McCartney issues a no-meat decree

Plus: The latest buzz on ‘The Green Hornet’

	Paul McCartney is keeping the set of his concert meat-free.
Pier Paolo Cito / AP File

By Jeannette Walls

MSNBC

updated 4:18 p.m. ET June 14, 2004

Paul McCartney is performing without Wings. Or thighs or drumsticks.

Crew members on the set of the singer’s concert are up in arms because the staunch vegetarian has banned the eating of meat by anyone working on the tour.

“It’s completely crazy,” one worker in Oslo, Norway, where the former Beatle is performing tonight, told the paper Aftenposten, according to our translator. “We’re supposed to work from eight till eight each day, and aren’t served anything but salad and vegetarian food. I can’t live without meat doing this kind of work, and will defy the ban and bring my own lunch packet with meat.” According to another local report, the crew is also forbidden from wearing leather belts or shoes.

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“We can’t control what they do in their spare time,” a spokesman for the concert organizers told Aftenposten. “But as long as they’re inside the stadium area, it’s correct that they are banned from eating meat.”

The buzz on ‘Green Hornet’
IMAGE: Smith
Jennifer Graylock / AP File
Looks like Kevin Smith won’t be directing “The Green Hornet” after all. The director of “Jersey Girl” was named to bring the cult comic book to the big screen, but now Smith is saying he will write, but probably will not direct “The Green Hornet.”

Instead, Smith, who also directed the widely panned “Jersey Girl,” is working on what he has described as a “small project” and some assumed that it would star Ben Affleck, his longtime buddy and collaborator who in 1997’s starred in Smith’s “Chasing Amy.”

“[Affleck] romanticizes that period in his life,” Smith told the Illawarra Mercury of Australia. “For him, it was the last moment before the apple cart took off. He became ‘Ben Affleck, the Movie Star’ after that.” Affleck, it turns out, won’t be in Smith’s “small project” and — after Affleck failed to appear at the London premiere of “Jersey Girl” citing bronchitis and Smith poked fun at him for it — some are wondering if there’s friction between the two.

Notes from all over
IMAGE: Cruise
Stephen Shugerman / Getty Images File
Tom Cruise has helped open another detox center in Long Island and plans to open several more this year, his sister and press rep told Agence France. The Manhattan center, which uses the techniques of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, has drawn criticism from some who say it’s a gateway into Scientology. . . . In a peculiar bit of casting, bald and tiny techno-rocker Moby will reign as Neptune at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade June 26. . . . DarkHorizons.com asked Jake Gyllenhaal what was the most difficult scene to shoot in the disaster flick “The Day After Tomorrow.” “The hardest sequence, I think [was when] we shot like two weeks in a tank full of water with 700 extras, which is that scene of the wave that comes over,” Gyllenhaal replied. “By the end of week one, people weren’t getting out of the tank to go to the bathroom, they were doing it right in the tank — so that was in its own special way, the most difficult scene that I shot.”