He presses on. He is one of the producers of the next “Mission,” due later this year, and helped brainstorm the story, but he didn’t write the screenplay. (Brad Bird is the director.) He hasn’t yet decided whether to direct the next “Star Trek,” whose screenplay, to be written by Damon Lindelof, Orci and Kurtzman, is still being developed. He’ll be one of the movie’s producers. Abrams’s name is attached to two fall TV shows for which he provided the kind of regular consulting that Spielberg lent to “Super 8.” “Alcatraz,” on Fox, ponders the eerie present-day reappearance of inmates from the legendary prison, which closed in 1963. And “Person of Interest,” on CBS, introduces a former C.I.A. agent and a rich, eccentric billionaire who together fight crime in New York. Meanwhile Abrams will continue to produce the supernatural thriller he helped create, “Fringe,” which is entering its fourth season on Fox.

Like a spy and science-fiction analog to the funnyman Judd Apatow, Abrams exists at the center of a galaxy of friends and frequent collaborators who have bolstered one another’s careers and are responsible in aggregate for a staggering amount of A-list output. Orci and Kurtzman, who worked on “Alias” scripts back in the day, are two of the industry’s most successful screenwriters, credited with “Transformers” and this summer’s “Cowboys and Aliens,” for which Lindelof was a co-writer. Garner moved from a small part in “Felicity” to the “Alias” lead, and Abrams repurposed the actress Keri Russell from her lead role as “Felicity” for a small part in “Mission: Impossible III.” Reeves won critical acclaim last year for directing the vampire movie “Let Me In,” a remake of the Swedish thriller “Let the Right One In.” Another of Abrams’s lifelong friends, Bryan Burk, serves as his producing partner on everything that comes out of Bad Robot.

But for all of that activity, Abrams struck me as focused to the point of obsession on “Super 8.” Friends and collaborators say that when he homes in on a project dear to him, he can be a relentless perfectionist. That was certainly the case on the early May day when I watched him carom between the scoring stage where a 104-piece orchestra was recording the movie’s music and an office suite, just three doors down, into which he had temporarily moved the final editing of “Super 8.” He would huddle with the movie’s composer, Michael Giacchino, over whether there should be an earlier swell of strings here, something more sinister-sounding there. Then he would spend 10 minutes with one of the movie’s two editors, Mary Jo Markey, on a detail as small as how long the camera should dwell on one actor during his dialogue in one scene.

“Does it feel tedious?” he asked me, reading my mind. “I love it.”

Paramount Pictures, with which he has a movie production deal, considers him one of its brightest lights. Its chief executive, Brad Grey, says he has told Abrams that he wants to promote and nurture him the way the movie moguls Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg nurtured Spielberg in decades past at Universal Pictures. In support of “Super 8,” he and Abrams both flew to New York in late March to do something utterly antithetical to Abrams’s nature but perhaps necessary for “Super 8” to be heard above the “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Harry Potter,” “Hangover” and “Green Lantern” din. In a Lincoln Center theater, they showed about 150 entertainment journalists roughly 20 unfinished (and monsterless) minutes of the movie.

I rode with Abrams to the screening from his Midtown Manhattan hotel. Beneath his customary cheer, he seemed antsy, and when he addressed the journalists just before the lights dimmed, he stammered a raft of apologies: the special effects weren’t complete; the train-crash sequence was longer than it would ultimately be; the music wasn’t the actual score.

“It makes me nuts to show it to you,” he told the audience. “Let’s just not show it!”

But he had no choice. He stepped off the stage, and the mystery box began to open — just a bit.