Behind Closed Doors: Clive Cussler is raising eyebrows for having his trial in front of only a handful of people — but it’s still more people than have read his books.

Funny Misunderstanding: By the headline this morning, we had mistakenly thought the LAT had replaced Patrick Goldstein with 90-year-old comedy writer Mel Shavelson. We wondered what that said about the paper’s vision of its own sustainability.

Sweeps Bonanza: The newsroom at ABC must sound like a cap-gun factory, what with all the champagne we’re sure is being uncorked. And we’ll pop our own bottle for FBLA‘s bro, Patrick Gavin, who lends this lovely kicker quote: “If you make a stink, everyone in this small town will eventually smell it.”

How About Fries and Two-picture Deal?

ICM and CAA dealmakers and flesh peddlers now convene at the Century City mall food court, at least until Craft opens.

Mo’ Bettah Burger
Junk foodies can enter Steve Lopez’s “guess the nutritional content of LA’s favorite foods” contest. Winner gets free lunch with Steve. Insert obvious joke here.

Hello, He Lied.

Clive Cussler fibbed about his sales numbers. He said 100 million, but the audit turned up less than half that number.

Robert McKee of the eponymous screenwriting course, testified that Sahara was a bad novel and worse script. Glenn Bunting reports on the breach-of-contract case between author Clive Cussler and tycoon-turned-producer Philip Anschutz. Anschultz paid $10 million for the rights to the book, and got stuck with Cussler as screenwriter, to boot, but Sahara tanked at the box office.

McKee’s seminars are well-attended–former student, Charlie Kauffman wrote one into a scene in Adaptation. (But not McKee–Brian Cox played him, as he didn’t want to appear in a bad movie.)

The open secret in Hollywood is that McKee’s never had a screenplay produced. To be fair, he did television work for Kojak and Columbo and his scripts have been optioned, which is pretty much a sympathy shtup.

McKee’s getting paid well as an expert witness, too. $500 a hour to say things like:

Bad writing offends me.

Join the club, pally.

It’s been a fabulous week of drama and intrigue and — this being LA — the hopes of well-televised racial violence at the conclusion of a controversial hate-crime case (alas, media blood lust goes unsated).

Here’s a little Friday evening sample platter of news. It comes free during happy hour, so indulge!

Jumping Ship: Ever since the Village Voice Media bought the OC Weekly last year, the staff has gotten mighty unhappy. And now everyone is fleeing — founding editor Will Swaim resigned this week. As did Chris Ziegler and Commie Girl (aka Rebecca Schoenkopf). Read all about it in her final column. As she says, it could have been worse: Singleton coulda bought them. But apparently not-the-worst wasn’t good enough.

Sahara For All The Trouble: Billionaire Philip Anschutz is suing author Clive Cussler, saying the author tricked him into paying $10 million for film rights to the novel Sahara — a development that’s far more interesting than anything Cussler has ever written.

LAT Editors Learn About That Series of Tubes We Like To Play With: Courtesy of LA Observed, LAT Innovation Editor Russ Stanton sends out a memo inviting Times editors to a class “designed to better familiarize you with latimes.com, what generates the most traffic and the least, what the site can and can’t do, and where it is headed.” We love the implicit admission in this that LAT eds don’t even know what’s on the site.