"I mean, it's half-animated and nonlinear and Ellen's in a very high place right now and there's just too much focus on her and her career for her to be able to go off and do some super-experimental flick."

This is clearly a matter of dues-paying for both women — particularly for the non-conformist Page, whose "one for Ratner, one nonlinear girl-girl monster drama for me" is proving a tougher road to hoe than even her image-shaping, power-lesbian flack/Oscar date may have anticipated months ago. All we can recommend is for the ladies as the Jack and Diane window closes is to keep fighting the good fight; considering Thirlby's admitted luck with pot comedies, the film may be just one super-experimentally drug-dealing-werewolf subplot away from the green light they've so desperately awaited.

[Photo: Getty Images]

• Olivia Thirlby Spurns Pot, Embraces the Munchies [NYM]

"You can do what you want in Central Park, unless you're doing it for a film," Ratner tells us. "Then, you can't touch anything. Olivia weighs about 80 pounds, but we weren't allowed to have her hanging from a tree. We had to buy a dead tree from a prop house and bring it to Central Park. We also couldn't walk on the grass, so we had to get a crane to stand the tree up on concrete, then put grass and mulch around it, so it looked real. ... It was insane."

It's like Ratner's own little tormented Herzog film; Fitzcarratner, perhaps, in which the embattled fauxteur, six minutes from "one of the most talked-about segments in the anthology," quits grab-assing extras long enough to guide a small army of crew members and a dead-tree-wielding crane inch-by-inch through the treacherous trails of Central Park. "No, no, no, Anton, not like that" he says before shooing the young actor away from his limb-dangling waif and closing in with his sweaty mitts. "Like... this. Hold still, Olivia." Some guys will do anything for their art.

• Brett Ratner goes out on a limb in NYC [NYDN]