Stapp and Shop

COVER TO COVER Also burning this holiday: Harry Potter books. Jack Brock, pastor of Christ Community Church in Alamogordo, N.M., is planning a ''holy bonfire'' this Sunday to incinerate Potter pages. ''These books encourage our youth to learn more about witches, warlocks, and sorcerers, and those things are an abomination to God and to me,'' the 74-year-old pastor told Reuters. Brock announced the bonfire during a Christmas sermon called ''The Baby Jesus or Harry Potter?'', urging Christians to purge their homes of everything that hinders communication with God. Other Christian groups have railed against J.K. Rowling's benign depiction of sorcery, and in the past she's replied, ''I have met thousands of children now, and not even one time has a child come up to me and said, 'Ms. Rowling, I'm so glad I've read these books because now I want to be a witch.'''

REEL DEAL After 30 years of friendship and successful movie ventures, is Steven Spielberg getting ready to cast away Robert Zemeckis? Spielberg has produced such Zemeckis-directed hits as the ''Back to the Future'' series, and when Zemeckis' prduction company, Imagemovers, set up shop five years ago at Spielberg's DreamWorks studio, Spielberg called the deal ''the continuation of the best circle I've ever been in.'' But in all that time, all DreamWorks has to show for the deal are two Zemeckis hits (''What Lies Beneath'' and ''Cast Away'') on which the studio had to share the profits with co-producing studio 20th Century Fox. And the deal has cost DreamWorks a lot of cash, both for an office building built expressly for Imagemovers and in the millions spent developing movies that were never made. Now, Variety Reports, Imagemovers is looking to move to Warner Bros. when the deal expires in a few months, with DreamWorks saying, ''Don't let the door hit you on the way out.''

THE WAR EFFORT Over the holiday, Jay Leno spent 23 hours flying to visit U.S. troops in an undisclosed location. He brought with him Cedric the Entertainer, Dwight Yoakam, and Chris Isaak. Leno will air portions of their performance for the troops on this evening's ''Tonight Show.''

HEALTH WATCH Clint Eastwood took his eight-year-old Francesca home to California after she was treated for smoke inhalation she suffered in the Christmas Day fire that destroyed the Vancouver home where she was living with her mother, Frances Fisher. During the predawn fire, Francesca climbed out a second story window and jumped 15 feet to safety. ''She's a pretty brave little gal because she was so disoriented when she was inside. It was all smoked,'' her father said. ''She had to go by Braille ... to get to the window.'' Eastwood went door to door to thank the neighbors for helping to rescue his daughter and ex-girlfriend. Fisher, who was renting the house while shooting a TV project, suffered second-degree burns on her hands. The cause of the fire is still undetermined.

PASSING NOTES Lance Loud, the most notorious member of the Loud clan that became famous on the granddaddy of all reality TV shows, PBS' 1973 series ''An American Family,'' died at a Los Angeles hospice on Dec. 21. He was 50 and suffered from AIDS and hepatitis C. The series spent months following Lance and the rest of his fractious family, including his four siblings and their parents, who split up during the filming. He is generally credited with being the first openly gay person on television, not to mention the first gay person on TV whose family accepted his homosexuality. In the years since ''American Family,'' he became an entertainment journalist, writing for such magazines as Details, Interview, and The Advocate, where his final article, about his own mortality, appears in the current issue. Fittingly, he had a documentary crew filming his last days at the hospice where he died.