Dutch Tape

Creator: Toby Scales
Age rating: 17 and older
Depressed and doubting his young wife’s fidelity, an office supply salesman makes a backroom deal to sell invisible tape. But when the deal goes bad, he suddenly finds himself caught between the FBI and the Yakuza. He must untangle the web of lies around him or die trying.
Project collaboration: Open
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Synopsis:
“So that’s me, running. I’m the good guy.”

These are the opening lines of Dutch Tape: a stylish, darkly comic neo-noir set in New York City, featuring snappy dialogue, meaty character roles and a climactic gun battle in Highline Park.

Mark DoDoecker – a middle-aged, shlubby guy – runs through a forest pursued by a group of tattooed thugs. He tells us in voiceover all we need to know: the guys chasing him are the bad guys, and he won’t escape in the end.

Cut immediately to three months earlier. Mark has just lost his professorship at the local university. Unable to find an opening in his field, he accepts a position as an office supply salesman with his father-in-law's company. But he’s not very good at it.

His wife Marie is a younger woman, who has pursued her passion for painting where Mark has been afraid to follow his. Mark's lack of confidence causes him to start doubting her fidelity, and matters only get worse when her old boyfriend, Stu Stillman, offers her a chance to hang her paintings in his brand new gallery.

Around this time Mark meets Sam, a roguish charmer, on the Staten Island Ferry. Sam offers Mark a deal on black market invisible tape, which he calls Dutch Tape. Anxious to prove his worth to his wife, Mark agrees. Along the way Sam shows him some psychological tricks to help him become a salesman, and armed with this new confidence Mark lands a large contract. He is suddenly a rich man…

…only the tape isn’t sticky. And Sam has disappeared. And two police officers show up at his work to arrest him! Meanwhile Stu Stillman is getting closer to Marie, and Mark struggles to keep his failures from her. Things go from bad to worse when Mark is bailed out by the Japanese mafia...

Through a series of twists we end up in the tense final sequence, where Mark uses Sam’s psychological tricks to get the real culprit – Stu – to confess to the crimes. But Stu double-crosses everyone, and a dazzling gunfight breaks out between Yakuza thugs and FBI agents. Sam escapes, Stu dies, and Mark is left holding the bag.

Back to Mark running. He’s not running away, as it turns out – he’s running home to his wife. The final poetic moments of the film, set entirely to music, attest to Mark’s newfound confidence in himself and his marriage, while at the same time underscoring humanity’s single possibility of redemption: through love.

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