“When it comes to spectacle, Hollywood enjoys nothing better than a nasty legal battle between two determined and egotistical adversaries: Bette Davis meets Joan Crawford, in a courtroom.” The participants in past high-profile lawsuits have “cringed to hear their private comments and inner thoughts offered up for public consumption. And so may it go if the headline-making book publisher Judith Regan proceeds with a lawsuit her lawyers have threatened against the News Corporation, which owns HarperCollins, the publishing house that fired her in December after the O. J. Simpson book and television project imploded.”