SHE'S A LITTLE BIT COUNTRY - AND A WHOLE LOT MARRIED.

Byline: Marilyn Beck & Stacy Jenel Smith

Reports of the demise of the marriage of Shania Twain and her record-producer husband, Mutt Lange, are, to paraphrase Mark Twain (no relation), terribly premature.

Or, as she puts it, ``terrible - but I have to laugh at them at this point. It's the longest-living tale. We try to guard our privacy, and we go on about our business, and that's pretty much it.''

She says that she and Lange will be spending a lot of time together in the new year at their homes in Switzerland and Florida - and ``traveling together, for pleasure, seeing things as a couple. We'll do a lot of songwriting while we're traveling, too. Sometimes, home isn't the best place to write. I kind of look at home as a place not to work.''

Shania's work at the moment consists of her Nov. 25 ``Shania Twain: Come on Over'' CBS special, three more weeks of her current concert tour and ``a little more work for Revlon. That will be it for the year for me. I'm excited about it all, because it's kind of like a farewell.''

For a while. She's planning a Christmas album for release next year and her next studio album for an early 2001 debut - and she won't return to heavy touring until the latter disc is out.

The superstar songstress is looking forward to ``the best New Year's ever. With the success of this (`Come on Over') album, the year is ending on a great note, and I'm happy to close it out.''

She's flying her brothers and sisters and other family members over to Switzerland to join her and Lange, with plans ``to bring in the New Year outside by a campfire. No New Year's Eve show, no party. I'll cook stuff for my family, and we'll have a down-to-earth kind of time together - play games, eat food, enjoy being together.''

In the trenches

Amazing how fast one can get cynical in Hollywood. Kirsten Dunst (``Dick,'' ``Interview With the Vampire''), who's now 17, makes that very clear in the December issue of Gear magazine when she notes that she would be nervous about working with girls her own age, because ``I worry everyone would be at each other's throats and telling lies behind each other's backs.''

Actually, as a child actress, her perception of life was tainted at a very early age. She recalls her stay at the Oakwood Apartments in L.A. at the age of 7, and says, ``It's like little-kid Hollywood there. I hated that place, like, you'd get in the pool, and some cute little girl would come up to you and say, `So what are y'all auditioning for today?' Everyone was smiling, and they'd all be thinking, `That little bitch, she got the role I wanted.' ''

Desert duty

``It was real guerrilla filmmaking,'' reports Bruce Davison of shooting on ``The King Is Alive.''

``We shot in a ghost town 15 miles from Luderitz, Namibia. When people ask me what Namibia is like, I say, `Imagine a sand dune 300 miles wide that stretches from San Diego to Vancouver. That's Namibia.' ... There was not a tree to be seen. It was a lot of climbing up sand dunes and rolling down on your face. It was miserable.''

Davison, who stars in the upcoming film with Jennifer Jason Leigh, says despite all that, ``it was some of the most freeing acting I've ever done.''

``The King Is Alive'' is the fourth in the series of Dogma '95 films, a filmmaking style that, in this case, involves ``a crew of seven shooting only with natural lights, only with natural sets and only with a hand-held DVD video camera.''

Instead of the stops and starts of standard filmmaking, Davison says, the actors in the indie flick about an acting troupe doing ``King Lear'' would ``shoot an improvised scene for an hour ... after 15 minutes, something starts to take over. ... It's quite amazing.''

Hotter than hot

Tina Landon, who's choreographing Ricky Martin's new tour, says even she found herself falling under the spell of the star's incredible charisma.

``It's funny. Normally, I'm really careful about taking care of the dancers, making sure they don't work too hard so they can last through a 12- to 14-hour shoot. But when Ricky stepped into the room while I was doing the video for `La Vida Loca,' the energy was so high, I couldn't stop watching him. I didn't even realize the dancers had done the scene about seven or eight times in a row without stopping. ... They were all dying, but I was just in awe.

That's what Ricky Martin will do to you.''

With reports by Stephanie DuBois.

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4 Photos

Photo: (1) TWAIN

(2) DUNST

(3) DAVISON

(4) MARTIN