The Stones' 12 minutes of Super fame

Seven hundred and twenty seconds.

That's what it comes down to. Twelve minutes. The Super Bowl halftime show, the world's most-watched annual music event, involves millions of dollars, thousands of people and 15 months of preparation. And it lasts 12 minutes.

That figure doesn't come with any give-or-take this-or-that. Talk to the professionals behind today's halftime show featuring the Rolling Stones, and you discover new definitions for words like "precision" and "rigor."

"There won't be a frame of video that we haven't pored over and discussed thoroughly beforehand," says Bob Toms, senior producer of ABC Sports, which is broadcasting this weekend's Ford Field festivities. "It's the culmination of a whole lot of work."

"People look at what we do and call us stress junkies," says Don Mischer, executive producer for Super Bowl XL entertainment. "You just say to yourself, 'If I'm going to fall on my butt, what better place to do it than in front of a billion people?' "

Mischer, whose résumé includes three Super Bowls and a Summer Olympics opening ceremony, says his task is even tougher this year: As of Monday, Stevie Wonder still hadn't settled on the songs for his pregame set, where he'll be joined by soul crooners John Legend, Joss Stone and India.Arie for a Motown retrospective. As for the Stones, well ... they're the Stones. Unlike every other performer today, and virtually every Super Bowl performer of the past decade, the band won't be playing along with the safety net of a taped track. The Stones will be "live, live, live," as one NFL executive stressed — and stressed is what it leaves Mischer.

"With Paul McCartney last year in Jacksonville, the decisions had all been made early, he'd rehearsed it many, many times, and as a result it was a very clean kind of coverage," Mischer says. "Here it's a very different kind of group. You don't necessarily know what they're going to do. There's more moving around, more raw energy, more unpredictability. There's no question that's going to make my job more difficult."

To the delight of Super Bowl organizers, the Stones have proved to be masters of keeping secrets. The band is tightly guarding its set list, and was still mulling over song possibilities this week, Mischer says.

"The options are wide open," he says. "Decisions could be made up to the very last minute in terms of what the Stones do."

Charles Coplin, the NFL's vice president of programming, says the league likes to view the relationship with its performers as a partnership, an alliance in which each party reaps big benefits from the other. Which means that even if Mick Jagger and company would take directions from anybody, the NFL hasn't been giving them.

The NFL and ABC do maintain veto power on the content of the performances, an area of particular sensitivity since Janet Jackson's 2004 halftime bust.

As the Super Bowl moved into its XXXs, the entertainment grew up. Mariah Carey on a national anthem here, Kiss on a pregame there, U2 on a halftime over here.

"It had been kind of ignored before that," recalls Mischer, who produced Michael Jackson's 1993 appearance. "Disney would do halftime with characters dancing on the field, that kind of stuff. It's become much more intense over the years."