Hollywood Exclusive by Marilyn Beck & Stacy Jenel Smith

"American Idol" winner Jordin Sparks was disturbed and dismayed to learn that obesity expert MeMe Roth was receiving death threats for calling Sparks "a vision of unhealthy."

Sparks, at 17 the youngest "Idol" winner ever, has this to say to her legion of fans: "Leave that person alone! That's not right. It's very intense and it's scary."

After hearing about the death threats, she tells this column, "I'm in shock right now. I don't think anything can really prepare you for stuff like that. But I'm going to take each day as it comes. Hopefully, I'll learn how to deal with stuff the right way."

It helps, she says, that she's the daughter of Phillippi Sparks, former NFL football player with the New York Giants and the Dallas Cowboys. She says growing up in his spotlight was great preparation for the whirlwind she's been on since her win.

"Being with my dad, we were in front of cameras and photographers taking pictures and people asking us questions all the time. I love talking to people and taking pictures. I'm not scared of the camera. It helped me a lot seeing how everything fell into place for him, so 'Thanks, Dad.'"

She adds, after snagging the grand prize, "He was the first person from my family I saw when I walked off stage, and I don't think I got anything out except 'I love you.' It was so crazy."

Over the next few months she'll be juggling work on her new album with the "American Idol" tour, which kicks off July 6 in Sunrise, Fla., with her "Idol" compatriots Lakisha Jones, Blake Lewis, Sanjaya Malakar, et al.

"I'm going to start working on my album as soon as possible, so I'm meeting with some songwriters and producers. I have to have the album out before Thanksgiving. It's going to be really insane during the summer doing the tour and flying in and out to record. We're going to 56 cities, and we'll be out till September. I'm praying my voice keeps up."

NO DOWN TIME FOR DAD: It's a good thing Angelina Jolie has decided to take time off to just be a mom, since her man Brad Pitt is going to be extremely busy through the rest of the year. Pitt wrapped "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," then went on to do his promotional thing on behalf of "Ocean's 13" and "A Mighty Heart." He's a co-producer on the latter film, which stars Angelina and played to fervently favorable crowds in Cannes. Paramount Vantage has been dealing with a mad scramble of people trying to get into advance screenings here for the June 22 release, based on Marianne Pearl's account of the life and death of her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl (Dan Futterman).

Pitt starts shooting Joel and Ethan Coen's "Burn After Reading," about a CIA agent who's writing a book and loses the disc, in August.

But he'll have to juggle that with doing tub-thumping for the September release of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," in which he plays the legendary outlaw.

MAROON'ED: Accused of having parallels to "Entourage's" central character, Vincent Chase, and his crew, Adam Levine of Maroon 5 cops to the fact, "It's frightening [how] our lives are [like] that show … Watching it, we just look at each other and say, 'Oh, man.' The things they do, the places they go … " he tells Entertainment Weekly, in the issue hitting stands tomorrow (6/8). Like Vince (Adrian Grenier), the 28-year-old Levine is a sex symbol who lives high in the Hollywood Hills, and he likes his cars fast, his girls beautiful and his friends loyal. And like Vince's crew, Levine and his band members go way back — to junior high, in fact.

But as much as Levine enjoys the good life, he complains to EW that it comes at a price. "We want people to remember that we're a band and I'm not a celebrity," Levine declares. "That's gotten skewed over the past couple of years, so we want to correct things … We don't walk on red carpets, we don't act in movies, and we don't date other celebrities."

Not a celebrity? Get that boy a new dictionary.

SHEDDING LIGHT: Polygamists trafficking in modern-day slavery — that isn't your average water cooler discussion. But Kelly Rowan is hoping her June 11 Lifetime movie, "In God's Country," will get people talking about the practice. "The truth is there are young teenage girls that are being taken across the border between the U.S. and Canada," says the former "The O.C." regular, who co-produced and stars in the film. "They're born into it (polygamous communities), and some of these girls are quite young, and they're being married to men in their 50s and 60s."

Rowan says she was pretty much clueless herself to such events 'til she "met a woman who'd been involved in polygamy at one point. A lot of women who leave the community end up going back because they don't have skills. It's hard for them to get a job. They don't have any money. And often they have a lot of children, and they have family within the community."

She says the film took five years to develop, but she wasn't going to give up. "We thought it would be not only an interesting story but an important story to tell."

(With reports by Stephanie DuBois and Emily Feimster)

To find out more about Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith and read their past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 MARILYN BECK AND STACY JENEL SMITH

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