BLAKE TRIAL FEELING MORE LIKE `B' MOVIE.

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

VAN NUYS - It's 2 p.m., and Courtroom 810 is in recess as prosecutors prepare for the next witness. Eight floors below, on the courthouse steps, a lone figure in a dark suit smokes a cigarette on a warm January day while gazing at the reconstruction work of the Van Nuys City Hall.

This guy is famous - albeit a ``B'' celebrity at best, and faded - and he's on trial for killing his wife. But no one's mobbing him for comment on the morning's testimony. The paparazzi are nowhere in sight. Even his team of lawyers aren't hovering over him.

Just an old man taking a smoke break.

A white-haired man walks up to the smoker, chats with him for a minute, then claps him on the shoulder. From a distance the gesture says, ``Good luck.''

This scene more than anything illustrates the weirdness of the Robert Blake trial unfolding at the Van Nuys Superior Courthouse. Prosectors believe the former Little Rascal and '70s TV star murdered Bonny Lee Bakley, his wife and mother of their infant daughter, Rosie, in May 2001 outside Vitello's restaurant in Studio City. He claims someone else shot her as she sat in the car, waiting for him to go retrieve a gun he forgot inside the restaurant.

This is nothing like those other wife-killing trials: The spectacle of O.J. Simpson a decade ago and the one a few months ago of that Modesto fertilizer salesman who wasn't even in the movies.

There's a second-rate feeling about everything, from the low level of media interest to the sleazy goings-on of a marginal cast of characters.

First, there's the nudie pictures of the victim, and allegations of her being involved in blackmailing lonely old men and maybe even being involved with a drug ring out of Mexico.

There's the links to other not-quite A-list celebrities, such as Marlon Brando's son Christian, who also had a thing with Bakley (he allegedly thought Rosie was his kid) and the rock 'n' roller Jerry Lee Lewis.

There was a field trip by the jury to visit the site of the murder. And there was the discussion of Blake's supposed eating disorder, and the appearance of Blake's vomit in a Dumpster the night his wife was shot to death. There was a question about its authenticity. There's a former cop turned P.I. and the veteran stuntman who said Blake offered money to deal with Bakley.

This could be the treatment of a seamy B movie that's not-quite porn. It's appropriate this case ended up in the San Fernando Valley.

Despite the inherent drama that leads up to any homicide, especially when money and celebrity is involved, most days this show doesn't even fill the seats in the small courtroom.

More than half of the regular seats are reserved for reporters, many of whom don't show up on most days. The rest are taken by looky-loos, court-watchers, law students, lawyers dropping in for an afternoon, and the self-described various FOB (friends of Blake).

The prosecution, led by Deputy District Attorney Shellie Samuels, is still laying out its case against Blake. The process is expected to stretch into February. On this day William Welch, a private eye and former North Hollywood Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective, is on the stand.

Prodded by Samuels, Welch details the various harebrained schemes Blake came up with to get rid of Bakley, whom he met at a jazz club and got her pregnant during a fling. One day in 1999, Blake called Welch to his Studio City ranch and asked the friend to take a walk. During the walk, Welch said Blake recounted how he had met Bakley and that she now had turned up pregnant.

Welch told the actor to just give her some money to go away. But Blake had another plan, Welch said: They were going to kidnap Bakley and force her to get an abortion. If that didn't work, they'd whack her.

``Are you out of your f---ing mind?'' Welch said he responded.

Later, after Rosie was born, Blake allegedly came up with other schemes to get rid of Bakley so he could take the baby, such as the elaborately loopy one in which he would plant cocaine in Bakley's hotel room at the Beverly Garland hotel. After Blake gave a sign - his cap would be on backward as he left on a motorcycle ride with Bakley - Welch and his former LAPD buddies swoop in and bust her.

At the defense table, Blake pays close attention to the hours of details. He frowns and scowls, his hands often busy rubbing through his gray buzz cut or playing with the skin on his face.

On cross-examination, defense attorney M. Gerald Schwartzbach methodically picks apart Welch's testimony, with the apparent strategy of boring the jury into submission. Welch doesn't recall many of the things he said to police during the investigation way back when. Schwartzbach is nonplussed, only raising his voice to point out that when Bakley turned up dead, Welch didn't go straight to police with his conversations with Blake. Instead, he went fly fishing.

``He impeached him,'' one regular spectator, a retiree named Hector, says later during a break. He should know, he's been watching the trial since the beginning. He sits in the courtroom with another retired court- watcher, Tom, and dissects the strategies of each side during the recesses.

Some people blame Judge Darlene Schempp for the public's relative disinterest in the trial. Schempp has banned cameras from her courtroom and even audiotape, which takes the drama out of any live shot. Instead, the stories are only updates on who said what and when, and takes the lurid power out of the trial.

In a way, it's a blessing that the court has limited coverage. The evening newscasts are depressing enough without having the tawdry details of Bakley's life and death played out each and every night.