Hollywood Exclusive by Marilyn Beck & Stacy Jenel Smith

Treat Williams begins production of his forthcoming "Heartland" series in Los Angeles Monday (3/26), with plans to commute back and forth to the Park City, Utah home he and his family established during his "Everwood" tenure.

"At the end of 'Everwood,' I said to my wife, Pam, 'Well, what now?' And she said, 'I want to stay. I love my friends here, and the kids are happy in school.' Fortunately, we have a beautiful airplane we can travel in, and my airport is easy to get in and out of," says the actor, who has 30 years' experience as a pilot. "I go through a canyon to Vegas, and turn right, and I'm there."

The Williamses also maintain a New York City penthouse and a house in Vermont.

Williams says he took time off after "Everwood" after the show finished shooting last April, "I think we all needed it." But from his list of activities since then, it hardly seems possible he's had much in the way of down time. There's his April 15 Lifetime movie, "The Staircase Murders," a true crime story in which Treat plays the accused killer, a best-selling novelist who leads a double life. There's the arc he put in on "Brothers & Sisters." And there's "Heartland," the TNT series in which he will play a heart surgeon specializing in transplants — a guy he says has nothing in common with his "Everwood" medico, Andy Brown, "other than the fact they're both doctors. There's nothing soft and fuzzy about this guy or this show."

GRASS ROOTS TAKING HOLD: PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley says he's getting assurances from both the Democratic and Republican parties that they're taking stock of the ideas and solutions he's advocated in his best-selling 2006 book, "The Covenant with Black America," and its follow-up, "The Covenant in Action," which hit stores last month. Smiley's set to moderate live TV forums as primary season advances — the Democratic forum in June and the Republican in September — and he tells this column that both party chairs assure him that "all the candidates running for the White House are going to show up to address the issues in 'The Covenant.'"

Smiley notes that in his forward to the new book, renowned scholar Cornel West wrote, "'The challenge was for us to go from moment to momentum to movement.' When the first book came out, that was a moment.

We actually put to page a blueprint for Black America being made better. Then as the book started climbing the best-seller list, and people were meeting and talking about it, the momentum started to build. Now this thing is starting to turn into a movement."

THE WAITING GAME: After a long season of commuting from his Los Angeles home to the shooting of "Friday Night Lights" in Dallas, Kyle Chandler says the first thing on his schedule now "is to do all the fixing-up work around the house I haven't done for the last six or seven months." And when he's done with that, he says, he and his wife are going to pack up their two young daughters "and head out on some nice little vacations, like camping out near some lovely bodies of water. That's what I want to do." The only thing that might interfere with those plans, says Kyle, would be a movie assignment. "A few things are pending," he says.

HER MAN IN THE TREES: "Men in Trees" regular Suleka Mathew reports when the ABC dramedy returns April 12, things will start to heat up between Sara, the single mom/former prostitute she plays on the show, and a man of the cloth who came into her life before the show's recent hiatus. It's a heat that's already familiar to her, says Mathew, since Sara's love interest is "played by my real boyfriend, Nick Lea."

She explains, "We get together very often as a cast, and our partners come with us for dinner or dancing. After ('MIT' creator) Jenny Bicks met Nick, she said, 'I'm going to keep an eye on a good part for him.' I had so little to do with it, and it worked out beautifully."

Before the show's break, Sara was asked out by a guy she met in an Emergency Medical Training class. "He revealed to me on the date that he was a pastor, and I freaked out because I thought, 'God is going to get me somehow.' My character used to be a prostitute, so she thought, 'This isn't going to work' and bolted.'" Fortunately, she says Pastor Eric "is the kind of man of the cloth who doesn't carry judgments — and that's so sexy to me."

Mathew says Lea will be in four more shows by season's end. The "Men in Trees" troupe only has two more shows to shoot, and Mathew tips the romantic dramedy will be going out with a bang in the season finale. "I'll say that much on fear of pain and death," she says with a laugh. "I will tell you it's very fun and exciting, but seriously, I fear losing my job at this point."

(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 2006 MARILYN BECK AND STACY JENEL SMITH

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