged Rollout, 'September 5' Presents Riveting Drama of Munich '72 Attack

Critics wrote heaps of praise for Tim Fehlbaum's film "September 5."

For this viewer -- a 1973-born "Munich Olympic Baby" who's been studying the city's 1972 massacre as a journalism undergrad and Games historian during 30 years since college -- the film proved excellent, on par with its predecessors "Munich" by Stephen Spielberg and Kevin Macdonald's outstanding documentary "One Day In September" (on their own merits all three works are "must see"). 

A major asset is Fehlbaum's new perspective on the terrorist attack portrayed through the ABC Sports control room operated adjacent to the scene of the crime: 31 Connollystrasse in the Olympic Village, an apartment built above the road and esplanade named for the first modern Olympic champion. 

Another strength: Whether the hostages' fate is already known, or moviegoers are naive to Jim McKay's unscripted punctuation on the Olympic Family's saddest day ("They're all gone"), all "September 5" viewers seemed captivated by the gripping drama in real life story that takes little time to build tension. 

Before sunrise on Day 11 of Heitere Spiele ("The Cheerful Games"), TV producer Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) arrives to prepare for another long shift of sports coverage. After viewers learn the studio layout and a few of its players -- such as legend-in-the-making Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) and composite characters like a German-English-Hebrew interpreter Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) -- a pin drop could be heard once gunfire emerges from the neighboring Olympic Village. What follows is a mostly accurate though condensed unfurling of Mason & Company navigating what became the world's first live broadcast of a terrorist attack. 

"September 5" succeeds in sticking to the true story, with minimal detours of creative license. It's forgivable, for instance, that in a lighter moment the control room tracks their disguised-as-Olympian colleague talking his way into the athlete village as seen from their Volkswagen Beetle-sized camera atop Munich's Olympic Tower (about a half mile away). 

More preposterous but laughable: guns drawn Munich polizei storming the broadcast center, prompting Arledge to exclaim "Get the fuck out of my studio!" 

The only other noticeable fiction involved the screenwriter paraphrasing IOC President Avery Brundage with his statement "the Games must go on" a day early (in real life, this quote was delivered the next day at the Munich Olympic Stadium memorial service for the lost Team Israel members). 

Viewers will appreciate the authentic Munich posters, accreditation mockups, team uniforms and other tuned-to-detail touches thanks to the methodical work of costume and set designers who also used actual equipment of 1972 -- from rotary phones and Rolodexes to vintage TV studio monitors and cameras -- to painstakingly create the broadcast set and Arledge's temporary offices. 

The soundtrack gives a nod to previous Munich-centric films with Apollo 100's "Jesu Joy" setting the early-70's tone just like in Macdonald's documentary. There's lots to love about German composer Lorenz Dangel's techno-centered score, with the strings of "Helicopters" played as Howard Cosell defines "shalom" for nearly a billion TV viewers, each note foreshadowing Team Israel's fate at Furstenfeldbruck. 

Another favorite line quipped in response to Mason's team instructions: "You got it, Kubrick!" 

The best unexpected surprise of "September 5" is that, unlike Spielberg and Macdonald, Fehlbaum does not cut off McKay after famously uttering "they're all gone." For the first time in over 30 years of studying this global event, we learn what else McKay had to say after "our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized."

"They're all gone. It's all over. The Israeli Olympic Team is destroyed, much of it. But what will happen to the Games of the XXth Olympiad? None of us know what will happen ... to the course of world history."

For all the film's strengths, Paramount's promotion and release plan proved to be a disappointing head-scratcher. 

After securing distribution last fall and setting limited release in New York and LA during November, according to industry reports, the studio pushed back wider release to December then January, then again when the locked-in mid-January date finally arrived. 

Frustrated by a lack of answers from Paramount's unresponsive national media relations team and vague responses from more local reps when asked "where is this film actually screening?" (as it was nowhere near Atlanta), I reached out to two New York Times reporters who replied with related insights.

Lead critic Manohla Dargis, who scribed The Times' Critics Pick praise of the film, stated distribution wasn't her bag while offering the Oscar factor was likely in play.

"Once the nominations are announced [viewers] should have some clarity on the release," she said. "I hope that you can see it in a theater."

Fortunately, by that time, I had seen it at a special preview screening, but friends in places low and high were still asking "where is September 5?"

Dargis' West coast colleague Brooks Barnes, for which film distribution is his bag/beat, seconded the Oscar timing theory while adding that some recent flubs and failures of other Paramount releases, combined with an array of recent or upcoming corporate changes, may have been in play, or they just didn't know what to do with the topics the film presents. At least my misery was in good company for lack of response from Paramount PR.

"I sent a query, and if I get an answer, I'll let you know," wrote Barnes. 

Not surprisingly, that was the end of that. 

Even with an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay, within a week of its very limited nationwide release, Paramount perplexingly pulled the critically acclaimed film out of the few U.S. theaters that had it, later rushing it to streaming by early February. 

Paramount's team apparently was so unsure what to do with "September 5" they didn't even add it to their own Paramount + service. 

My grade of their distribution plan: D minus. 

And the question emerges: To what extent was this wutend oder enttauscht for Fehlbaum?

"September 5" is worth the search and price to view it where it is available -- as of this mid-February post, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Plex, Prime Video and Row8 have the film streaming in the $9.99 to $19.99 range. Watch it. 

And if you're lucky enough to find it on the big screen, take it from Dargis' advice and get thee to the cinema. 

Images via Paramount's "September 5" press materials

A History of the 1984 Winter Games (Book Review)

Sometimes it feels as though nobody's reading the blog.

No matter the occasional click-tracker upticks, the positive Blogspot stats, or meager ad revenue (did I mention meager?), the big fat 'zero' in the comments section stings when on the brain of an online writer.

But every once in while, out of the blue, an email arrives from a reader acknowledging your work, and these moments of reassurance** keep you typing.

One such email arrived earlier this year from Jason Vuic, an author and historian with a new nonfiction book titled "The Sarajevo Olympics - A History of the 1984 Winter Games" published by University of Massachusetts Press. What a great read!

For context, before reading Vuic's text my knowledge of the Sarajevo Olympics was decent but filled with holes. When they lit the Olympic cauldron in Yugoslavia, for instance, I was watching the ceremony on a massive box TV at my childhood home in Edmond, Okla., with Jim McCay and other ABC Sports commentators as the viewer guides.

Games memories from that fifth-grade winter also include a screen filled with perfect 6.0 scores for figure skaters, a terrible hockey program from Team USA, bobsled crashes and a decent ski run or two for American downhill athletes. That was also the winter Games during which the cartoon 'Animalympics' aired on cable, viewed twice at a neighbor's living room.

But most of the proper nouns from Sarajevo's Olympics did not stick with me. And in spite of reading Peter Ueberroth's book about producing the Los Angeles Olympics months later (in which some references to Yugoslavia travel appear), I never gave much thought to how the Sarajevo Games became a reality, nor what challenges blocked the organizer's road to success.

Vuic's book perfectly filled in the blanks and then some.

Readers of "The Sarajevo Olympics" will find a narrative in two main parts: Background/Organization and Games-Time Details. I appreciated the one-page izgovor vodič (pronunciation guide) to help with accents from the written Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language, and in the acknowledgements Vuic notes the book project enjoyed support in the form of a grant from the Olympic Studies Centre in Lausanne, Switzerland (hometown for the International Olympic Committee).

Vuic's Games-related labor of love began in 2010. In his words via his first email to me, "I'm a Yugoslav historian by training, but traveled to Lausanne on an IOC fellowship  in 2010 and visited libraries and museums in Los Angeles, Lake Placid and Sarajevo to research the book. Needless to say, I have become, in the process, an Olympic nut."

Welcome to the club, Jason.

I learned Vuic's initial published text was "The Yugo -- The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History" which is now in queue on my library reserves list. If this first book is similar to "The Sarajevo Olympics," it is bound to be filled with interesting details and quirky back stories from a blend of news articles, official reports, broadcast archives and interviews with the people who lived the history.

I enjoyed learning about the Yugoslav personalities who pursued the Winter Games hosting enterprise as early as the 1960s when their government started investing in tourism. Taking inspiration from a 1968 tourism study in which Olympic possibilities were mentioned, in 1971 a professor named Ljubiša Zečević visited Lausanne with many questions and ideas. In the years just after this visit Zečević reported back cautious optimism for pursuing the Games given many issues faced by the region around Sarajevo (notably, lack of big sport event hosting experience and, for some residents, lack of plumbing).

Vuic mentions one lighthearted message from Zečević: "Go ahead and submit the bid, but pray to God we [don't] get it!"

By 1977 a formal bid team known as the "Preparation Committee" took shape, As word spread of the Sarajevo bid, some American reporters opined, describing the city as Eastern Europe's answer to Fort Wayne, Indiana, "The Pittsburgh of Yugoslavia" and as scenic as Harrisburg, Pa. Vuic continues to detail how a unique blend of people, politicking and strokes of great timing a luck aligned just in time for the May 1978 IOC host voting which placed Sapporo, Japan, and Gothenburg, Sweden, behind victorious Sarajevo.

In other background and organization chapters, Vuic details the organizing committee's "vast" needs in the wake of the winning bid: They needed, among many things, a skating rink, a bobsleigh run, Olympic villages (one for athletes, another to house world media) and more hotels.

Green things (U.S. currency) and how the committee earned funding proved to be another complicated and heavy matter.

On the lighter side, I learned the Sarajevo mascot, a wolf named Vučko, got more votes than a weasel or a lamb. And I learned more about the pre-Games test events, some slushy other blizzard-blown, that reinforced skepticism for a successful 1984 gathering.

It fascinated me to find that more than 3,000 workers from "Communist Youth Brigades" volunteered in venue construction. One photo in "The Sarajevo Olympics" shows four teenage women sans shoes and hard hats at work breaking ground on some unidentified venue.

Vuic's book also filled in the blanks for me on the athlete stories from Sarajevo. I enjoyed reading of the perfect-scoring ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean (a fan letter from the USA to IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch provided a great intro to this section about the duo who scored perfect 6.0s to a song from the movie "10"), and more-familiar-to-me figure skaters Katerina Witt and Scott Hamilton.

I didn't know a thing about "Wild" Bill Johnson (a.k.a. nasenbohrer), nor did I recall that ABC Sports engaged a popular singer named Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. (a.k.a. John Denver) to provide commentary and a theme song for their Sarajevo broadcasts (see it to believe it on the video at the base of this post).

There's also some great notes about "the agony of defeat" ski jump athlete Vinko Bogotaj and his connection to Sarajevo.

It was fun to learn of hometown hero Jure Franko's downhill race, and to find that the original goals of inspiring regional tourism were achieved, if only for one season, before Sarajevo became a geographic center point for the breakup of Yugoslavia. Vuic shares other post-Games history including notes from Samaranch's proclamation and visit during the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics, and how several '84 venues became battle scenes during the war of the early 1990s.

Vuic is now working on an NFL-topical book titled "The Yucks" regarding the early history of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Here's hoping he'll return to Olympic writing through future projects as "The Sarajevo Olympics" is a fun and informative read, and it would be great to see more five-ringed titles from this author.

Photos via this link, this Herald Review link, this gallery and from Jason Vuic's website.

**Another welcomed 'moment of reassurance' recently arrived 

with the total readership for Olympic Rings And Other Things 

topping 125,000 clicks as of spring 2015. Thanks for reading!

A Day In D.C.

This past weekend I tacked on an extra day after a Friday business presentation in Alexandria, Va., and visited two favorite sites in Washington, D.C.

Twenty-four hours in downtown D.C. also afforded me an accidental visit to the "Hinckley Hilton" as my Mapquest printout directed me to the wrong hotel on Friday afternoon (though the mile-long walk on Connecticut Street was nice, and helped me locate a wonderful Thai restaurant for dinner).

On Saturday, my first tourism stop was to the National Portrait Gallery. I love this place -- always learn a lot with every visit. Any my three-hours inside yielded an introduction or reintroduction to some Folk Art masters, a surprise Georgia O'Keefe skyline painting from 1932 (gorgeous), and a peek at the Ronald Reagan installation which was a new addition since my most recent visit.

Though there were no direct Olympic references spotted, some of the Reagan-era portraits reminded me of his role in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Opening Ceremony; also, the Folk Art of Alabama/Georgia fame, Howard Finster, brought back notions of his creations for the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games.

Another new addition (I think) was the enclosure of the museum's courtyard, which is now covered by a wonderful modern skylight.

The afternoon marked a return to the Newseum; my first visit was on Thanksgiving 2001, at the original location in Arlington, Va., and it was awesome to finally experience the Newseum's new home on Pennsylvania Ave.

Only moments after picking up the tickets, a trifecta of Olympic connections to the Newseum emerged. First, there is a "journalism in sport" film that brought to light several historic images from coverage of Olympians and the Olympics, from Muhammad Ali and Wilma Rudolph to more recent Olympic images from Barcelona, Atlanta, Athens and Beijing. The Olympic coverage was punctuated with Jim McKay's somber announcement "They're all gone" referencing the victims of the Munich Olympic hostage crisis carried live for more than 18 hours on ABC Sports.

Just outside the theatre for the sports film, I enjoyed the temporary "photos of the year" exhibition featuring several Olympic images of 2010 including the Vancouver Games and the first Youth Olympic Games at Singapore.

The third Olympic reference in the museum was in the video archive, where several Games' key clips are available via touch screen.

I was impressed with the new Newseum's outdoor overlook for Pennsylvania Ave., with commanding views of the Capitol Dome. Inside this viewing area they display a timeline of the week of Hurricane Katrina and how the news media (specifically print) covered the national tragedy (it did seem to me that more video highlights would enhance this gallery).

Of course, 9/11 and its upcoming 10th anniversary are prominently displayed with a headlines and video experience built around remains of the World Trade Center's radio tower. Somber, yes. Informative, yes. It was also interesting to read of many journalists who died in the line of duty. I found the Newseum also kept things current with an obviously new display featuring the last edition of the now-defunct Murdoch tabloid of London.

The one Achilles' Heel of the Newseum is its lack of social media displays, which were tucked behind several decades worth of historic broadcast coverage. It seems to me the Newseum has a real opportunity to inform its visitors of the rapid-fire changes underway through delivery of online news. They covered the basics -- would love to return to the Newseum with a new section or wing on social media in the last decade, big online news successes and flops.

Looking forward to another DC visit in the months ahead.

Shalom, Atlanta Jewish Film Festival

A few of my Edelman colleagues are working with the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, which kicked off activities in "The ATL" earlier this week with a fun party at Fox Sports Grill followed by a premiere screening at Regal Cinemas at Atlantic Station. After wrapping up an afternoon of press interviews with client Cirque du Soleil (this Edelman client pitched their big top at the same site), I enthusiastically joined the film festival fun for their opening night.

This year's Festival includes the "first time outside France" debut of "Hello, Goodbye," a romantic comedy starring Gérard Depardieau (a.k.a. The Big ... French ... OAF! from "Greencard") as a Paris gynecologist whose wife requests a holiday in Israel to celebrate their new "empty nest" status from the marriage of their only son.

Upon arriving in Tel Aviv, it's clear she is looking for a longer-term relocation (and renewed faith for them both, after decades of swearing off their Jewish roots), and chaos ensues (well, sort of) after all their belongings from the move are lost at sea. It was a sweet story with a few cringe-inducing scenes involving the 50+ Depardieau character signing up for a date with a mohel (ouch!). If you can find it, this film is worth a look.

I'm looking forward to several other films in the festival, starting with the new documentary "Run For Your Life" regarding the creator of the New York City Marathon (disclosure: Edelman client). Apparently an Olympian is supposed to appear at the Q&A for the screening during the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival (will post more when confirmed). The trailer hints that Olympic champion Frank Shorter (listen to this outstanding Shorter recording from NPR), and Olympic commentator Jim McKay, are among those with cameos on the big screen.

There is also a William H. Macy comedy titled "Bart Got A Room" that looks priceless.

These days a flood of great films are on my "to be screened" list, starting with "Gran Torino" and the Golden Globe winner "Slumdog Millionaire," about which my sister raved. "The Wrestler" is probably one to watch, too. Over the holidays I stumbled onto "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles," which is excellent (it took me back to Beijing and some of the fun Chinese bureaucracy we grew to love while in the Olympic city.

Happy screenings to you!