Hollywood Exclusive by Marilyn Beck & Stacy Jenel Smith

Dane Cook is confident his marathon stand-up comedy record is going to, well, stand up. That's in spite of the fact that Dave Chappelle broke Cook's three-hour, 50-minute record at L.A.'s Laugh Factory in April last year. Then, after reportedly hearing rumors of Cook's intention to grab the record back, Chappelle added a six-hour, 12-minute run in December, only to have Cook best him with his seven-hour endurance joke-telling spree Jan. 1.

And yet, asked about Chappelle coming back again, Cook says, "It isn't something we went into competitively. If anybody could get up there and entertain people for more than seven hours, it would be Dave," he adds. "But I think the seven hours will probably stand for some time."

The audience was in a marathon, too. "At the five-hour mark, five or 10 people stood up and said, 'Dane, I have to go to work tomorrow.' But almost everybody stayed. It felt like an event, like something special was happening in the room. At about 4 o'clock in the morning, I gave a guy in the front row a few hundred bucks to go get everybody hamburgers," recalls Cook, who has "Dan in Real Life" with Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche newly out on DVD this week.

He's very fond of the charming romantic comedy. "I'd made a couple of more adult, R-rated films, so to be able to go and do something more family-oriented was great. My nieces and nephews could see Uncle Dane, and I could share the experience with them," he notes. "And I was in heaven working with Juliette and Steve, Dianne Wiest, John Mahoney, Emily Blunt — a fantastic group."

A KISS IS STILL A KISS: Tyler James Williams tells us that filming his first kiss on "Everybody Hates Chris" for this Sunday's (March 15) installment of the show was pretty much just another day on the job as far as he's concerned. "I wondered when they'd get around to it. Tequan got a kiss in the third episode," he points out, referring to his series brother, Tequan Richmond. For Williams himself, kissing is nothing new. His first on-camera smooch was in the 2006 feature "Unaccompanied Minors," in fact.

Still, he adds, "you never forget the awkwardness of that first kiss. Everyone can relate to that."

Williams adds that even though his "Everybody Hates Chris" series alter ego, young Chris Rock, is six months older than he is in real life, the character is more naive than Tyler himself. "One thing I had to do was remember the different mindset of 1982 versus 2008," notes the 15-year-old star. "I noticed even in school, the guys wanted to go out with girls but they had no idea what they were doing. Now we see models everywhere."

TRACK SHOES ON: "NCIS" regular Brian Dietzen says cast and crew will be "working overtime, six days a week" to complete the final episodes of the Mark Harmon CBS drama. "We are going to do seven, with the last two airing as a two-hour finale. It's pretty fantastic that we're going to be able to get that many in."

He adds that after several scary weeks off, no one's grumbling about the workload. "We just started this past week, and it's going great so far. Everyone is so happy, ecstatic to be back on the set. It might not still be that way after two months of working six days a week, but everyone is realizing how fortunate we are now."

Dietzen, who plays Dr. Mallard's (David McCallum) assistant, Jimmy Palmer, on "NCIS," says the silver lining to his writer's strike cloud was the birth of his baby girl, Clover. "She's 10 months old, and she's fantastic. It's funny. Sean Murray, who plays McGee on the show, had a baby three weeks after us, so we've been doing lots of play dates. That's how we spent our strike hiatus."

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz is pretty young — 28 — but he's lived long enough to have known times of struggle as well as times on top. Reflecting on that, he tells us, "I had a friend who says that character is who you are in the dark. It's easy to have great character when everyone's patting you on the back, but it's when you're kicked and down that you find out who you really are. You try to handle it with grace and dignity as much as possible."

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 2008 MARILYN BECK AND STACY JENEL SMITH

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