“I didn’t get it?”
Steven Spielberg, film rebel, sputtered at the lens in mock fury and disbelief.
“I wasn’t nominated? I got beaten out by Fellini?” he howled, on learning that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had nominated“Jaws” for a best-picture Oscar, but had snubbed him as the movie’s director.
The year was 1976, and Mr. Spielberg — long haired, loose and tongue firmly in cheek — was hurling outrage at the makers of a sassy documentary about the year’s Oscar contest. “This is called commercial backlash,” the young Spielberg explained, in a final and perhaps not entirely feigned moment of exasperation. “Everybody loves a winner,” he said. “But nobody loves awinner!”
Mugging for the camera at the age of 30, he had found the fault line in his own colossal career. It would totter — and totters still — between loud, popular, popcorn movies, like this year’s “Real Steel” and “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” for which Mr. Spielberg was an executive producer, and his untiring push for recognition as an innovative director.
Now Steven Spielberg the contender will try again, as he twice enters the awards race, once with an ambitious 3-D, motion-capture animation film, “The Adventures of Tintin,” and again with a period drama, “War Horse,” based on the children’s book whose stage adaptation on Broadway won the Tony Award for best play in June.
Mr. Spielberg declined to be interviewed about those films. This month, his representatives said, he was busy in Richmond, Va., in the second week of production on“Lincoln,” a long-planned drama about leadership and turmoil in the last months of Abraham Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Likely to be released late next year, it looks like yet another bid to become the kind of winner everyone can love.
Still, the line between art and commerce can be a scary place. Time and again Mr. Spielberg has held the audience in the palm of his hand. Now 64, he is not simply the best-selling film director of all time; his domestic ticket sales, at about $3.8 billion, roughly match the combined sales of his next two rivals, Robert Zemeckis and James Cameron. If Hollywood had a Mount Rushmore, Mr. Spielberg would get two heads.
Yet Spielberg the Artist has often struggled, as if the box-office hits were a handicap to be overcome. Who could forget the Great Snub of 1986, in which “The Color Purple” got 11 Oscar nominations — though not for Mr. Spielberg’s directing — and won nothing? (That tied a dubious record set a decade earlier by “The Turning Point,” directed by Herbert Ross.)
In 1987 Mr. Spielberg won his first Oscar, an honorary Irving G. Thalberg award. After some ferocious campaigns, three more Academy Awards would follow, for “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.” Those helped fill the mantel but have left him short of the recognition given Walt Disney, with his 26 statuettes, or even Billy Wilder, with 7, and Francis Ford Coppola, with 6.
Lately Mr. Spielberg has been working as if he intends to close the gap. By most measures he appears busier than at any time in his professional life. If “Lincoln” is released by DreamWorks and Walt Disney Studios in late 2012, he will have directed three major films in the span of a year. He has recently shared producer credits on another four movies, including “Super 8” and “Cowboys & Aliens,” while shouldering corporate responsibility for others, like “The Help” and “I Am Number Four,” which come from DreamWorks, a company he owns and manages in partnership with Stacey Snider.
The movies have come on top of television ventures that have included “Terra Nova,” the time-travel series he has produced in partnership with Peter Chernin for Fox, along with “Falling Skies” for TNT, “The River” for ABC and “Smash,” for NBC. It is a pace that startles even Kathleen Kennedy, a producer of “The Adventures of Tintin,” “War Horse” and “Lincoln,” who has worked with Mr. Spielberg for more than 30 years.
“He’s often choosing for emotional reasons,” Ms. Kennedy said of decisions that helped add Mr. Spielberg’s three directing assignments to an already large stack of productions. “I do think that plays a role in what he chooses to do.”
For those who wonder what drives him (money is no object: The Los Angeles Business Journal recently listed him as this city’s eighth richest person, with a net worth estimated at $3.2 billion), Mr. Spielberg has left clues. Perhaps the most telling was tucked away last year in the teacher’s guide to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibition of Norman Rockwell works from the collections of Mr. Spielberg and George Lucas.
In the guide Mr. Spielberg discusses the painting “Boy on High Dive,” in which a boy crouches on the end of a diving board, looking fretfully over the edge. “For me, that picture represents every motion picture just before I commit to directing it — just that one moment,” he says of a work that has long hung in his Amblin Entertainment office at Universal Studios.
The painting is about fear, and so are Mr. Spielberg’s films this year — and, at some level, almost always.
As an Oscar contender “The Adventures of Tintin,” based on the Belgian artist Hergé’s classic series about the capers of a teenage reporter and his dog, faces a threshold question — still to be determined — as to whether the Academy will allow it to compete for an animation award, given that it uses computer techniques, rather than illustrations, to transform real actors.
But the core of the story, and Mr. Spielberg’s hope of moving the Academy’s voters, turns on his use of digital magic to communicate a stomach-churning sense of threat to a boy and his beast.
In that sense “Tintin” forms a matched set with “War Horse,” which is adapted from the 1982 book by Michael Morpurgo, about a boy, played in the movie by the newcomer Jeremy Irvine, who follows his horse into the carnage of World War I. The confluence, said Ms. Kennedy, who spoke by telephone from the set of “Lincoln,” is partly accidental. “Tintin,” she noted, is an elaborate production that actually began six years ago and involves an intricate collaboration with Peter Jackson, another of its producers, while “War Horse” was hurried into existence in the last year or so.
In a brief e-mail exchange Mr. Spielberg said he sees the two films as being completely different. “They are each other’s polar opposite,” he said, without elaborating.
And it is a canard, of course, that Mr. Spielberg, through his directing career, has been hung up on a child’s point of view. Having directed roughly 30 films (depending on how one counts odds and ends like the “Amblin’ ” short or his contribution to the “Twilight Zone — The Movie”), among his full-length features he has focused squarely on the young only in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Hook” and “Empire of the Sun.” But this time around Mr. Spielberg seems more than casually intent on tapping the power of youth. Before diving into his current pair of pictures, he flirted with the possibility of directing “39 Clues” and “Chocky,” both about the young.