Movies – Everything That Happened .com

2018-01-142024-07-27

Duck and Cover

“The film starts with an animated sequence, showing a turtle walking down a road, while picking up a flower and smelling it. A chorus sings the Duck and Cover theme:

There was a turtle by the name of Bert
and Bert the turtle was very alert;
when danger threatened him he never got hurt
he knew just what to do …
He’d duck! [gasp]
And cover!
Duck! [gasp]
And cover!
(male) He did what we all must learn to do
(male) You (female) And you (male) And you (deeper male) And you!
[bang, gasp] Duck, and cover!“

I did not grow up with a “constant fear of nuclear attack by the Soviets”, and for that happy truth I thank the Orange, New Jersey school board, which made the curriculum decisions affecting me and my schoolmates. We did have some fear, but it wasn’t constant. I’d call it more of a low-grade background concern, and a condition of life in the 1950s and ’60s.

We had only one duck-and-cover drill at Cleveland Street School, in sixth grade. I don’t recall being shown the Duck and Cover film, or getting any advance explanation for the drill, but one morning we were taught how to crawl under our desks and curl up in a ball. Our classroom was partly below ground level, with the window sills level with the asphalt playground outside. We were told that when we saw the flash we should not look out the window under any circumstances, but instantly get under our desks, facing away from the windows, which would shatter inward in just a few seconds when the blast wave arrived. We should keep our eyes closed and curl up with clasped hands protecting our necks, tricky when your desk’s iron legs are bolted to the floor.

If we happened to be outside when we saw the flash, we should drop down next to a curbstone, or lie down next to a log (assuming the town’s pioneer settlers left some unused logs behind, which they had not).

We never discussed that drill – in class with the teacher, among ourselves, or with our parents. and we never had another one. I think someone on the school board decided they were pointless, stupid and frightening, and said let’s not do that any more.

There was plenty of other propaganda around to influence us; I remember drawing a picture of a falling atomic bomb I labeled “Happy Birthday Joe”, and it was not Stalin’s birthday. Later, as a grownup, I would dream a few times a year of silo doors blasting open and missiles sailing out, whether their missiles or ours I never knew. These were not quite nightmares, I was a passive onlooker, but were not pleasant to wake up to at three in the morning. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the world felt safer and the dreams pretty much stopped.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, one of my customers asked if I had sent my family to stay with relatives at the shore, farther away from New York City, a likely target. He was wide-eyed and genuinely frightened, and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t frightened too. That was a good question – I think I just couldn’t believe that either the Russians or us would do anything so crazy.

Fallout Shelter signs were posted on most public buildings; many remain

From a 1963 Department of Defense internal newsletter:

THE SHELTER SIGN. How many really understand the real significance of those black and yellow markers? There are six points to the shelter sign. They signify: 1. Shielding from radiation; 2. Food and water; 3. Trained leadership; 4. Medical supplies and aid; 5. Communications with the outside world; 6. Radiological monitoring to determine safe areas and time for return home. … It is an image we should leave with the public at every opportunity, for in it there is hope rather than despair.

2018-03-152024-07-27

Gentleman farmer, part 2/4: NO LUGS

In the first part of Gentleman Farmer I told how when I was ten and then eleven years old, I spent two happy summers at my Uncle Bert’s farm in Michigan. I traveled there by myself, the first year by train, the second year by air. Late every summer, Bert drove back to New Jersey with his own family to visit his mother, brothers and sisters, and I came back to Jersey with them.

Condom vending machine, courtesy ebay.com

The Pennsylvania Turnpike was still under construction, so the trip was not yet an easy, all-four-lane-highway one. It was over six hundred miles, so I imagine we stopped somewhere overnight, but I don’t remember that part. During one return trip, I spotted a tall, coin-operated vending machine in a gas station men’s room. It wasn’t clear to me what was being vended, so I asked Bert. He just laughed and said “Never mind, let’s go.” Another men’s room had a confusing sign next to a full-length mirror at the exit; it said “Please adjust your dress”. Before I could even ask, Bert said it meant “Make sure your fly is closed”. Why not just say so?

During my first visit, I mailed my mother a map of the farm, showing the creek that ran across it, the house, the barn, the garden, and a cloud-shaped blob labeled “razzberries”. It also showed where my cousins and I were surprised by a blue racer snake. I saw that map somewhere around here a year ago, but when I looked for it just now to put on this page, it had gone missing. Stay tuned. (April 23 – okay, found it, posted at Gentleman farmer, part 3: lost map found. Enjoy.)

In the barn there were cats, household junk, and farm tools including my favorite, a post-hole digger. Because they lived beyond county garbage collection routes, they buried their organic garbage in rows parallel to those of their vegetable garden. In time, a garbage row decays into the rich soil of a vegetable row, gets planted with seeds, and the cycle continues. I learned to use the post-hole digger, and enthusiastically lengthened the current garbage row until Aunt Evelyn said it was long enough for now. They burned their trash in a shallow ditch around the stump that doubled as the chicken-execution block.

I think they owned a radio, but I don’t remember ever hearing any music in the house. Naomi had a violin that was probably rented through her high school band program, but she wasn’t in love with it – I never heard her play it, or even saw it out of its beat-up case.

There was a dinnertime rule that you had to eat everything that was put on your plate. I don’t think it was Bert’s rule, he was too kindhearted for that; I think it was Evelyn’s. Maybe surviving the Depression had made her that way. There was no such rule back home, and I had a hard time with it, sometimes sitting at the table by myself long after dinner, trying to choke down what still remained. Evelyn was not a great cook — I remember in particular leather-like pork chops, and brussels sprouts, always brussels sprouts.

(I mentioned Evelyn’s rule, and how unjust it was, to one of my sons. He said “What?! You did that!” I told him he was crazy, I never did anything like that. Thinking about it now, I know I did say at times, but not all the time, “No dessert until you finish what’s on your plate”. But that’s not the same thing, nope. Pretty sure.)

Someone decided the house needed a fresh coat of paint, and one hot July day the project began. There were ladders and plenty of brushes in the barn, and my cousins made sure that I was provided a brush and a bucket of paint, the same as them. Painting was easy, and I was good at it. Thinking of the time I helped my father and his friend paint a lady’s beach bungalow, I just slapped it on.

Where there are barn cats there are bound to be kittens, and when Virginia inspected the latest litter, she saw one that looked like it wasn’t breathing. She went into her ER-nurse mode, putting her mouth over the creature’s muzzle and giving it tiny puffs of air, stopping at intervals to check for results. She did her best, but it was too late.

There wasn’t much to do in Temperance, it was as rural as it gets. Up at the next corner, about a 10-minute walk away, there was a gas station with a grocery store that had candy and comic books. I sometimes was sent there to pick up milk or whatever. I don’t recall ever going into “town”, if there was a town, unless you count going to the feed store. A charitable organization, maybe the Kiwanis, got the idea of having a movie night to give the local kids something to do. There was an empty lot behind the grocery store and that’s where they set up the screen. People brought blankets and folding chairs and waited for the dark. Once it was, they started the projector. Every moth and other flying insect in Monroe county spotted the light, and collected in dense bug clouds around both the projector and screen. Disgusted moviegoers began grabbing their blankets and heading home. I don’t know if anyone stayed for the whole show; we were among the first to recognize a bad idea and bail out.

One day Bert took us to Lake Erie to go swimming. It was a pretty long drive, not one you’d want to do every day. On the way, he had to slam on his brakes to avoid another car, and my throat hit the top of the front seat; no seat belts then. It was like getting punched in the voice box; I couldn’t make a sound. It seemed like a long while before I could breathe. No one noticed my difficulties; I think they were all too upset about the almost-accident and about Bert cursing. I just took in small gasps until my breathing came back. Once we got to the lake, nothing of note happened, except for my being disappointed that even lying flat on a blanket, you cannot see up inside ladies’ bathing suits. The skirts have matching underwear underneath.

Bert made the back field of his property available to a neighboring farmer, who planted it with wheat. After the neighbor harvested the grain each year, he brought Bert the baled-up remaining straw, to use on the floor of the chicken coop and as chicken bedding.

Steel lugs, courtesy cazenoviaequipment.com

One day Bert walked me across the creek into the field, where there was a tractor parked. It wasn’t Bert’s, it was the neighbor’s. We hooked it up to another piece of farm equipment and pulled it up and down the rows. The tractor didn’t have a steering wheel; it steered by pushing left and right foot pedals, Bert let me try steering when we got to the end of one row, but I didn’t have enough weight and leg strength to push the pedals hard enough to make a good turn.

After the field was finished, we drove past the house and onto Dean Road to return the tractor. Alongside the road there were signs that said “NO LUGS”. I’d only seen that word before in the comics, used to describe large, dim-witted people, and I asked about it. Bert said some tractors still used steel spikes, called lugs, instead of rubber tires, and the spikes would tear up the highway. Anything with lugs had to drive on the shoulder.

2018-05-012024-08-05

Generous features

++++++++++There is no excellent beauty which hath not
++++++++++some strangeness in the proportion.
+++++++++++++++++— Sir Francis Bacon

When I worked for Continental Insurance, a group of us went to Texas to visit a company that wanted to sell us computers. Our hosts took us out for drinks, and we sat quietly rating the entertainers as they took the stage. One girl had a face that was perfect – she was absolutely movie-star , Miss-America beautiful.

I hadn’t thought about it consciously before, but I said such perfection made me a little uncomfortable, and I would need at least one defect for such a girl to be “real.” One of our hosts said “So, for you, a 10 is a 9 with a broken nose?” I thought about that, and about Mary Ann, the first girl I ever asked out on a date, and told him he was correct.

As an example of “generous features”, the first time I saw newslady Maria Bartiromo on television was around 1995, before she ruined her beauty by getting her nose “fixed”, something done by insecure women who don’t appreciate what it means to be unique. Before that, she was a perfect example of a woman blessed with “generous features.”

Maria was doing the stock market reports on CNBC. She had everything right – the big eyes, the Mediterranean nose, the full lips. I watched her whenever I could, absorbing everything about her. I remember thinking “Man, if only she had been around when I was in high school.” Then I remembered – she had been around, in a sense, but she moved away. Her name was Mary Ann Potenza.

No, not Mary Ann, this is Sofia Coppola, but close. Courtesy Getty Images

She lived a half block from Vince’s but never came to the store; her aunt did all the shopping. Her house was behind the house of one of my friends from the corner, so we knew each other to see. We both went to Orange High; she was a sophomore and I was a junior. One day I saw her in the hall, got up my nerve and asked if she’d like to go to a movie with me sometime. She said yes.

I wasn’t old enough to drive, so everything happened on foot. The day of our date, I walked to her house the long way around, so I wouldn’t have to go past Vince’s and get quizzed about where I was going all dressed up.

When I got to the house, her younger sister opened the door, but the two girls looked so much alike that I didn’t realize for a moment that the sister was not Mary Ann, and wondered why she looked sort of unkempt and was wearing blue jeans. Then she said “I’ll tell her you’re here” and I said “Okay, thanks.” Her father was lying on the sofa reading and gave me a half-wave without sitting up.

We walked up High Street and then over Main to the Embassy. I suppose I should remember what movie was playing, but my mind was too busy. Did I buy popcorn? Yes, probably. After a while, I tried putting my arm around her shoulders like you’re supposed to in the movies, and it worked; plus she moved over even closer. Did we hold hands walking back? I want to say yes, but when I was older and tried holding hands walking with a different girl, it felt new and weird getting our fingers lined up right, so probably not.

When we got back to her house, we held each other for a minute and had a soft, sweet, slightly open-mouthed kiss. I walked home thinking about that.

The word of our date got out, and the next time I went to Vince’s I was greeted with “Hey! Secret lover!”, and serenaded with the first few bars of the syrupy “Once I had a secret love” song. They were just jealous.

A few weeks after our date, she came up to me in school and said she had to say goodbye, her family was moving to Sherwood Forest. I had no idea of where or even what that was, except for the place Robin Hood lives, and I was too flustered to suggest we stay in touch somehow. And that was the end of a good thing that never had a chance to grow.

Searching now with newspapers.com, I see that Sherwood Forest was a new single-family housing development in Mountainside. So her father moved his family out of Orange, a town already in decline, to a town that is still one of the 10 best in the state. Good for him.

I also ran across her mother’s obituary notice, from 1993, and in the list of survivors I saw that Mary Ann had married a nice Italian boy and was living in Poughkeepsie, New York. Good for them, too.

2018-05-222024-07-03

Test drive

I bought a new used car, a 1951 Chevy, through my cousin Walter, who worked at a dealership in Nutley and kept an eye out for clean trade-ins. I wanted to give it a more thorough workout than my original test drive, in particular to see how far it could make it up a hill before it had to be shifted down to second. I called up my friend Bobby and we drove to West Orange, which is on a low mountain and has steep roads and even steeper side streets. We drove up a few hills and third gear was pretty strong, we tried a few other things and I was happy. Then we turned around to head home and there were these two girls.

We slowed down and drove along next to them, close to them. Bobby leaned out and asked where they were going, and if they’d like a ride. They answered “home!”, and “no!”, but in a not-unfriendly way. We stayed alongside them as they walked, asking where they went to school (one of the East Orange high schools, I forget which) and lots of other questions, as traffic swung out to pass us and our little group made its way down the mountain.

This probably sounds creepy to anyone who didn’t grow up in the 1950s, but that was one of the ways people met then, just boys cruising around, talking to and picking up unattached girls. By the time we got to the bottom of the mountain, everyone knew everyone else’s name, and the girls, let’s call them Carol and Becky, lowered their resistance and got in the back seat. Before we dropped them off at Becky’s house, we set up a double date to get better acquainted.

Carol and I hit it off on the double date, and we ended up dating for real. She was sweet and smart and nice to look at, but you probably guessed that already. Meanwhile, Bobby dated Becky, but not for long – he played in a band, and he had lots of other female friends.

The first time Carol and I had a real date, she told me in advance to expect to meet her mother, and made it clear that I should come to the side door of the house, not the front. By the time the day arrived I had forgotten, and I went to the front, where there was an enclosed porch with a “Nursery School” sign. I rang the bell, and in a minute an annoyed Carol opened the door, revealing two rows of child-sized porcelain toilets installed behind her. In a weary voice she said “My mom runs a nursery school,” and led me past the toilets into the house. I found out later they were a regular source of embarrassment for her, and this time it was worse because the inevitable reveal happened on a first date. I think I just said “Oh” in an understanding voice. I thought it was pretty funny, but I didn’t let on.

We developed a dating pattern, and didn’t go “out” on our dates every time. Sometimes we would go to the movies or such, but mostly we just parked and did deep kissing and what the French call frottage, that is, grinding ourselves against each other with our clothes on. It was good fun and nobody got pregnant.

We went to a house party, two paneled rooms in someone’s basement. One room was mostly high school kids like us; the other was college types. Everyone was behaving, just drinking beer and slow dancing to doo-wop music — Earth Angel and such. After a while, this big jock walked in from the other room. He wasn’t quite shouting, but his voice was angry as he asked, “FUUUCKKKK?? Did somebody say FUUUCKKKK?? In front of my GIRRRRL??” Back then nobody ever used that word in mixed company, certainly nobody had used it that night, and it was a shock to hear it loud and clear. We all froze as he glared at us, as though expecting a confession. After a moment he left. I think now that he was probably just doing a fraternity “bit”, a prank – funny in retrospect but scary for those on the receiving end. Maybe we’ll see it reenacted in a high school movie some day.

After a few months, things slowed down and we gradually stopped seeing each other. I don’t remember a reason, we didn’t have a fight or anything like that. Maybe it was just time.

The following year I joined the army, and I was feeling down. I wrote her a letter, just a kind of friendly “Hello, what’s up?” letter. I didn’t know her house number, so the envelope looked like:

Her name
Nursery school across from the Amoco station
South Harrison Street
East Orange, N.J.

I know the post office motto is “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night blah blah blah”, but they don’t seem to put much effort into the non-weather aspects of getting a piece of mail delivered – what was so hard about that address? How many nursery schools across from Amoco stations were there on South Harrison Street?

Yes, I do realize I was asking a lot. The letter came back marked “Insufficient Address”, and that was the end for Carol and me.

2018-08-082024-07-10

Among the bungalows

Bungalow colony, unknown artist. Courtesy merry3mnbpostcards, ebay.com

At its peak, the New Jersey resort town of Mount Freedom had eleven hotels and over 40 bungalow colonies. I wish I had better pictures, but the Catskills seem to have gotten all the photographer love.

I had a wholesale baked-goods route selling pastry and such, similar to what Entenmann’s sells today. My two customers in Mount Freedom, Max Shiffman and Hesh Steinberg, owned competing grocery stores about a mile apart.

Deserted colony, 2007, courtesy Carolyn via flickr.com

Max was the more enterprising of the two, bringing his wares direct to the customers. He filled his Volkswagen bus with baked goods, coffee, eggs, laundry soap and anything else he thought vacationers might need, and circulated through the colonies. On Friday morning I would leave a double or triple order with Max – weekend sales were brisk because all the hard-working fathers came down from the city to visit their families. Dugan products were kosher, so that helped too.

The 1999 film ‘A Walk On The Moon’ features life in a similar colony in the Catskills. We can consider Max a counterpart to the film’s Viggo Mortensen “Blouse Man” character. While Max sells pies and cakes to vacationing Holocaust survivors, Blouse Man’s truck is fitted out as a general store where he sells sexy blouses to frustrated housewives like Diane Lane.

Max had a wife who watched the store while he was out on his rounds, but Hesh did not, so Hesh’s business was limited to walk-in trade from the nearby bungalows. A while back I wrote about a memorable experience I had at Hesh’s when I accidentally disrupted a transaction.

With the construction of the Garden State Parkway came easy access to the Jersey shore and its nearby communities, and Mount Freedom began to fall out of favor as a vacation spot. The bungalows, built for occupancy only between May and September, were eventually classified as substandard housing and demolished, leaving only fond memories.

2018-11-112024-07-28

New rules for captioning

Here are my new minimum requirements for anyone captioning film for US television.

1) Native English speaker
2) Minimum 60 years of life experience
3) Minimum IQ of 100
4) Broad knowledge of US history and pop culture
5) Good hearing

I could add more, but you get the idea. Here’s a small example of what’s wrong with today’s captioning.

I was watching Lansky, the 2021 version starring Harvey Keitel. Lansky is about the life and times of Meyer Lansky, often called “The Mob’s Accountant”, and his involvement in the early days of what the press then called the National Crime Syndicate. The film starts off slowly, with little violence of interest, and no new insight into 20th century crime or criminals. As I followed along with the captions, one line of dialog stopped me.

In a New York City nightclub, Lansky and a few other gangsters are sitting at the bar, just generally shooting the breeze. In the background, a woman gives out tickets as new arrivals appear and hand her their hats and coats. According to the captions, one gangster opens a new subject of conversation with “Hey, do you see that half-Czech girl over there?”

Or did a computer do this? That would make it even worse.

2018-11-152024-06-30

Please, no more empty luggage

“All we ask is that an actor on the stage live in accordance with natural laws.” — Konstantin Stanislavski

Here are a few things that bug me when I see them in a movie. Allow me to get them off my chest.

First off, let’s think about things that are heavy – luggage and packages and other things that get carried, thrown, or otherwise moved from one place to another. The audience can tell the difference between a full suitcase and an empty one, simply by seeing how the actor interacts with it. The audience will not be fooled.

Think about the great actors who have played Willy Loman, the self-deluded traveling salesman in Death of a Salesman. Willy carried cases of samples to show his customers. Arthur Miller never told us what Willy sold; some people speculate it was only lingerie and socks, but whatever it was, Willy’s sample cases were big and packed tight full, and they were HEAVY, you could tell by the way they pulled his arms straight down and rounded his shoulders and put a bend in his back. That wasn’t acting, it was gravity.

Willy Loman didn’t bob along swinging his arms as he walked, he couldn’t. If you are putting on a production of Death of a Salesman or some other work where there’s luggage or bags of ransom money or anything else that has real weight, you need to go and get 60 or 80 or 100 pounds of yesterday’s newspapers to make that weight be real.

Relatedly, in the movie Three Kings, each of the stolen gold bars is roughly the size of a carton of cigarettes, and the actors handle the bars as though gold and tobacco weigh the same. THEY DO NOT. A bar of gold that size would weigh about 60 pounds, so your actors shouldn’t be handing them off to each other as though they’re shaking hands. As a moviegoer, how am I supposed to suspend disbelief when I see something like that on the screen?

The f-word: Whatever happened to the word “hell”? Where has it gone? Scene: A young suburban husband comes home and sees his wife is working on, say, a semi-abstract painting. It is not very good. Instead of having him jokingly ask “What the hell is that? “, or even the softer “What the heck is that?”, he asks “What the fuck is that?” and the joking is over. Point: The f-word does not fit in everywhere. Unless you’re Quentin Tarantino or some other writer with a great ear for dialog, which you are probably not, take it easy with the f-word. Also, remember that in the real world, a person of lesser authority will cut back on f-words when a person of greater authority is present.

Some of the best dialog ever written comes from The Sopranos, but even those writers go over the top sometimes. I have known some real-life lowlifes, and in general they did not use more than one f-word in a single sentence, or more than ten in a single speech. IT JUST DOESN’T RING TRUE. Getting back to “hell”, when’s the last time you heard a Sopranos character say “hell”?

I suggest not trying to write working-class dialog until ypu have worked a while as a member of the working class. Listen closely. Make notes.

Read your dialog out loud. Can you imagine a real person, in the real world, ever saying those words to anyone? People don’t just spout words; they assemble sentences that make sense, it’s not poetry, but it’s an ability we begin developing at age two, and we know when it sounds fake. Does it sound fake? REWRITE. Does it lack a realistic pace and cadence? REHEARSE SOME MORE.

Vincent and Jules have a conversation on their way to work. Courtesy miramax.com

In-car conversation: when we see two actors having a conversation in a moving car, we know the car is actually on a low-slung trailer being towed through the scenery by a professional. The actor “driving” isn’t really driving at all, but he needs to LOOK like he’s driving. That means not engaging with the passenger as if they’re seated in a living room somewhere. Drivers, drive! Adjust the steering wheel to stay in your lane. Turn the wheel as you get towed around a corner. Yes, glance at your companion, but keep your eyes on the road, so the audience isn’t always anticipating a collision.

Lastly, our mothers taught us to look for traffic before we cross the street. Teach your actors to do the same. I always think “BAM!” and expect a plot twist in 3 – 2 – 1 when I see an actor walk into the street without looking.

Thanks for listening. See you in the movies!

2018-11-202024-07-08

How to play dead in a movie

This article is sort of an addendum to Please, no more empty luggage, where I list careless or sloppy things that directors allow, and say “Here are a few things that bug me when I see them in a movie. Allow me to get them off my chest.”

There are several things that can show us an actor is not actually dead, breaking the movie magic; looking dead isn’t just squeezing your eyes shut and clenching your jaw. In fact, those things only serve to prove you’re still alive, and probably not a good actor. First, make yourself comfortable. You don’t want to have to adjust your underwear halfway through the scene.

To look truly dead, relax, completely. Let gravity happen. Let your body lose its tension and fall in on itself. Relax your facial muscles and let your face sag. Let your mouth fall open, let your tongue loll as gravity wills it. Let your eyes go ‘soft’ – look at a single spot on the wall without bringing it into focus. There’s a YouTube video called Acting Dead where actor Doug Fahl gives extensive tips on how to play dead on stage or screen, including simple methods of breath control.

I never saw a truly convincing on-screen strangulation until Tony Soprano killed Ralph Cifaretto. Ralph had it coming, both for engineering the racetrack fire that killed Pie-O-My and for beating to death Tracee, Tony’s young friend from the Bada Bing. As Tony strangles Ralph, he shouts in his face “She was a beautiful, innocent creature!”, leaving us to wonder whether he means Tracee or the horse.

When the fight ends, Ralph is dead, and certainly looks it. Not for the faint of heart, here’s a YouTube video of Ralph’s murder.

Hey, special-effects people, here’s an idea: how about a neck wrapper made of flesh-tone Play-Doh so we can see the killer’s fingers really digging in?

If a script requires a captive be kept quiet, remember that gagging someone with a rag or article of clothing does not work in real life, no matter how you do it. “Mmmmglurrrgg!” Hello, we can still hear you!

This leads us to duct tape.

Lifetime Movie Network is the primary offender against duct-tape reality. On Lifetime at least twice a week, weeping kidnap victims wear a neat rectangle of duct tape barely wide enough to cover their mouth. Is there a shortage of duct tape? I’ve never kidnapped anyone, but when I do, they’re going to get at least two yards of duct tape wrapped around their head to keep them quiet.

If I ever get to be a Lifetime director, we’ll have rolls and rolls of fake duct tape, standard gray on one side but no adhesive on the other, and you better believe you’re going to see the bad guy walking around his prisoner at least twice, tightly wrapping their head, mouth and hair. Sorry if this disturbs anyone, remember it’s only a movie.