How Donn the Beachcomber’s Hollywood tiki bar began a motion

Alex Lamb and Max Well didn’t got down to make a documentary. Fans of tiki bars, their aim was an online collection, one which appeared on the colorfully ornamental tropical bars in Southern California. What they found, nevertheless, was an only-in-Hollywood story that not solely minimize to the center of the scene’s roots, however foretold the fashionable cocktail motion, modified tourism and spawned a subculture.

Now obtainable to hire or purchase on most main streaming platforms, “The Donn of Tiki” appears to be like on the life, a lot of it grounded in self-made myths, of Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, in any other case referred to as Donn Beach or Donn the Beachcomber. A bootlegger, World War II veteran and nightlife impresario, Beach, as he legally modified his title to, was a sort-of cocktail-focused reply to Walt Disney. He was a pioneer of an business who trafficked in experimentation, massive concepts and, ultimately, closely thematic environments that centered the visitor expertise.

“Donn and Walt Disney, they’re both hosts,” Lamb says, noting that many have referred to him because the “Walt Disney of rum.”

“They create this experience that people are going to come to and not just see, but they’re going to feel it and hear it,” Lamb says. “It’s for all their senses. They’re very similar in that way.”

“The Donn of Tiki,” first launched in 2024, additionally portrays Beach as a little bit of a schemer. Some of his bar innovations, as an illustration, had been much less grand thematic concepts and easily tips to maintain patrons indoors and ordering. The filmmakers credit score Beach with serving to to commercialize the luau, now a staple of many a Hawaiian trip, and convey his story to life by way of stop-motion and 2D animation, historic footage, and recent interviews, together with along with his widow and a few of those that labored for his latter-day institutions.

Yet Lamb and Well are primarily concerned about how a as soon as tiny Hollywood bar on McCadden Place grew to become floor zero for a motion that over the a long time has repeatedly come out and in of recognition. Tiki bars have been celebrated, and criticized, however not less than right here in SoCal many have survived and defied traits. Today, the tiki scene is prospering, a hub for craft cocktails but in addition a mirrored image of our metropolis’s penchant for dreaming and escapism.

A tiki bar, at its greatest, is commonly a mash-up of cultural concepts and myths — bits of the Caribbean, Polynesia and Asia, and fewer a mirrored image of any actual place or heritage. It’s an imaginative setting, one thing that feels dreamed up for a film.

That’s what drew Well, a cinematographer by commerce, to the area.

“Some people are really into the music, the fashion or the cocktails,” Well says. “But the thing I was into was just the visuals. You go into one of these places, and it’s like walking into a film set. It’s been transformed into an experiential thing.”

As a filmmaker, says Lamb, it’s laborious to not be transfixed by a well-done tiki bar.

“You walk in off the street, and it may be daylight outside, but you walk into a dark room, turn a corner and smell burning cinnamon or baking spices and it seems like it’s raining outside. It’s a story,” he says. “And Donn’s drinks were stories. Rum from all these different places, and spices and fruits. It opens up a world of locations.”

Beach’s origin story can differ based mostly on who’s doing the telling, however he was born in 1907 and spent his early youth in Texas. Instead of faculty, he traveled, because of a windfall of money from his father. That would ultimately dry up, and Beach discovered himself in Hollywood, pairing along with his brother. When Prohibition hit, he discovered himself a makeshift profession as a rum runner. When it ended, he opened his Hollywood bar that may ultimately morph into Donn the Beachcomber.

As for why rum, the filmmakers observe it was doubtless the simplest — and least diluted — liquor to accumulate on the time. Beach took the system behind, say, a Planter’s Punch, and basically expanded it, growing the extent and mixture of components to create, the co-directors say, properly over 60 cocktails, many that also at this time outline the tiki bar menu.

“You can go back to a daiquiri, before Donn Beach, which is just rum, lime and sugar,” Well says. “But you go to a Donn Beach cocktail like the zombie, and it might have 10 ingredients. You take a blueprint, and completely blow it up.”

Beach had a big affect on the craft cocktail motion, says Nick Oehlers, a former music supervisor turned nightlife maven, who not too long ago opened the tiki pop-up Savage Seas on the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood, which is able to run not less than by the top of the yr. Just a couple of blocks from the unique Beachcomber, Oehlers says he designed his bar as a contemporary ode to the McCadden Place locale. He even tried to repeat the precise dimensions of Beach’s debut bar.

“It’s so complicated and complex,” Oehlers says of a tiki drink. “A lot of people don’t eyeball anything. All the drinks are jiggered. It’s precise, a very complex art form. Other bars seem easy once you work in a tiki bar.”

Beach was additionally a showman, a trait that maybe developed as one thing of an accident. “The Donn of Tiki” paperwork how often Beach would head to the roof of his bar and spray water down on its home windows to create the impact of a rainstorm. An try to conjure a tropical vibe, or only a strategy to persuade patrons to run up a tab by avoiding a drenching? Many a tiki bar, equivalent to Disneyland’s fashionable Trader Sam’s, at this time have rain results.

Tiki bars aren’t with out criticism, having often been attacked as escapist fantasy that appropriates Hawaiian or Polynesian iconography. Lamb and Well take a extra biographical method reasonably than dipping closely into broader cultural conversations. They additionally make an effort to seize Beach’s real ardour for journey and Hawaiian tradition, particularly in a Honolulu outpost that had a market really feel, full with makes an attempt to create a conventional luau. The extreme proliferation of totems and masks as decor is extra intently related to Beachcomber offshoots and descendants within the ’50s and ’60s.

“Some folks take a hard line that this is just flat-out cultural appropriation,” Well says. “I think it’s a little more nuanced than that…. But we should be talking about it, and we think it’s good to have that conversation. Hopefully the film can help with that. It gives people the history, the backstory.”

Today’s tiki scene is huge, encompassing every part from historic venues like Silver Lake’s Tiki-Ti, fashionable takes on the shape equivalent to Tustin’s Stowaway or Highland Park’s Lucky Tiki, or twists such because the seafaring tone of Anaheim’s Strong Water. It’s additionally value noting that Beach’s preliminary bar flourished in the course of the Great Depression.

“Most people were never going to go to Hawaii or Jamaica or the Caribbean. So Donn brought it to them. There was a need for that then, and there’s a need for that now,” Lamb says.

Fantasy, in the end, by no means goes out of favor, regardless of difficult financial instances.