News junkies will find much to love in “September 5,” a fictionalized account of ABC’s live coverage of the hostage crisis during the 1972 Munich Olympics. There are spirited debates about reporting with only one source, use of words like “terrorism” and what to do if violence breaks out during a live shot. There are negotiations with rival networks over satellite usage, disguises and fake badges made to get reels of 16mm film in and out of the locked down Olympic village and plenty of confused men (and a few women) trying to keep up with an ever-escalating situation.

The film is a moment by moment retelling of how a group of sports broadcasters brought this story to the world in real time, despite the technical limitations and their own inexperience across a confusing 22 hours. Everyone came to the studio that night ready for breaking sports news, scores and pre-packaged interviews. Even that was going to be a test for the man running the control room for the first time. Geoffrey Mason, portrayed by John Magaro, was a 28-year-old coordinating producer. Someone wonders about his experience and is assured that he’s covered minor league baseball games.

But in the early hours of Sept. 5, 1972, eight members of a Palestinian group called Black September broke into the Olympic village and attacked the Israeli delegation killing wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossi Romano. Some escaped, but nine others were taken hostage.

While the tragedy of the Munich Olympics has certainly been told many times, writer and director Tim Fehlbaum saw an opportunity in the team behind the live broadcast. And he commits fully to staying in the newsroom, with all of its glorious old technologies, from the walkie-talkies they used to stay in touch and to taking time to show how they had to manually add text to the screens. He and his screenwriter were able to reconstruct the events almost minute-by-minute, which helped shape the screenplay.

The players are many in this large ensemble. Peter Sarsgaard, who’s looked right in a newsroom since “Shattered Glass,” gives gravitas to Roone Arledge, then-president of ABC Sports, and Ben Chaplin is operations engineer Marvin Bader. Leonie Benesch is Marianne Gebhardt, a German-speaking interpreter who is the only person there able to understand the language of the country. She might be a bit of a composite who checks off a lot of boxes as both an entrepreneurial woman and a younger German offering perspective and insight into what this moment might mean for the country trying to put on a good front in the aftermath of World War II. An actor (Benjamin Walker) plays broadcaster Peter Jennings, and real archival footage of anchor Jim McKay from that day is used in the film.

And while they all rise to the occasion, mistakes are made – including a rather big one at the end, following imperfect secondhand information from the Fuerstenfeldbruck airfield. They don’t call it the first draft of history for nothing, after all, and it may be illuminating for audiences to see how it’s handled.

The film looks of its time, but it also feels fairly modern in its sensibilities which makes it always seem more like a re-telling than an in-the-moment experience. This may be to its detriment, yet it’s still an undeniably riveting and compelling watch. The word thrilling doesn’t seem appropriate, however. This is not “Apollo 13” after all. The end is not a happy one.

But at time when trust in the media is in crisis, this film is a great humanizer, reminding audiences that the media is far from a monolith, but a group of individuals under immense pressure to get the story right, get the story out and go back and do it again the next day.

“September 5,” a Paramount Pictures release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language. Running time: 94. Three stars out of four.

There was more to the shocking “Golden Bachelor” divorce than met the eye. Gerry Turner, who charmed all ages as the ABC franchise’s elder star, has cancer and he says that’s what cut short his marriage to final rose recipient Theresa Nist.

The 72-year-old revealed to People on Tuesday that early in their marriage he was diagnosed with a rare bone marrow cancer, which influenced their decision to split. Nist, in a separate interview with the magazine, appeared to disagree. (More on that later.)

Upon announcing their divorce in April, Turner and Nist said that distance was mainly the culprit. The two couldn’t decide whether they should live in Turner’s Indiana or Nist’s New Jersey — because they didn’t want to be separated from their respective families.

The reality star said the cancer revelation “probably will clear up a lot of mystery” around what happened at the beginning of the year.

“As Theresa and I were trying very hard to find our lifestyle and where we were going to live and how we were going to make our life work, I was unfortunately diagnosed with cancer,” he told People.

The former couple, who got engaged during the “Golden Bachelor” finale that aired in November 2023, tied the knot during an ABC special that aired in January. But three months later, the two announced on “Good Morning America” that they were calling it quits. Turner filed his divorce petition the same day, ending the short-lived marriage to the financial services professional.

Turner said his diagnosis followed a three-year-old shoulder injury that he sustained while teaching a pickleball class. But he got busy and didn’t have it properly looked at until after his run on the reality show. Then his orthopedic surgeon referred him to another doctor after his lab work contained “unusual blood markers” that they initially believed could be caused by a blood disorder.

The reality star said he was then diagnosed with Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, a slow-growing bone marrow cancer. The Mayo Clinic says it’s a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that occurs when white blood cells turn into cancer cells and build up in the spongy material of the marrow.

“Unfortunately, there’s no cure for it. So that weighs heavily in every decision I make,” Turner told People. “It was like 10 tons of concrete were just dropped on me. And I was a bit in denial for a while; I didn’t want to admit to it.”

The widower shared the perceived blood disorder news with Nist in February and underwent additional testing for a more definitive diagnosis. He told Nist in mid-March that it was cancer,. Their conversation was brief and she was understandably “a little bit awestruck” by the news, he said.

“I wanted my life to continue on as normal as possible, and that led me to believing that as normal as possible more meant spending time with my family, my two daughters, my two son-in-laws, my granddaughters,” he said, adding that “the importance of finding the way with Theresa was still there, but it became less of a priority.”

He also pushed back against judgments about their split that he believes are “unfair” and characterized their abbreviated union as a “cherished memory” that he wished had a different ending.

“I hope that people understand in retrospect now that [the diagnosis] had a huge bearing on my decisions and I think probably Theresa’s as well,” he said. “Hopefully they’ll look at things a little bit differently, that maybe it wasn’t quite a rash, fast decision that people thought. That there was something else going on.”

However, Nist, 71, told People that her ex-husband’s diagnosis “wasn’t a factor in the ending of the relationship.” At least not for her.

“If that was something on his part, maybe, I don’t know. But no, that didn’t factor into ending the relationship,” she said. “Part of it was the distance, but that wasn’t the only part. That’s really all I will say.”

Meanwhile, Turner said that he’s working with a hematology-oncology group in Fort Wayne, Ind., and is going to “pack as much fun” he possibly can into his life.

“[W]hen I’m gone, I’m gone, but I’m not going to have regrets,” he told the magazine.