Researching Kevin Dunn

Dunn's roles include White House Communications Director Alan Reed in the political comedy Dave, U.S. Army Colonel Hicks in the 1998 version of Godzilla, a role he reprised for the animated adaptation of Godzilla, Alan Abernathy's father Stuart in Small Soldiers, Sam Witwicky's father Ron in the Transformers film series, Oscar Galvin in the 2010 action thriller Unstoppable, and misanthropic White House Chief of Staff Ben Cafferty in Veep. He has also had recurring roles on True Detective in 2014 and on the TV series adaptation of The Mosquito Coast in 2021.

As the Fans wound down, Dunn was concurrently pursuing a solo career as both performer and producer. In 1978 he co-produced for the independent label DB Records The B-52s' landmark "Rock Lobster" 45, the success of which was instrumental in setting the stage for the Athens, Georgia quintet's subsequent stardom. In the following year Dunn co-produced the first single by the influential Athens band Pylon, "Cool" (b/w "Dub"). In 1979, he released his first solo single "Nadine" (b/w "Oktyabrina"). In 1980, he co-produced Pylon's first LP, Gyrate. Dunn's first solo album, The Judgement of Paris, received a joint release by DB and the UK label Armageddon in 1981. He followed that with the 1983 maxi-EP C'est Toujours La Même Guitarre; released on Peter Dyer's Press Records, it was widely reviewed; with one positive notice, by Robert Palmer of the New York Times, comparing the artist's distortion-and-modulation-heavy guitar sound to "angry animals and natural catastrophes". Released in 1985, Dunn's second LP, Tanzfeld (also on Press) earned a B+ from Robert Christgau in the Village Voice.

From 1985 Dunn restricted himself to local live performance — chiefly solo guitar, featuring ambient pieces and baroque repertory performed on a replica 17th-century instrument. A comprehensive anthology titled No Great Lost: Songs, 1979-1985 was released on the Boston-based label Casa Nueva in May 2010. In September of that year, encouraged by the tenor of the retrospective's critical reception, Dunn mounted a mini-tour of the Northeast, with dates in Washington, D.C., Manhattan and Brooklyn, Cambridge and Amherst, MA, and Durham, NC; it was the first time in 30 years that he had played live outside the Atlanta metropolitan area. The following December, plans were laid with Casa Nueva for the release of Dunn's first collection of new material since Tanzfeld, but though the audio component of the album, titled The Miraculous Miracle of the Imperial Empire, was completed in mid-2012, a series of reverses later in the year led to the effective dissolution of the label as a going concern, and the project stalled out; however, encouraged by his defunct label's management, Dunn issued the collection online in July 2013. Resident in Athens since 2016, Dunn in 2017 began performing on guitar, mandolin and electric sitar with the local ensemble Cosmo Jr and appears on the albums Sisters in Arms (2018) and Athens Legends (2021).