Steve Boettcher & Mike Trinklein - Secrets of Sacred Spaces
Program Date: March 27, 2024
Steve Boettcher and Mike Trinklein are best known for their profiles of TV giants in productions like Pioneers of Primetime and this year's Betty White: A Celebration (https://www.jsonline.com...).
But since they were kids, the Milwaukee filmmaking partners have had another fascination: churches and other religious buildings.
“I remember sitting in church and kind of looking around and trying to understand what the artifacts meant," Boettcher said.
“One of the things that’s universally true is that both churches and filmmaking have something in common — that you’re trying to tell a visual story,” said Trinklein, who added that the pair at one time thought about being architects. “I think it’s that fascination with the storytelling that church buildings do. They’re just really an interesting way in which communities try to communicate.” The pair combined both interests in their latest project, "Secrets of Sacred Architecture," which airs on 360 public television stations around the country in April.
Narrated by LeVar Burton, the one-hour documentary explores the connections between churches, synagogues, mosques and temples and the communities that build them.
"The central purpose that unites all sacred architecture is that the goal is to communicate," Burton says in the film's narration. "Every steeple, every stained-glass window, every parking lot is sending a message to the membership and to the community."
https://www.jsonline.com/story...
Pioneers of Television," produced by UW-Oshkosh graduates Steve Boettcher and Mike Trinklein, ran for four seasons on PBS and received three Emmy nominations. The two also produced "Betty White: A Celebration," which recently was shown in 1,500 theaters across the country on Jan. 17 to celebrate the life of one of America's most beloved actresses, who passed away at age 99. (Editor’s note: Third of a three-part series on Wisconsin natives Steve Boettcher and Mike Trinklein, an unlikely pair of University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh graduates who went on to chronicle the history of television through the PBS series “Pioneers of Television,” speaking with hundreds of Hollywood’s biggest stars).