(FORTUNE Magazine) – Every so often there emerges from the smog and sun-bleached streets of Hollywood a figure who is best defined as The Guy. The Guy knows everyone and is sought after by all. He drives hot cars, wears cool clothes, and dates famous women. Often he is disturbingly tan. Most important, The Guy possesses an uncanny magic for turning mundane concepts into megahits. He has the golden touch. In the '80s it was Steven Bochco with L.A. Law and Hill Street Blues; in the '90s it was David E. Kelley with Ally McBeal, The Practice, and Michelle Pfeiffer on his arm. The Guy's role is a recurring one, then. (Other prominent alumni: Aaron Spelling and Dick Wolf.) But at this particular moment in television history, The Guy's name is Mark Burnett.

Burnett, 44, is the reality-TV uber-producer behind Survivor and The Apprentice. Survivor, which first aired in 2000, is widely credited with bringing reality TV to the big time, and last year The Apprentice helped cement the genre as an advertising hot spot--it was the No. 1--ranked show among affluent, college-educated viewers, according to Nielsen Audience Demographics. Burnett has run seven reality shows on four of the six major networks and is gearing up for his biggest year yet: In addition to new seasons of Survivor and The Apprentice, he could launch as many as six more shows, beginning this fall with The Contender, a boxing show he created for NBC with Jeffrey Katzenberg starring Sylvester Stallone.

But while Burnett is well known for his creative successes, he is less credited with a more substantial feat: changing the economics of television. When Survivor first aired, reality TV was a low-rent punch line. Today, despite ongoing speculation that the genre can't last, it's the anchor of the industry; 17 reality shows will appear on network television this fall, up from eight last year.

Burnett is also leading the way in television's search for a new advertising model in a TiVo world. With heavily integrated product placement and closer-than-ever relationships with advertising clients, Burnett has essentially rewritten the rules for the way programs are financed.

Meanwhile he is commanding unheard-of deals. This year, to clinch the deal for The Contender, NBC agreed to sell Burnett six advertising units per episode at a floor price. He is reselling the spots to advertisers, presumably at a handsome profit. "Every network wanted The Contender," says Jeff Zucker, president of NBC Universal Television Group, who had never agreed to such a deal before. "It was the price we had to pay for admission."

Such success has brought Burnett a unique brand of Hollywood power. It is the kind that seems to put him everywhere at once, that is based on something as tenuous as his connection with the "audience," and that burns hot, bright, and often very fast. A precarious pedestal, to be sure, but not without its perks: It would not be overstating the case to say that at this instant in the world of television, Mark Burnett can do just about anything he wants.

"I'd say, no question, he is the most important producer in television right now, says CBS chief Leslie Moonves. "He has two monster hits, which are the two most important shows at the two leading networks. He can basically get any show done anywhere."

One way to tell that you are The Guy is that normally conservative executives like Moonves nearly jump out of their Aeron chairs to compliment you. Zucker puts Burnett "in the same class as Jerry Bruckheimer, David Kelley, and Dick Wolf," while Katzenberg goes him one better, calling Burnett "the Steven Spielberg of unscripted television. Truly one of the few people who deserve to be called a genius."

In entertainment, of course, compliments are just things that fall out of your mouth--the real story is actions, events. In those terms, the surest sign that Burnett has made it is that during his interview with FORTUNE, Donald Trump popped in to pay his respects.

That is so something that happens to The Guy.

The circumstances were thus: Burnett was holding court in a private dining room at a restaurant called Breeze in the lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, where the annual Television Critics Association event was in progress. He had just returned to the U.S. the night before at midnight, on a 20-hour flight back from a month on the set of the ninth Survivor, somewhere in the Vanuatu islands of the South Pacific. He was wearing a dark suit with blue stripes, a white shirt, red cuff links, and his signature shell necklace. His hair was brushed back like the crest of a perfect wave, and he was looking very tan and "prepped" for his upcoming stage appearance. He ordered tea and began talking about his theories on Joseph Campbell and John Nash and "exploring the human condition." He explained that he usually retains a 50% ownership stake in the rights to his shows. He noted that a hit show can bring in nearly $300 million in ad revenue and argued that producers should rightly share in that loot.

Just then The Donald burst in.

Trump's electric-pink tie seemed to reflect off his hair, and his bushy eyebrows moved about as he spoke, wholly independent of his face, like pet caterpillars.

Burnett leaped up and began telling Trump a story in his animated British accent. The two men have become good friends and have more than a little in common. (Burnett first approached Trump about doing The Apprentice by telling Trump how influential The Art of the Deal had been for him as a young man.) Indeed, Burnett is the consummate entrepreneur. His early career resume ran from Venice Beach T-shirt salesman to credit card marketer to real estate man to part-time adventure racer, before he turned finally to television. (He broke in by broadcasting Eco-Challenge, the adventure race he founded in 1995.) Burnett also has a habit of boasting: In his 2001 book, Dare to Succeed, he claims that during an adventure race he once brokered a truce with a lost band of pygmies in Madagascar. In the first season of Survivor he made a habit of demonstrating the challenges himself, calling the process "method producing." Even his tastes seem a little Trumpian: He drives a 2004 triple-black Corvette convertible, a bright-yellow Land Rover, and a 1969 Firebird, also black. He is dating actress Roma Downey, who starred in Touched by an Angel.

As it turned out, he and Trump had last seen each other when they attended a Neil Young concert together at Trump's hotel in Atlantic City.

"So," Burnett began, "I'm sitting watching the premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11 as a guest of ... Neil Young!"

"No!" said Trump.

"Yes! And I said to him, 'I saw your concert at the Trump in Atlantic City.' So Neil said, 'Is that the same night Donald was there?' And I said, 'I was with Donald!' Neil loves you, by the way."

So, does Trump think Burnett is a good businessman?

"I think he's a great businessman," said Trump. "My man is a visionary."

"We're making money!" Burnett said.

"We're having fun!" Donald said.

They both smiled, and the glare from their equally white teeth reflected around the room like candlelight.

Making money, having fun. What could be more The Guy than that?

The next trick for Burnett, naturally, is staying The Guy. And make no mistake: He has been very busy leveraging his new power. On the subject of his recent ubiquity, Jeff Zucker says that when he called Burnett to congratulate him on The Apprentice's time-slot ratings, Burnett called back from aboard Katzenberg's private plane--where he was busy hammering out the details of the show that would become The Contender. "The guy is just everywhere," Zucker says.

And amazingly, Burnett is everywhere. He goes on set for the entirety of every shoot, no matter where in the world it happens to be: The shows are staggered throughout the year so that they never overlap. Each show is structured as its own company within Mark Burnett Productions, and in all he oversees more than 1,500 people. (Each show has a roster of about 400.) Burnett also has a very loyal staff and promotes from within: The show runner (a.k.a. lead producer) on The Apprentice, for example, was an editor on the first Eco-Challenge; the show runner on The Contender also worked on the first Eco-Challenge, as a production coordinator. "It's almost like I have to keep making new shows so I can create more jobs to promote people into," says Burnett.

He also takes months developing his shows before he begins shopping them to networks. He and Katzenberg spent nine months together talking to boxing officials, regulators, and trainers, and screening more than 6,000 fighters for The Contender. "There is enormous intellect and substance to what he is doing," Katzenberg says of the experience. "The facade may look easy and simplistic. It's anything but. I can tell you from working with him, I have never seen anything like this. His organization is second to none."

Besides being an obsessively hands-on manager, Burnett has built a reputation as something of a visionary on the advertising side of the business. Since DVR recorders like TiVo first raised fears of the demise of the 30-second commercial, Burnett has been looking to product placement and even advertiser-financed productions to generate revenue--areas others had largely dismissed as too crassly commercial to be acceptable to viewers.

On the first Survivor, for example, Burnett helped Pontiac launch the Aztek by promising one to the winner, while Jeff Probst offered castoffs a refreshing on-air reward of Mountain Dew and Doritos. This sort of behavior wasn't popular with critics, but it won him many friends--and repeat customers--in the ad community. "[Mark] loves our business," says Laura Caraccioli-Davis, a product-placement manager at Starcom Entertainment, a media-buying company. "If I called him up right now, he would pick up the phone and listen to my ideas."

In The Restaurant, Burnett and his producing partners at Reveille, where the show was created, took an even more aggressive tack, allowing the main sponsors--American Express, Coors, and Mitsubishi--to fully finance the production in exchange for ad time and extensive product placement. (In one episode Rocco DiSpirito, the head chef and then part-owner, announced to the camera, "I know what I'll do. I'll have Stacy apply for a line of credit from American Express's Open: The Small Business Network." At which point the camera then cut to a shot of his assistant at Amex's Open website. Subtle.)

"Mark has attacked the business from a very, very unusual point of view," says Moonves. "And along the way he's created business models that didn't exist before."

Burnett also has some new ideas that go beyond advertising. Because reality TV still has a major drawback in its lack of appeal for syndication, he is constantly seeking out new ways to generate revenue. The premise of The Contender, for example, is to establish and promote a new boxing league, which he will run. Burnett has already become a licensed manager in California (his status in Nevada is pending), and he plans to sell the fights he hosts over pay-per-view after his show has produced new stars.

Back in the private dining room at Breeze after Trump has left the scene, Burnett begins brainstorming again about his new projects, but he wants it to be known that he has other ambitions. He says he's interested in how Baz Luhrmann moved into theater and what Michael Moore is doing in documentary film. "Look, I don't limit myself to unscripted TV," he says, "and I don't limit myself to TV, or to TV and film. It wouldn't matter to me if my storytelling was broadcast over the web."

Besides The Contender, he has two more new reality shows in the works at CBS: Rock Star, about the search for the next lead singer of INXS (the Australian rock band whose original frontman died in 1997), and Recovery, which follows an ex-CIA operative as he tries to recover abducted children.

On top of those, Burnett is also moving into a genre he's never tackled before--scripted entertainment. His first comedy, Commando Nanny, which will air on the WB (owned by the parent company of FORTUNE), is based on Burnett's experience as a British paratrooper turned Beverly Hills au pair. Two dramas are also on the way: Global Frequency, about a man thrust to the center of an international intelligence conspiracy, is in development at the WB, and Eden, about a group of exchange students who get shipwrecked on a remote island, is at NBC. Whether the scripted shows are bought because they're good or because the networks want to cozy up to Burnett for his reality clout was a matter of debate at the Television Critics Association event. One prominent critic who has seen the Commando Nanny pilot called it "aggressively bad television." And even Burnett has had some bombs. Destination: Mir was supposed to launch a civilian into space, but the space station failed; a martial arts series and a European road-trip series called Are We There Yet? also died.

The bottom line for Burnett is that no matter what new genres he tackles or what new advertising deals he strikes, he still has to keep making fresh, original shows in order to stay The Guy. In that way, Hollywood power is like a poker game where you can't fold and you never leave the table. But the stakes are higher now, and a Mark Burnett Production is expensive: The shots that define his style--the closeups of indigenous creatures of the bush on Survivor, the soaring, cinematic shots of New York's skyline in The Apprentice, not to mention The Donald's hefty salary--don't come cheap. Though reality began its assault on network television as the poor man's sitcom--shows were generally thought to cost about $300,000 for a half-hour, vs. $1 million for a scripted show--that gap has narrowed, if not disappeared. The Contender will cost $2 million for each of the hourlong 15 episodes, says Zucker. That's as much as NBC's new hourlong drama Hawaii.

So there are two ways a story like this can end in Tinseltown: If Burnett fails to produce a major hit--or worse, turns out a string of flops, which the vast majority of TV shows become--he will cease to wield any real power. Sure, he will have made plenty of money by then, but he will fade into obscurity with his safari hat, and he will no longer be The Guy.

The other way is the happy ending: He delivers another mega-smash, along the lines of Survivor or The Apprentice. It's an entirely possible outcome, given his track record. It's a bet everyone in the industry is scrambling to take. Of course, if it works out that way, Burnett won't be The Guy for long either. He will be The Man.

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