Janet and Clive flew to Los Angeles in July of 2006, only to discover the trial had been rescheduled for August - the first of four delays. “It was frustrating,” Janet says. “We would fly to California, find out the trial had been postponed, turn around and fly back to Phoenix. The strain begins to wear on you. Finally, in November, the judge assured us the trial would start in January. Clive and I ended up living in the Omni Hotel until mid-May.”

Jury selection began on Monday, January 29, 2007, in Judge John P. Shook’s cramped courtroom in downtown Los Angeles Superior Court. Five days later, with eight women and four men seated in the jury box, the opposing attorneys presented their opening arguments. Bert Fields, assisted by Elisabeth Moriarty and Caroline Heindel Burgos, was raring to go. “It’s drama,” Fields says, “and you get a chance to be a director, a producer and an actor. And you have a captive audience.” Warming up to the jury, he exhorted, “For weeks, you are going to hear personal stuff about Mr. Cussler. You’ll hear them claim that he was difficult and cantankerous and grumpy and even rude. Hold your ears.”

Fields described his client as a successful, bestselling author who, having been extremely disappointed by the film adaptation of Raise the Titanic!, was determined to have some degree of control over the script and casting of Sahara. Nobody, the attorney suggested, held a gun to Philip Anschutz’s head when he agreed to what many in Hollywood considered unprecedented approval rights. In fact, it was the Baldwins and Anschutz who sought out Clive in the first place. When Crusader ignored Clive’s suggestions, Fields asserted, “They tore the heart out of the story. The story died, lost all this money because they gutted it.”

Anschutz was represented by Alan Rader, Marvin Putnam, William Charron, and Jessica Stebbins from the firm of O’Melveny & Myers. Listed as the world’s twenty-ninth largest law firm, O’Melveny & Myers employs more than 900 lawyers in fourteen offices worldwide. First up was Rader, who told the jury Clive had intentionally torpedoed what should have been a blockbuster by capriciously rejecting scripts, publicly bad-mouthing the film, and inflating the number of books he had sold. The numbers were a major source of contention since Anschutz insisted it was Clive’s highly publicized 100 million sales that convinced him to agree to the $10 million-a-book deal.

The opportunity to gawk at Hollywood stars, a steamy off-screen romance (Cruz and McConaughey), a bestselling author, a publicity-shy billionaire, and accusations of behind the scenes double-dealing and squandered millions turned the trial into a media circus. Photographers camped out in front of the courthouse and Los Angeles Times reporter Glenn F. Bunting provided the paper’s readers with a day-by-day, blow-by-blow account, as did Janet Shprintz in Variety. The internet was inundated with blogs discussing the case and anybody who had anything to do with publishing or Hollywood - real or imagined - was more than happy to share his or her opinions.

Peter Lampack was the first witness to take the stand. The agent described the meeting in June 2000, at Anschutz’s Denver office tower. After Clive had agreed to drop the price from $30 million to $10 million, he testified, both Anschutz and Howard Baldwin had agreed Clive would get “total and absolute discretion” over Sahara’s script and cast, and a consulting role on subsequent films. Rader grilled Lampack on Clive’s sales numbers. Instead of the 100 million Dirk Pitt novels Cussler, Lampack, and Putnam claimed had been sold, the figure, Rader insisted, was closer to 42 million. This glaring disparity not only “perpetrated a massive fraud” to secure an “unprecedented contractual agreement,” it meant Clive’s audience was much smaller than he asserted and the major reason Sahara bombed at the box-office.

An hour after Lampack completed his sixth day of testimony, Anschutz’s lawyers filed a lawsuit against the agent, alleging Lampack intentionally inflated his client’s book sales. Fields was outraged. “It is a typical Anschutz bullying tactic to try to intimidate a witness on the other side by suing him personally. It is disgusting and despicable.”

On February 16, the jury, attorneys from both sides, the judge and his staff, escorted by a company of sheriff’s deputies, boarded a bus in front of the court building. Their destination was a screening room at Paramount Pictures studio lot where they watched a private screening of Sahara. The field trip was Rader’s idea. “It is important for the jury to decide whether audiences enjoyed the movie or not. The only way to do that is to see it in a real movie theater with a real projection system.” Fields argued the viewing would not only put “too much emphasis” on the movie, “It’s prejudicial and pandering to the jury.” A wag suggested the jury was being “subjected to something that tilted toward the cruel and unusual.” The Los Angeles Times reported, “Sadly, no popcorn will be served.”

On February 21, it was Karen Baldwin’s turn to testify. Called as a hostile witness by Fields, she was shown several memos, including one in which she declared $10 million was a bargain for the rights to a Clive Cussler novel. When Fields asked her to reiterate Crusader’s tortured odyssey to produce a suitable script, Baldwin admitted Paramount’s production chief Karen Rosenfelt deliberately misled Clive by telling him the studio “loved” his screenplay when, in fact, nobody liked it. In a 2003 e-mail introduced into evidence, Baldwin informed Clive, “Paramount is a studio notorious for distortion of the truth whenever necessary in order to avoid conflict or cast themselves in a good light.”

When Anschutz’s lawyers criticized Fields for attempting to “sully” Baldwin’s reputation in an effort to shift the jurors’ attention away from the facts of the case, Fields responded, “The real disruption to the movie was the breathtaking duplicity of Karen Baldwin telling one person one thing and another person another thing. I can’t help if she has no credibility.”

As the trial progressed, dozens of witnesses were called to testify. Among them were two experts who provided very different opinions of Clive’s talent. Robert McKee, actor, professor, and creative writing instructor best known for his bombastic, profanity-laced Story Seminars, was brought in to testify for Anschutz’s side. Asked to critique Clive’s screenplay, McKee responded, “I mean, I cannot overstate how terrible the writing is. It is flawed in every way writing can be flawed.” When he was informed Sahara, the book, was a commercial success, McKee scoffed, “Bad writing often makes a lot of money.” During Fields’s cross-examination, McKee described The Da Vinci Code as, “flawed,” and characterized Citizen Kane as, “Heartless,” “emotionally empty,” and “cold.”

Testifying on Clive’s behalf, Lew Hunter, chairman emeritus and professor of screenwriting at the UCLA Department of Film and Television, stated changes made to the screenplay, including the elimination of a scene where a hero kills a villain, were a major mistake. “We’re a justice-driven audience,” he explained. “We want to see the bad guys gone.” Hunter was also critical of the film’s “juvenile humor” and “superficial” romantic scenes he classified as “Marina del Rey-like,” not at all typical of Clive’s writing.

On April 15, the attorneys from both sides were called into Judge Shook’s office. They were shocked when he told them he might declare a mistrial.