Rising

Rising

Seth G. Abraham
Abraham, the 44-year-old president of Time Warner Sports, is pushing pay per view as the wave of the future, and the numbers back him up: As long as his TVKO network keeps showing matches like April's Tyson-Holyfield fight (which grossed $75 million), his star will keep rising.

Joichi Aoi
A Toshiba engineer who specializes in heavy equipment and nuclear power, Aoi, 65, has steered his company in a new direction: movies and cable. He is currently negotiating Toshiba's potential $1 billion investment into Time Warner, giving him access to programming needed to wire Japan for cable.

Michael Bivins
A new-jack entrepreneur and member of Bell Biv DeVoe, Bivins accomplished a daunting feat this year: He lifted Motown's faltering sales as executive producer of two albums: Coolin' at the Playground Ya 'Know! by Another Bad Creation and Cooleyhighharmony by Boyz II Men.

Kenneth Branagh
Hollywood's newest golden boy is a 30-year-old Irishman who's two-for-two in Stateside hits. Henry V won him 1990 Oscar nominations for acting and directing, and this year's Dead Again is a sleeper success, grossing almost $40 million so far.

Joshua Brand and John Falsey
Brand, 39, and Falsey, 40, may be TV's hottest series creators. Their range extends from the gentle whimsies of CBS' Northern Exposure to the acutely observed racial struggles of NBC's I'll Fly Away. A Lorimar deal may yield a third show by season's end.

Ann Godoff
Random House's new executive editor is playing literary hardball. Godoff, 42, is aggressive in almost every important nonfiction auction and pays unmatchable (some say outrageous) advances — including a whopping $580,000 for a second book by Beauty Myth-maker Naomi Wolf.

James G. Robinson
Though his partly self-funded Morgan Creek Productions has produced hits (Young Guns, Major League) since 1988, Robinson, 56, didn't reach Hollywood's inner circle until Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves ($300 million worldwide). His next offering is the $30 million sci-fi thriller Freejack.

John Singleton
Singleton's highly praised Boyz N the Hood, made for less than $6 million, has grossed $56 million to date and turned the writer-director into a major force at the tender age of 23. One of his next projects is Make Me Wanna Holler, the memoir of ex-con-turned-Washington Post reporter Nathan McCall.