I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear and Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

Well, I've had an interesting life of done so many different kinds of things. I have

a tons of credits and I was going to mention to you that if I were a star instead of a

character actor, you know, I could make a movie in eight weeks and maybe later I'd make another

movie in eight weeks, but while someone else is making a real movie with lots of scenes because

they have a leading role, I'm playing a one-day partner, a two-day part, so I can do that all year long

and being six-rate movies. So I have tons of credits. That's Paul Dooley. We go back a long way.

To when we were both just starting out and collaborating on writing his stand-up comedy act in a

Cheap Spaghetti restaurant. We didn't know then where our lives would lead us. That we would one day

have a reunion decades later on a podcast, or that he would become a character actor famous for

playing people's dads. The autobiography he's written due to be published later this year is what

brought us together again. You know Paul, I love your book.

Movie Dad. And it's remarkable to me that you played somebody's dad in so many movies. Did

you ever count up how many movies you played a dad in? There are at least 25 of those actors.

In one of the chapters it's called All My Children. And mostly they were actresses, but I did

play Philip Seymour Hoffman's father once when he was 16. He was a school bully and I was a kind of

a bully too. I was a guy I walked around with a shotgun with a hunting gear on. Why do you suppose

how did you get into this line of work of playing dads? How does something like that happen? Well,

it's it probably largely happened because of the six-cess of 16 candles, which is beloved

movie by young women who saw it when they were young. And now they're 35 or 40. But it's just

something to stuck with them, this understanding kind of dad. And so because of that movie, other

people began to picture me the same way. It's really type-casting. If you do a movie and it lands,

...