Beautiful Minds.(The Talk of the Town)(Brian Grazer looks for new cultural attache)

Bored at work? Victim of a hiring freeze? In the past few weeks, word has been circulating, among the post-collegiate cubicle crowd, about an exciting new job opportunity. The rumor, according to one (unofficial) e-mail: "Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer (Da Vinci Code, A Beautiful Mind, American Gangster) is looking for a new cultural attache." The e-mail explained:

This person would be responsible for keeping Brian abreast of everything that's going on in the world; politically, culturally, musically. . . . They're also responsible for finding an interesting person for Brian to meet with every week . . . an astronaut, a journalist, a philosopher, a buddhist monk. . . . There is LOTS of reading for this position! Grazer may ask you to read any book he's interested in. You'll probably get to read about 4 or 5 books a week and you may be required to travel with him on his private plane to Hawaii, New York, Europe--teaching him anything he asks you about along the way. . . . You will also be provided with an assistant. . . . Salary is around $150,000 a year. . . . You will be to Grazer what Karl Rove was to Bush.

"This job is kind of an urban legend in Hollywood," a twenty-five-year-old assistant in the movie business said last week. (She had received a similar e-mail, describing the position as Grazer's "idea curator.") Rovian undertones aside, it's actually an old concept: according to Anthony Grafton, a history professor at Princeton, Renaissance and Enlightenment princes often had such a minion, known as a "reader." Frederick the Great, of Prussia, cribbed much of his expertise from a reader named Dantal; Sir Philip Sidney relied on a Livy scholar named Gabriel Harvey to brief him before a meeting with the Holy Roman Emperor.

Cultural attache to a movie producer. Not a bad gig. But who, in this post-Renaissance era, could do it? Michael Rosenberg, the president of Imagine, the production company Grazer owns with Ron Howard, said that about a hundred would-be attaches have e-mailed resumes since word of the job got out. One was Ed Cooke, twenty-six, a British writer and education consultant. His resume: philosophy-and-psych degree from Oxford, three languages, a demonstrated interest in "the philosophy of cricket." "This seemed like a job ...