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Sensing that there might be more to yesterday's announcement that Ryan Gosling's sudden departure from Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones adaptation than a friendly disagreement over competing visions for the film, the sleuths of Page Six dig deeper into this new Hollywood mystery, unearthing disturbing allegations of personality clashes and actorly eccentricity. Egads, we say!

THOSE old "creative differences" are to blame for director Peter Jackson's firing of Ryan Gosling from "Lovely Bones." "Peter couldn't stand Ryan," said one source.

Though Variety reported that Gosling had "stepped down" and was replaced by Mark Wahlberg, our source said, "Ryan cut his own hair, and was fighting with wardrobe. He was so demanding . . . Peter booted him two days before filming started." The flick is based on the best-selling novel by Alice Sebold. A rep for Gosling did not return calls.

Given that Jackson, the veteran director of feature films that have grossed more than a billion dollars domestically, surely realizes that the price of working with Genius involves tolerating the talent's occasional behavioral quirks and would be unfazed by matters as trivial as those mentioned above (or the weight gain referenced in Variety), we're inclined to speculate that Gosling's on-set behavior was considerably more unconventional than reported. Perhaps the notoriously intense actor insisted on preparing for his most heart-wrenching scenes by laying down in a pile of bones he claimed were those of a murdered teenage girl, a pre-performance ritual that he considered indispensable to meeting the emotional demands of his role, but which understandably made the crew uneasy. Happily, however, Jackson should have a more docile collaborator in replacement Mark Wahlberg, whose needs should prove no more onerous than requesting that no one knock on his trailer door as he performs the six-hundred crunches that comprise his daily acting prep.