SXSW Film Q&A: Red Dog

It's day four of SXSW, and as the long hours start to grind on, it's always best to ask people how they're doing. "I am doing fucking fantastic," said Kim Kassen. "How about yourself?"

That's the kind of greeting that customers at the Red Dog, Oklahoma City's legendary dive bar/strip joint, would have got when she worked there. It was a place of myth and legend, so infamous it got name-checked in Silkwood. It's still there, but the new documentary Red Dog, directed by Kassen's son, Luke Dick, and his creative partner, Casey Pinkston, focuses on its lowlife high times during the oil boom of the Seventies and Eighties. That's when getting fucked up was the order of the day: but for Dick, who was basically raised there, it's more than just a story of a blue-collar debauchery. It's the tale of the community that raised him.

Austin Chronicle: Every town has that bar – where I grew up they were always nicknamed the Knife in the Back – and they're both part of the culture and a dirty little secret. Where did the idea come from to make a documentary about it as a center of the community?

Luke Dick: I had taken a voice recorder back to Oklahoma – I was living in New York at the time – and I just set my mom down and had her tell me some audio stories. The bar opened in '65, and it's still open to this day, and when she started telling me these stories, and the way that she told them, I just took them and edited in audio form, and I took them to Casey and said, 'I think this is awesome. I think we should go try to get a little footage and see what happens.'

Just being a part of the culture in Oklahoma, and being raised there, the bar is just such a notorious rite of passage to everyone – I don't know if odd is the right word, but that on top of knowing that my mom had worked there, and it was a roots story for me, and that she was a great storyteller. I just dipped my toes in the water, and it just flowed from there.

Austin Chronicle: How easy or hard was it to track down everyone you wanted to talk to?

Luke Dick: The advent of Facebook is an amazing thing. What would be my ex-stepdad Randy – I called him Dad Randy – I told him kind of what I wanted to do, and he said he would be willing to talk about it, and then he called his other ex-wife, who was a dancer, and she was into it, and I talked to her on the phone. Then other dancers started coming from those conversations, because they started getting in contact with each other about 10 years ago with the advent of Facebook.

That, in addition to the Kickstarter that we ran. That was a regional viral phenomenon, and the character of Tiny came out of that, because somebody saw it and said, 'Oh, he knows your mom.' So it was a process, but it wasn't that hard, really.

"[The film] brought up a lot of memories. They're not bad memories – I'm not going to say that some of them are wonderful memories but they're not bad. They're real, they're true, they're gritty" Kim Kassen on life in the Red Dog.

Casey Pinkston: I'm not from Oklahoma City, so I didn't know about it until the first time we came down to talk to Kim. The first time I ever set foot in was with Luke, and we were scouting to see what it would look like on camera. But it is crazy. It feels mythological, almost. It doesn't look like you expect out of a topless bar. It really has its own vibe that hasn't changed much in 20, 30 years.

AC: So, Kim, what was it like for you, being the subject of this? Because it's clear there's some pretty raw memories in here.

Kim Kassen: Luke came to me and talked about it the first time, because he would come home from Nashville and we would just be the regular family that we are. I'm not really a regular person, I guess, but he just said, 'I'm kind of thinking about trying to make a little documentary about the Red Dog. Would you be willing to sit down and talk about some of that, Mom?' Of course, him being my only son, and me loving him as much as I do, I said sure, and he said, 'Well, if we did something like this, would you be in?' and I just looked at him, thinking, 'I don't know what he's trying to get at.'

But I told him, 'There's a lot of other people also involved in it. I can write down as many names as I can on a piece of paper, and if you find them, and they're even alive, there'll be some people who won't want to be mentioned, because they'll have moved on with their lives.' I think we've all moved on with our lives – I've certainly moved on with mine – but I can remember the first time he called me, 'Mom, I'm coming home for the weekend.' 'OK,' because I'm grateful to see him any time that I can. He goes, 'Well, I'm going to bring Casey, this friend of mine, with me, and we're going to bring some cameras, and we're going to talk about this on film.'

Then as time goes on, it of course ends up being so much time, that I was remembering things. I didn't forget 'em, it's just that I don't think anybody would find it all that interesting – although there are all kinds of interesting stories that came out of that place. But I'd hear them giggle, and go, 'Oh my God!' I'd look at their face, and they'd have this strange look. But for me, it was home, and when Luke was little, and I had him in there with me, or even out of there, it was my normalcy.

[The film] brought up a lot of memories. They're not bad memories – I'm not going to say that some of them are wonderful memories but they're not bad. They're real, they're true, they're gritty.

Red Dog