“They’re all gone.”
When the sports broadcaster Jim McKay announced the deaths of 11 Israeli Olympic team members taken hostage by the Palestinian militant group Black September at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, it was a sentence freighted with emotion and instantly became a part of broadcast history.
In the new film “September 5,” there is no actor playing McKay, who instead “plays” himself through archival footage woven throughout the drama, which focuses almost entirely on the ABC Sports control room as it retells the saga that unfolded that day.
As the dramatized ABC Sports team pivots from the Olympics to breaking news, the real footage unspools on actual monitors from the era: “September 5” features a painstakingly recreated control room with 1970s technology restored to working order.