Paul Dooley made his film debut at the age of 49. Before that the West Virginia native had made his mark in New York and Hollywood working with a variety of comedy troupes, which led to a long string of commercials. Dooley is ultimately best-known as the ideal movie dad, from the cranky used-car salesman father of the bicycling-obsessed hero of Breaking Away to Molly Ringwald’s sympathetic dad in Sixteen Candles. Dooley says that Robert Altman discovered him on stage, and wound up casting him in films like 1978’s The Wedding and 1980’s Popeye, which started a TV and film career that’s included everything from Law & Order to Shakes The Clown. The now-92-year-old still shows up frequently in movies and TV show guest spots.
Since 1984, Dooley has been married to My So-Called Life creator Winnie Holzman (“You may not know this, but my wife is a very famous writer”) and Dooley is currently writing himself, working on his memoir, titled, appropriately, Movie Dad. In honor of Popeye’s release on Blu-ray this month, Dooley took the time to talk about what life was like with Robin Williams on the film’s set, how his time doing commercials led to his work on The Electric Company, and what convinced him to join the cast of Sixteen Candles.
The A.V. Club: What was that set like, with Robert Altman and Robin Williams?
Paul Dooley: That was half of my life. I do remember a lot. [Laughs.] Spent six months doing that movie. Long time. First six months of 1980.
AVC: Why did it take so long?
PD: Well, it had been planned for four months, and there were 50 actors at that point. Altman let all of them go home except about 10 of us who were the principals. That way they didn’t have to pay for hotels and per diem and all that stuff, and the expenses were less. We thought we’d finish with the filming on the water and a couple of boats in about a week or two. But then we got bad weather. So we’d shoot one day and be off for two and shoot two days and be off for three. We operated with high winds and choppy waves and [were] unable to shoot on the water. So that’s what extended it for another couple of months. Feels like a lifetime.
AVC: Robin Williams had a reputation for always being “on.” Was he like that on set? Would he stay in character?
PD: Well, as you know, with movies, more than half the time, you’re not filming. You’re between takes, between setups, between lighting. And he was always our court jester, because he obsessively could not stop entertaining. So we were happy to have him, and we didn’t get bored because we had him. And then, of course, when we filmed, he would go into the part. Although he did a lot of ad-libbing, because that’s the nature of Robin. I tried to follow the script as much as possible. But we had a wonderful time together. Could have been very boring otherwise.
I remember one day we were on a break for 20 minutes and just hanging around all of us in costume. Some minor actor on the set had a crutch for some reason, and Robin borrowed the crutch and then did about 20 minutes of humor of just using a crutch. But he played the crutch as if he was drunk. It was amazing. He hardly had to talk. But of course, knowing Robin, he did talk. But I do remember that drunken guy on a crutch.
He was doing his nightclub act half the time, you know. We all had a great time. And I did notice something about him, which I saw later in his work. He had long periods of time where he’s just on, couldn’t stop entertaining. But suddenly when he wasn’t doing it, he kind of retreated into himself, refreshing his batteries or something. And he would almost be melancholy. And if you think about his film work playing dramatic roles, he has a melancholy quality about him, a thoughtful quality. He played a few psychiatrists and some strange characters. But when he wasn’t on, he was off. I kind of thought of him as a little undiagnosed manic depressive, because when it was manic, he was manic. But he did have those moments where he was quiet and sort of going into himself. Not paying much attention to the rest of us. There was about 85% of the comedy. And the rest of it was kind of very, very serious.
AVC: You grew up in West Virginia. How did you get started in New York?
PD: I went to New York after college, and I fooled around there. I worked on the stage and off Broadway and really became successful more as a commercial actor, which I did for many, many years. I became more popular on commercials than I did on stage for a long time. I didn’t make my first film till I was 49 years old. But from the ’60s into the ’70s, for 15 years I did commercials. On-camera commercials, maybe a couple hundred, maybe 250 of them.
And then I started doing voice-overs, and then I drifted into doing comedy on radio with some partners of mine from Second City, where we used improvisation to create the commercials and recorded radio. And I did that for a long, long time. And then I was in a show off Broadway, written by Jules Feiffer from his newspaper column. And Robert Altman discovered me there, and he put me in five movies in a row. And that’s how I got into the film business. I was a discovery. [Laughs.] I’m writing a book now about my experiences, and I say, after 49 years as a New York actor, overnight I was discovered.
AVC: Altman was known for letting his actors ad-lib, so your improvisational background probably came in handy.
PD: Yeah, I spent a lot of time improvising. First, I joined the Second City group that came to New York, then after [that] I moved to California. There were several groups out here that I joined. And so once out here for absolutely no money, I went every Saturday night out to Santa Monica. There’s a street called the Promenade. There’s no cars there. There was a little nightclub. And we worked every Saturday for five years for no money, just for fun. But I worked with a lot of great improvisers. And I never stopped. I’ve always worked here and there with different groups of people out here in L.A.
AVC: That improv history probably helped your work in the Christopher Guest movies as well.
PD: Oh, yes. And I also worked with Larry David, where we improvise our dialogue. And Christopher Guest. I did three movies with him. I met Chris when he was only 17. And then later, a little later, I met him again, and he put me in a few movies. I loved working with him. I look at him as kind of a genius. You know, he’s a writer and an improviser and one of the best, actually, and a terrific comic actor. If you think of Guffman and the character he played as a director of that wonderful group, he chose the best actors in the world to play the worst actors in the world—Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, and all of them. It was a thrill to work with them.
PD: The best movie I ever made was called Breaking Away. It’s about bicycle racing. And it’s been my calling card ever since. And that was also about as old as Popeye, which is 42 years old now. It was so well-received that I still get work from it, and people meet me, and they mostly connect me with that film and Sixteen Candles, where I also played the father. Those are my two favorites actually. It’s still popular after all this time. It took off and then revived and on cable all the time. And retro theaters will play it at special times. And they recently had a big reunion for that film. And it was a huge audience out of Hollywood. And some of the actors who were still around were doing a Q and A, talking to the fans.
And over 90% of my work has been fathers after that. And it’s kind of connected, mostly with Sixteen Candles. I got to be sort of typecast, as they say, which I didn’t mind. An actor always likes to get parts that are different, so you’re not playing the same thing all the time. But if you are typecast, that means you work a lot.
AVC: Right. You need a perfect dad, you call Paul Dooley.
PD: That’s right. And if an actor is good at playing a cop, you’ll play 40 of them. Good at playing a gangster, would do 40 of them. Casting directors like to use people who have done it well before. So it’s easy to get typecast if you’re successful at one thing.
AVC: You’d probably read a lot of scripts by then. Did you have a feeling that this was going to be this sleeper hit?
PD: I thought it was a great script. Sometimes you could have a great script, but for various reasons, it doesn’t become a commercial hit. But I know it was a great script. That’s the best script I ever read. It was just brilliantly written. [Steve Tesich] won the Oscar for the writing, original screenplay. It was so beautifully considered, and they created these characters that are so different to each one from the other. And my part allowed me to be very, very funny and also kind of dramatic sometimes.
AVC: Like that wonderful scene when you’re walking through the campus at night with your son, played by Dennis Christopher. Did you feel a bond with him? He had already played your son the year before in Altman’s The Wedding.
PD: Yeah, I’m still friends with Dennis. I see him all the time. Not so much in the pandemic, but we’re still friends. We have dinners and lunches, and I watch him if he’s in a play. He comes to see me if I’m in a play. Recently worked with Dennis Quaid. He had a series just before the pandemic, and I met him again and worked with him, very friendly. But Dennis [Christopher] and I are very closely associated. Once he got a job on Law & Order and he called me and said, “They’re looking for a guy to play my father and I gave them your name.” So I did Law & Order with him. And we both were led away in handcuffs at the end. He’s a good friend of mine. I really enjoyed that. I never again found writing quite that good for me to play.
PD: I was only there a couple of weeks, because most of the scenes are with the kids. They became very friendly with a kid named Gedde Watanabe, who played Long Duk Dong, the Korean character. He and I became friends. I knew it was going to be a hit, but I thought it was really just for kids. But then when I saw it, I realized it’s entertaining for anybody, for grown-ups, too. It’s just a very funny show, and it’s really interesting.
The big scene that people remember—young women write me and stop me on the street all the time—about that late-at-night scene where I’m being really warm to [Molly Ringwald’s character], I originally found that that scene wasn’t in the movie. I turned down the movie because I was only in it for the first two or three minutes and the last two or three minutes. And then finally John Hughes, the writer-director, called me, and said, “I wrote a scene in the middle of a movie, just so you’ll be in the movie.” And I read it, and it was a good scene, and that became the scene that everybody remembers. All the young girls love that scene. They say to me when they write to me or meet me on the street, “I wish you were my dad.” [Laughs.] So that’s a nice thing. I am a dad. I have four children and three grandchildren.
PD: I created that show. I was the head writer. I spent a year doing that. It all came about because I’d been writing so many funny radio spots. And someone heard of me and knew that they were going to have short segments, because of children’s shorter spans of attention. So you could almost do a scene that could be a commercial, but for reading instead of a product. That was kind of connected to all my radio writing and experience.
But I learned a lot, and I was proud to have been involved with it. I hope we helped some kids get more interested in reading. It would take about a year of my life, but I found it a very rewarding thing. I said to a friend when I started working there, “I’m finally going to use my comedy skills for good instead of evil.” Instead of just selling stuff, it was going to be about perhaps helping kids. But it was a wonderful chapter in my life, because I’d been a kind of writer and an improviser and an actor, all kinds of different things in my life.
AVC: The shows that you’ve guest-starred on recently, it’s such a long list. You’ve done everything from the drama you’re describing on Law & Order to comedies like Modern Family and Children’s Hospital.
PD: At a certain point, I stopped auditioning. Maybe, I don’t know, 15, 20 years ago now. Now people just call me because they know who I am. Especially television. I don’t really audition for TV anymore. You just get invited to be a guest star. Sometimes I still go and audition for a film, but of course, with the lockdown, nobody is doing anything right now.
Normally a character actor often will have one day’s work. You might have one scene or two scenes once in a while. You’ll have two or three days out of an eight-day schedule. But I did The Good Doctor, and I had about eight or nine scenes, and it was a real guest-starring part, not just a small scene, but it was very dramatic, a guy who wanted to die in the hospital. And I was very happy doing that one.
A lot of them were very short-lived. You’ll come in, and it takes about eight days to do a drama and about five days to do a sitcom. But often guests will come on and work one day, one scene, maybe two. I had a few jobs or I was there the whole week and it worked very well. I got a couple of Emmy nominations for Dream On and for The Practice with the David Kelly series as Judge Wright. I enjoy it all. It’s a lot of fun, I like working with other actors. My favorite stuff is working with Chris Guest and Larry David. You’re not only an actor, you’re a writer. If you’re improvising, you’re writing just without a pencil.
AVC: And you have so much stuff still coming out. It looks like you have five films that are in post-production or production right now.
PD: I have some independent films that are slowed down in the editing and all. You can’t find a theater right now, but I did three or four independent films in 2019, and they’re still waiting to find a home, will probably stream at some point. But everything is slowing down. I’ve even been offered some jobs in the last six months to go to a set and to work safely, you know, be tested. But if it wasn’t a very interesting part I wasn’t going to subject myself to maybe catching COVID. I just turned down three or four of them because they were boring parts anyway, but certainly didn’t want to risk anything. I owe it to my wife and my family.
I’m at the at-risk age. And in about eight years I will be 100 years old. Pretty long career. I have over 200 credits on the IMDB. I got very busy once I started working in film and television. But I’d have even more credits if you counted all the commercials. So I did get a lot of experience, because you could learn from doing commercials because you can still learn about camera technique and work in front of the camera. So I was all prepared when they started doing real movies. Anyway, it’s been quite an interesting journey.
AVC: In the 200 credits, is there a movie that you have a soft spot for that never really got the traction that Breaking Away or Sixteen Candles did?
PD: Well, there are movies that are a little cult films that college students like, like Strange Brew, with those two Canadian guys from SCTV, Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis. I had a big part in that. I was the heavy. And another one is Shakes The Clown with Bobcat Goldthwait. I was the agent for a bunch of clowns. And they’re little cult films with young people, because they’re about pot-smoking clowns and alcoholic clowns, and Strange Brew is about drinking beer.
Another one I have a very small part in is Slap Shot, which is very popular with people who like sports. I was in it one day, but I have a nice little part, which I improvised. And there are a number of things like that. But you know, going in, you know some films will be popular and some won’t. Even a film that is not so popular, it will find an audience. So I was at the carousel picking up my luggage at the L.A. airport, and Bobcat, who I didn’t know, came up to me. [Adopts Bobcat voice.] “Paul Dooley! I’m making a movie. I’d like to have you in it. Would you do the film with me?” With his croaky little voice. Get a job while you’re waiting for your luggage. It’s funny.
92 Comments
So glad he mentioned Strange Brew. How they got both him and Max Von Sydow to be the heavies in a goofball Canadian retelling of Hamlet with two morons in the lead I will never know, but I’m glad they did.
I have such fond memories of seeing “Strange Brew” in the theatre with my family but I hadn’t actually connected the dad from “Sixteen Candles” with elder Elsinore. I haven’t watched “Strange Brew” since it ran on TV in the late 80s for fear it won’t hold up. But my siblings and I still quote it at each other pretty regularly.
Heh, no one I know is a devotee to that movie like I am, so I can’t trade quotes but “I could crush your head … like a nut!” pops into my brain unprompted fairly regularly for reasons I’m not entirely clear on.
Anytime I have to stop quickly while while driving, I find myself saying “Just testing the brakes, they felt a little soft” out loud regardless of whether someone is in the car or not.
“Just because I don’t know what it is . . . doesn’t mean I’m lying.”
Probably my single favorite Paul Dooley comedic line reading, and one of my favorite memories of the movie. The pause, the look on his face… just perfect.
Personally I love the glorious entitled-white-dude dumbassery on display in the “photographic memory” bit, which has that classic radio comedy feel. “Who chiseled this?” “It was some sculptor, I think.”
That’s such a great bit – Dooley recovering for a beat after Von Sydow lets him go, then wincing in pain as he slinks away.
I watched it for the first time last weekend oddly enough, and liked it a fair amount. It’s a little bit uneven, starting well but then dragging a bit for 20 or so minutes, before the second half really ups it’s game and is laugh out loud funny most of the time. Paul Dooley’s really superb in it too, though Max Von Sydow plays it a bit too straight, to the extent that it feels like he’s in a different movie half the time.
I think that might be the joke, but maybe Max didn’t get the actual joke!
I think Von Sydow knew exactly what he was doing. I mean, this guy was Ming the Merciless in “Flash Gordon” a couple of years prior to “Strange Brew.”
Yeah, I was kind of kidding about that aspect of it. Surely, he got the joke. He was a very intelligent man. I’d be willing to bet they told him to be as scary as possible.
I remember an interview at the time where he said he took the part because his kids were big Bob & Doug fans. And yeah, keeping his part straight is a part of the joke.
I found a Blu Ray copy last year at a WalMart of all places. I introduced it to my 13 year old son and we both laughed pretty much the whole time. So it still holds up.
The one problem of the movie is that the opening with Bob & Doug’s home-made sci-fi movie is so hilarious that there’s no way the rest of the film can top it. But it’s good dumb fun.
I wish I could’ve been in the room with the SCTV guys when they started discussing the story for Strange Brew. “Hey, we want to make a movie out of Bob and Doug McKenzie.” “Damn, what kind of coherent story are we going to tell with those two knuckleheads?” “I dunno, Hamlet?”
Strange Brew is one of the seminal “college guy” movies of the 80s and early 90s. If you watch it sober, it’s a funny, quirky little Canadian movie… but if you watched it half in the bag sometime after midnight, it became a magnum opus of quotability and hilarity.
He made a great Cardassian.
I know! How could you not ask him about playing Enabran Tain!?
I don’t know what’s more amazing – that I completely spaced (hah!) that he played Enabran Tain, or that even as a Cardassian he played a dad role.He was really good in that episode, too.
He was great in DS9’s “The Wire” as well as the two-parter where the Romulans and Cardassians attacked the Dominion. Congenial, yet completely chilling. He nailed the part.
Yeah, I think they played on the avuncular nature he’s typecast in (and still managed to evince in “The Wire”) and then absolutely killed it in “The Die is Cast” two-parter…
A cardassian dad no less😂
A Cardassian secret dad!
And not only that, Dennis Christopher was a Vorta. Though, they didn’t get to be in the same episode.
I didn’t remember that. Time for a rewatch😎
I was literally coming here for this. Even as a Cardassian, in heavy makeup, I could recognize his voice — especially still playing a father (spoiler alert!)…
His dying speech to Garak was awesome. Hell of an actor.
Paul Dooley is a wonderful actor in both comedy and drama, and also very charismatic – they really missed a trick in not putting him in one of those indie romantic comedies in his heyday. I always enjoy watching him. My favorite role of his may be as the father on Dream On. People either don’t remember Dream On as it was barely syndicated (for obvious reasons) or because they just knew it as HBO having another excuse to show bare breasts, but it had many fine comic actors and some good writing here and there. Martin eventually realizes his recently divorced father is gay. There is a scene that is still stuck in my head somewhere where he deals with the revelation that when they went to baseball games, his father would check out the asses of the players – it’s a lot funnier than it sounds, thanks in large part to Dooley’s performance.
Sadly, no mention of Coming Of Age. Granted with the man’s back catalog not everything is going to be covered, but it was a high point for me. He played a man forced into early retirement (which is where I am now), his wife is Phyllis Newman and his neighbors are played by Mr. Ed star Alan Young and … Glynis Johns. Oh, they were delightful! Favorite episode brought on two curmudgeons that ran the community in which they all lived, and were played by Bob & Ray (Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding), a comedy duo known for razor sharp timing. Watching them all together was a singular joy.Fantastic tribute to a massive talent, thank yoU!
Thanks … now I’ll be going back down the Bob & Ray rabbit hole all morning!
My favorite Bob and Ray skit is the interview with the expert on Komodo dragons. It’s absolutely brilliant.
So great.
Oh, there’s good news tonight! Chocolate wobblies! All chocolate!
Do you remember the peanut hat from that show?
Sadly, no. Bear in mind, please, that I am pretty much the age of the characters in the show and lots of things wander off at this point.
Should have been nom’d for an Oscar in Breaking Away. What a performance in a movie full of ‘em!
A thousand times yes. If only for the delivery of the line “I want some American food, dammit! I want French Fries!”
No more “ini foods.”
“That’s Eyedee food!”
“Refund! REfund!” I love this movie. We used to watch it so much when I was a kid, and I recently showed it to my own kids and they loved it, as well. Much cheering during the final race. Paul Dooley totally deserved an Oscar nom.
Gwen picked the right clip, but that would have been almost as good!! Mrs. F. just told me she’s never seen the movie, so we added it to our list.
The Blues Brothers movie came out not longer afterwards. It cost $30 million. As the destroyed police cars kept piling up I thought, Couldn’t they have made this movie for $28 million? Then there would have been two million to make another Breaking Away.
There are two movies about small town life which, by sheer happenstance of my life experience, absolutely burrowed into my psyche and will never leave. Napoleon Dynamite is one of them because I lived in southern Utah for a time and it just absolutely nails the whole ambience of that life. Breaking Away is the other, because I was born in Indianapolis and lived there for the first ten years of my life. Breaking Away is my family’s de facto “home movie.” I think I must have seen it a hundred times by now.
But Paul Dooley is right – he’ll never have a part as good as “Dave’s Dad” again. It’s been 41 years since the movie came out and my entire family still quotes the “Refund? REFUND??” scene nearly every week. The second clip referenced above – the one where Dave and his dad walk on the IU campus at night and bare their souls – is so understatedly magnificent. But Dooley did such an amazing job of playing a curmudgeonly used car salesman trying to understand his son without ever being as mean-spirited, predictable, and drenched in irony as it might be portrayed now. What a lovely little movie that is.
“Dooley did such an amazing job of playing a curmudgeonly used car salesman trying to understand his son without ever being as mean-spirited, predictable, and drenched in irony as it might be portrayed now. What a lovely little movie that is.”Couldn’t say it any better so just quoting it again. A generous, beautiful performance in a wonderful movie.
Quote to yell at Mr. Dooley from a car: “I don’t wanna be a cutter, dad!”
Okay, I was today years old when I learned Paul Dooley basically created The Electric Company. After watching it I even remember that “fish” sketch they embedded in the article from when I was a wee lad. Holy carp.Also love Strange Brew and Popeye. I remember watching Popeye as a kid and wondering why they were pulling all these random characters out of nowhere, having only seen the animated cartoons before. It wasn’t until I was working at a studio years later that had a printed collection of old Popeye comic strips in the conference room library. It was like reading a storyboard for the movie. (About the only difference was in the comics it was Eugene the Jeep, not Swee’Pea, who could tell the future.)Good times. What a cool guy.
Yeah, I’m with you on The Electric Company. I liked it more than Sesame Street back then. I had no idea Paul Dooley created it.
Since Sesame Street came out a year before I was born, I grew up with it. I also remember Electric Company. I feel like Sesame Street was more for preschoolers, kindergardeners, maybe 1st graders and Electric Company was for elementary kids older than that.
Yes! I love Paul Dooley — I can almost instantly recognize his voice on my screen, he’s so embedded as the “father characters” he mentions here — but I had no idea that he was behind The Electric Company! That’s amazing!
I got a little dopamine rush reading the connection between “The Electric Company” (HEEEEEEEY YOOOOOOOU GUUUUUUUUUUYS) and “Strange Brew”, both defining media of my childhood.
I was today years old when I learned the sympathetic dad from 16 Candles was also in Strange Brew.
In the same year!
I know, just when I think I couldn’t adore Paul Dooley any more, I find out that he created The Electric Company, probably the most significant signpost of my childhood development. I was already a little too old for Sesame Street when I discovered you could change the UHF dial on a TV to find other stations, and discovered the local PBS affiliate. However, I was the perfect age for The Electric Company, and I loved it. Even today, hearing “HEY, YOU GUYS!” gives me an endorphin rush. Thanks, Paul.
Same, I’ve always thought of him as one of the all-time great character actors and as a child grew up on The Electric Company but somehow never knew he had a hand in it.
Yeah, I had no idea he did Electric Company which absolutely was a formative part of my life as a child.
He’s great in everything, but I think my favorite role of his was Enabran Tain in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. His time there was mostly lots of scenery chewing with Andrew Robinson, another great character actor, and it was just wonderful.
TOTALLY forgot he was on DS9. Great scenes with him and Garack.
I’ve always admired his work. One of those actors that isn’t the lead but I can’t bring myself to calling a “character actor” as it feels like an insult. I completely forgot he was in Strange Brew. And I had no idea he was from West Virginia, the state my family ultimately settled in as I was going into high school.Just recently I watched Little Shop of Horrors (86), not realizing it was the director’s cut, which I had never seen. All of a sudden here’s James Dooley playing the bit part I had always seen James Belushi play. So bizarre having seen that movie countless times since childhood. Dooley had the part originally but was replaced by Belushi when they had to do reshoots.
Paul Dooley, that is . . .
I played this role in our high school production of Little Shop of Horrors a million years ago. I was no Dooley or Belushi when I did so, but I always perk up when I get to that part of the movie.
Nice!
The show only lasted a season (which was a shame) but he was great in “The Kids are Alright”, 2018. Played a priest who up and decided to leave the priesthood and get married😂
Popeye is fantastic. Breaking Away is fantastic. Paul Dooley was fantastic in both
Loved him. Barbara Barrie was equally great as the mother, and likewise went on to many similar roles.
How could you forget his role as the security guard in Sesame Street’s Don’t Eat the Pictures?!
Even with all of the great stuff he has done, Mr. Dooley’s greatest father role is as Enabran Tain on DS9. The scenes between him and Andrew Robinson are always fantastic.
Nice article but I really wanted a behind the scenes look at the Major Crimes episode with Tim Conway, Dooley, Ron Glass, Doris Roberts & Marion Ross.
I didn’t realize he’s in Slap Shot! So he’s in two of the greatest sports movies ever made, pretty nice.
Thank you, Gwen, for such a wonderful read, with this undersung cinematic hero… the warm fuzzies are much appreciated so late in this shithole year!
Had this browser window behind another and just saw the pic of Paul Dooley and thought NOOOOOOO. Relieved this wasn’t an RIP post after all.
God do I love Breaking Away. Gotta be in my top 10 of all-time. It’s a surprisingly great treadmill movie, too. Get to that scene where he’s chasing the big rig on the highway, and then the final race, and I defy you not to get a little boost of adrenaline during a run.
Fantastic article. Paul Dooley seems like a great guy and is an American treasure.
I get that he has a long career, but the fact that you had Paul Dooley
in an interview and didn’t ask one question about “O.C. and Stiggs”
makes this trash and you should be ashamed.
Word! Schwab is one of the all-time great movie villains
The Schwab family is, on the list of great movie villains, at the top – right above the Ralph Fiennes in “Shindler’s List”
That, and top of the list of great commercial jingles:Schwab InsuranceServing the desertFor just overEleven yearsWe will help youWe will protect you‘Cause misery loves our company
That brought a tear to my eye.As the only true OC and Stiggs fans, you and I should get married. At the reception we will eat lobster and will dance to the sweet sounds of King Sunny Ade and his African Beats.
“I don’t like *colored* ice cream…”- Schwab
They used to have a series on here called “My Year of Flops” and in a pretty decently written “OC and Stiggs” entry Rabes gave it a well-deserved “Secret Success” designation:https://film.avclub.com/my-year-of-flops-case-file-54-o-c-and-stiggs-1798212112
Hard to see a picture of him without hearing the words “Devoted sister, beloved aunt” (or some version thereof) in my head.
Can you imagine saying “I’m 8 years away from being 100″ and being as sharp as he appears to be in this interview? We should all be so lucky.My 12 year old son was asking about what movie we should watch tonight to which I replied “not sure” but now I know, we’re watching Breaking Away!
Ok, who else came here hoping for some Enabrem Tain stories from DS9?
Dude’s 92? He looks pretty damn good.
And yeah, his Sixteen Candles dad was great, and not just for the scene mentioned here. His attitude towards the other daughter’s fiance is priceless, but instead of being a dick and trying to fight it he knows the best thing to do is just roll with it and support her.
Indiana University’s cable network started a movie channel in 94 or 95 and would show a block of movies on repeat for a month. Breaking Away was one of the first ones (along with Animal House and The Blues Brothers) and it seemed like it was always on.Of course since my father was also an IU alum I saw it every time it was on TV in Pittsburgh, too. Great movie, great role.
No Enabran Tain? Boooo!
Thanks for the article, he’s a terrific actor and I was shocked to learn he was in his 90s! (Not THAT shocked, but still…)
From Strange Brew:
I had no idea that he was that old. He’s been in so many good things.
Keto
XP
https://apnews.com/press-release/ts-newswire/lifestyle-nutrition-health-diseases-and-conditions-diet-and-exercise-cb0c889505a34d5f51180715d41da98c
I barely believe anyone reading this was even born in 1988, but he has a episode in “Coming of Age” (had to look up, otherwise forgettable) where he take a retirement job filling up peanut vending machines. He gets way too into the job, and brings up past work related blah, blah , blah……who cares.BUT, there is a scene where he put on his uniform and has a hat shaped like the top half of a peanut shell this I remember to this day. He sold it so perfectly.
I used to watch MST3K VHS tapes over and over, and if you don’t feel like grabbing the remote, you sit through the commercials. The episodes I had were from summer 1993, and the movie My Boyfriend’s Back was released that year, so the commercial for that movie was on the tapes a lot. The movie is a wacky comedy about a high school boy who comes back from the dead to take his girlfriend to prom.
The thing I remember the most about Paul Dooley is the following scene from the preview:His delivery of “He’s a stinking zombie, you idiot” stayed with me all this time. I never saw the movie, because it does not look good, but I love that line.