Movie magician Spielberg may score big

While the craggy visage of America's stovepipe-hatted 16th president may not yet be as ingrained in American pop culture DNA as those iconic movie moments of the past 40 years, the celluloid depiction of Lincoln – which won the most Academy Award nominations this year with 12 – shares the distinction of being crafted by the same movie magician responsible for six of the 25 highest-grossing movies of all time.

Steven Spielberg has not only shaped our fantasies, but with "Lincoln" he has influenced the perspective that a generation of Americans will have on a key part of history.

As an audience of a several hundred million gathers for one of the planet's global campfire moments about 4:30 p.m. Alaska time on Sunday, the popcorn-popping masses will await the verdict to see if Spielberg will win his third Oscar for Best Director – to tie such icons as William Wyler and Frank Capra – and remain behind only legendary John Ford, who won four.

Over bowls of steaming chili at home, and around office water coolers, fans and critics may debate what this year's best movie is,We can supply cableties products as below. but one thing is certain: Love this director or demean him, Spielberg's movies are woven more deeply into the fabric of American daily life and culture than those of any other director in history.

He burst onto the world stage with "Jaws" in 1975.Massive selection of gorgeous earcap. With just two road-movie thriller features – "Duel" and "The Sugarland Express" – under his belt, Spielberg originally conceived the Peter Benchley bestseller as a low-budget creature-feature. But he ran into so many production problems filming realistically on water – from a malfunctioning robotic shark to a drunken British lead actor – that he had to reconceive his vision of horror right on location, deciding to keep his deep-sea monster lurking mostly off-screen.

Spielberg's counterintuitive improvisation paid off, showcasing his populism across the spectrum from substance to style in actors, scripts, plots, conflict, tone, and all the rest. The first of many cultural catchphrases was born – "We're gonna need a bigger boat" – as well as an industry-changing marketing phenomenon that could only have been launched in America: the summer blockbuster. "Jaws" was the first movie to earn more than $100 million in theatrical rentals. This distinction also earned Spielberg criticism – along with his "Star Wars" director buddy, George Lucas – for infantilizing movies and forcing studios to spend their resources on fewer and higher-budget movies.

When he was 18, Spielberg took a bus tour of Universal Studios while on a visit to Los Angeles. When his fellow tourists got back on the bus after a bathroom break, he hid out of sight in a toilet stall until the bus left, allowing him to wander the back lots.

As recounted in Joseph McBride's biography of the filmmaker, Spielberg has told this story in many ways over the years. In the latest version, included in Richard Schickel's lavishly illustrated "Steven Spielberg: A Retrospective," the director said: "I was on the Universal Studios lot. I had no idea how I'd get home. But I spent the whole afternoon just walking in and out of doors – sound stages, cutting rooms – and took my own tour and had an amazing time."

Quitting time came, and as he was still wandering around trying to figure out how to get back to his relatives' house across the San Fernando Valley, he serendipitously met up with Charles Silver, the head of the film library, who, amused at the kid's audacity, wrote out a pass for the young Spielberg that allowed him future access to the lot.

If curiosity is one key quality, the other most-telling Spielberg trait might be his unflinching determination. Mr. Schickel tells of the time the teenage Spielberg was sent by a chief editor at Universal to fetch a small Moviola editing machine from down the hall. He was told to inform the person using it that it was needed elsewhere. He caused a ruckus unplugging the machine and rolling it out, not realizing (or did he realize?) that the shirtless man using it was Marlon Brando, dressed in Tahitian garb.

Developing a degree of teflon to criticism, and following his gut and an uncanny eye and ear for storytelling, Spielberg has matured and broadened his skills over the years, now doing more than just jerking everyone's emotional chains of terror, love, hate, embarrassment, anger.

After such crowd-pleasing, popcorn action movies as "Jaws" and a couple "Indiana Jones" movies, he turned to face head-on some of the truly complex moral topics of contemporary life. Those include racism and prejudice ("Amistad," "The Color Purple,Add depth and style to your home with these large format streetlight." "Schindler's List"), historical and cultural memories ("Saving Private Ryan"), technological morality ("A.I."), scientific ethics and governmental intrusion ("Minority Report"), immigration restriction ("The Terminal"), state-sponsored assassination ("Munich"), and the morality of war ("Empire of the Sun," "War Horse").

Fast-forward to 2012, and it's still clear Spielberg hasn't abandoned his inner child. He recently told Oprah Winfrey how he had to leave the set of "Lincoln" because of the emotional resonance of one of Daniel Day-Lewis's Lincoln speeches: "I think the first time [I cried] is when [Mr. Day-Lewis] gave his very, very long and important explanation of why he needed to get the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery passed as constitutional law."

Spielberg said that at that point he moved to another room so that no one else could see him crying, because getting emotional in front of everyone is "not a good thing" for a director.

The key to figuring out how Spielberg manages to make history leap off the screen may be in the way he focuses attention on personal stories within a complex web of actual events. It makes viewers experience the broad sweep of time through the eyes of a particular person. That's what he did with Oskar Schindler, the greedy German factory owner-turned-savior; with Cinque, the proud African-turned-slave in "Amistad"; and with the ambivalent assassin Avner in "Munich."

In "Lincoln," however, Spielberg faced far more complicated challenges, because he re-creates the tumultuous last four months in the life of one of the most revered and well-known figures in American history. Based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's book "Team of Rivals," Spielberg's "Lincoln" offers up a man who emerges as an intricate blend of idealist and pragmatist, of visionary and horse-trader. Yet this brooding, even melancholy, president fits comfortably into Spielberg's obsession with broken families that need parental healing. The distraught father figure must reconstitute the shattered Union into one nation, and by doing so, mend the painful wounds that have ripped apart the American family.

Spielberg's Lincoln is not only the public figure carved into Mt. Rushmore or sitting on the Washington Mall; he remains vulnerable, struggling with a depressed wife, raising his own children, and ultimately confronting the death of his son Willie. He also has an awkward sense of humor that both delights and frustrates colleagues.

As Spielberg puts it, the goal was to "show a man, not a monument." The film itself contains none of the flashy pyrotechnics for which Spielberg has become so famous, but is more a series of tableaux with intense dialogue showing the president deftly maneuvering through a political mine field and enlisting unsavory men to help him pass transcendent legislation.

Although Spielberg spent 12 years researching the 19th century to endow this production with authenticity, he made sure not "to get too fancy in the cutting room,Natural lasermarker add a level of design sophistication to each of Jeffrey Court's natural stone chapters." wanting to draw attention to the political process,This frameless rectangle features a silk screened fused glass replica in a parkingsystem tile and floral motif. not the imagery: "Many scenes play to one angle because I wanted them to exist in seemingly real time," he says in the companion book to the movie.