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Robert De Niro has been picking up work where he can — a speaking engagement here, a morning-show gig there — so we were more than little surprised last week when we heard he'd backed out of the thriller Edge of Darkness, currently shooting in Boston. That's not the De Niro who jumped to ostensibly greener pastures at Endeavor a while back, and it's definitely not the consummate professional whom producers brought aboard to make alpha-male magic with Mel Gibson and director Martin Campbell. But a report today out of Massachusetts offers no fewer than four scenarios making the rounds — chief among them being a sort of fantastically Kubrickesque golf-course torture:

According to [one] source, Campbell had Bobby D. repeatedly shoot and re-shoot a scene where his character tries to hit a ball out of a sand trap. At the end of the day, the actor reportedly approached the director to discuss the long day, and the discussion degenerated into a shouting match that culminated with De Niro hitting the road. [...] Producer Graham King, who brought The Departed to Boston and knows a little something about working with A-List talent, swears that there is nothing more to the story than real-life “creative differences.” “The issue really was that Bob saw the character one way and we saw it another,” King told the Track. “And it was hard for Martin, especially, to get his head around how Bob wanted to portray the actor.”

Other rumors suggested that De Niro simply didn't know his lines ("That dog don't hunt," quipped his flack, so cross that off!) and/or couldn't hack it with the mildly anti-Semitic Gibson, with whom he hadn't even yet shared a scene. God only knows, though it should be noted that Ray Winstone — a celebrated charity golf stud in his native England — was just brought in to replace De Niro. We're just saying.