The TIME 100

Brian Grazer, a co-chair of Imagine Entertainment, has a short attention span. That isn't a criticism. It's just a fact. It's a crucial piece of information to understand if you want to get to know him.

Engaging with Brian in a conversation, particularly if you haven't seen him for a while, requires lightning-swift reflexes. When he asks questions, and he will, in staccato bursts, you need to respond with alacrity. What you need to realize is it's not just your words he is listening to. He can hear your soul. His rapid-fire questions are his way of taking your emotional temperature. Imagine (forgive the pun) the edge that gives him in a deal negotiation. He knows almost instantly how you really feel about something, and in Hollywood, the capital city of smoke and mirrors, that instinctive, savant-like skill gives him an alchemist's power.

Brian has run the company that he started with business partner Ron Howard for some 20 years. Just 55, he has won a pile of gold statuettes, including the Best Picture Academy Award in 2002 for A Beautiful Mind. He has produced 50 movies, including Splash, The Da Vinci Code and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and half a dozen TV series, all while retaining his company's independence—a widely envied position in the industry.

If there is anybody I know who was born for this e-mail, text-message, BlackBerry, information-superhighway, YouTube, MySpace, blogosphere, URL world we now live in, it's Brian Grazer. A modern-age hunter-gatherer of information.

Facts, figures, thoughts, wisdom—he sifts through them all at a rate of knots and processes them all on a surfboard slicing through the ocean or as he caresses a brush over canvas or on a mountaintop that has a view of the edge of the world. These days, it's not whether your attention span is short or long. It's how you use it that counts.

Oscar winner Crowe and Grazer have collaborated on three films

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