Hollywood Exclusive by Marilyn Beck & Stacy Jenel Smith

Soap star-turned-talk show host Kelly Ripa got back into performing with her sitcom "Hope & Faith," but now she tells us she might be done with acting.

"As much fun as 'Hope & Faith' was, it was a lot of work. It made me appreciate working just one hour a day," says Ripa with a laugh. "I love acting, and that's how I started out my career. It's creative and it's fun. I don't know that I ever want to work that hard again, but I never say never." Speaking of her children — Michael, age 9; Lola, 5; and Joaquin, 4 — she adds, "As my kids get older, once maybe Joaquin goes to school full time and I have eight hours a day where I'm just sitting around, then maybe I'll feel differently, but right now I'm really content."

She's looking forward to next week's "Live with Regis and Kelly" shows, which will emanate from New Orleans. They plan to showcase spots all around the area — food, architecture, culture, ways in which the Big Easy has come back from Hurricane Katrina and ways it hasn't. Guests including Luke Wilson, John Stamos and chef Emeril Lagasse will be on board.

Of special interest to Kelly is the fact that the show, along with Disney/ABC TV, is sponsoring building of a playground in New Orleans' Dr. Charles Drew Elementary School in Bywater, one of the areas hardest hit by the 2005 disaster. As a mom herself, she says, she knows how badly kids need a clean, healthy place to play.

Ripa also has behind-the-cameras pursuits awaiting her. She and her husband, Mark Consuelos, "wrote a script for a pilot, which didn't get made this year. We wrote it with the show runners from 'Hope & Faith,'" she notes. "We're going to stick with it, though, because we got far along in the process. We really enjoyed putting together a show."

HIGH SIGN: Gary Cole reports production is just wrapping on "Pineapple Express," the James Franco-Seth Rogen starrer written by Rogen and his fellow "40-Year-Old Virgin" writer Evan Goldberg. "I hesitate to call it a drug movie, but that's certainly a significant element in it," adds Cole, who has a supporting role in the comedy. "Pineapple Express is a category of a certain herbal product of the leafy kind."

Yep, and Franco and Rogen (who also has "Knocked Up" with Katherine Heigl opening June 1) play a pair of stoners who unintentionally get involved with a drug gang. Is the world ready for a return to pot humor? All Cole can say is, it's "super bad and very funny."

Meanwhile, the actor who easily bounces back and forth between filming frivolity (Reese Bobby in "Talladega Nights," enough said) and drama, has Warner Bros.' "American Pastime" coming out on DVD Tuesday (5/22).

That's a mere 11 days after opening in a handful of showcase theaters. Cole notes it will be interesting to see how well the movie, drawn from the historical realities of baseball leagues set up within Japanese internment camps during WWII, fares in its theatrical release in Japan. "A lot of the money to make it actually came from there," he informs.

"I'm a huge baseball fan, so it was great for me to get to play baseball," adds Cole, who portrays a camp guard/minor league player. "It was especially great to play movie baseball, because it makes you look so good — so much better than you really are!"

THE VIDEOLAND VIEW: When the Emmy-nominated "The 4400" returns next month, Aussie actress Jenni Baird reports she'll not only be the new boss, she might be the new love interest for the series hero, Tom Baldwin (Joel Gretsch). Fans of the hit USA Network show know that Tom's wife, Alana (Karina Lombard), was missing at the end of last season. "They won't give me any hard and fast facts, but there's certainly a lot of chemistry, especially in this dramatic episode we're shooting this week," says Baird.

In "The 4400," Baird plays Meghan Doyle, the new boss of NTAC, the National Threat Assessment Command agency, which keeps track of the 4,400 abductees who returned to Earth with enhanced abilities. "I'm given a fantastic introduction," she says. "In the first scene I'm hanging film posters on the wall, wearing jeans and looking completely wrong. I'm young and I'm funky, and everyone is like 'Who the hell is that?'" Baird says her character views the 4400 as "like refugees in the world and in their lives — and she breaks rules in helping them."

GETTING PHILOSPHICAL: Armand Assante recently finished one of his most challenging roles to date — that of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the movie "When Nietzsche Wept." It was a role, he says, he must have been meant to play. "There were passages [written by Nietzsche] that were given to me by people — one of whom was a German actor who was helping me with the language," Assante explains. "I went back to my original copies of Nietzsche that I've had since my teens and I had underlined the same passages, and I'm now 57 years old. In a strange way, the imprint that he left on me as a boy has left as much of an impression on me now."

(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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