Growing up, my family made summer and winter trips to the Hawaiian Islands as casually as other families drop in to their neighborhood Wendy’s. In the ’80s, the 50th state was a cheap place to visit. We ogled the rugged Nā Pali coast of Kauai, drove the treacherous road to Hana on Maui, and explored lava tubes on the Big Island. But Waikiki Beach, Oahu’s most developed strip, was our second home. We played Frisbee on the sand while our parents watched over us from the bar at the Reef Hotel, where our family usually stayed, sipping mai tais and recapping their days.
Now when my brothers and I visit, we watch over them: More than a decade ago, we scattered our parents’ ashes in the waves off that same beach, as they wished. My two brothers and I keep their spirits alive in our respective homes, however, which are filled with the Polynesian art and decor that Mom and Dad procured at thrift shops and flea markets. Each of us has built home tiki bars—I have two, one indoors and one out, but given that both of my brothers work in Hollywood and are handy, they win in the sibling design competition.
So, when a new documentary about the man behind Don the Beachcomber arrived, I came to it not as a neutral observer but as a second-generation true believer, which is to say: the best and worst kind of critic. For those who don’t know a volcano bowl from a Moai mug, Don the Beachcomber started as a bar tucked away on a side street in Hollywood but looked as if it had been airlifted from the South Pacific. Ernest Gantt opened the place in 1933, inspired by his world travels as a young man, where he had become intoxicated by the fragrance of plumerias in tropical locales and the taste of fruity drinks with alcohol levels that could knock you off your barstool. Drunk on the success of his own bar and its signature Zombie cocktail—he was a master mixologist before the term existed—he reinvented himself as Donn Beach and, in so doing, invented tiki culture.
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The documentary The Donn of Tiki, available on Apple+ starting August 21, posits that the entrepreneur’s scope of influence, built from scratch, wanderlust, and sheer audacity, is exponential. The filmmakers credit him with devising cocktail culture as we know it today (think muddled fresh fruit, mixing multiple high-potency spirits) and also experiential dining, which means we may have Don the Beachcomber to thank for the Rainforest Cafe and Medieval Times. Directed by Alex Lamb and Max Well, the film is an original, delightful love letter to a man who, despite his public persona, was a private enigma.
Less than a year after opening his bar, Gantt was busted in a post-Prohibition crackdown. Sunny Sund, a business-savvy customer, bailed him out, on the condition Gantt sell half his joint to her. They moved the bar across the street, where it expanded into a destination restaurant (stars like Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, and Bing Crosby loved the place) that served Cantonese food in a fantastic Polynesian setting. Gantt had to fight to keep his bartenders, who were mostly Filipino men, from getting poached by the 150-plus copycat restaurants that had popped up around the country. The film digs into Sund’s mob ties, revealing how Gantt eventually lost the business to her in 1940. He decamped to Honolulu, having legally changed his name to Donn Beach, and opened his own Don the Beachcomber restaurant, where he popularized the tourist luau and, the film hypothesizes, helped create the commercial idea of Waikiki.
A white man from Texas (though in his self-mythology, he said he was from Louisiana) bringing Polynesian culture back, well, to Polynesia after the missionaries had stripped it away and making it famous worldwide? It’s complicated. The filmmakers argue that Beach championed Hawaiian culture rather than appropriated it; he hired Indigenous women to demonstrate hula dancing and treated luaus more as ritual than spectacle. I’ve faced this moral quandary myself. I am a distant relative (first cousin, seven times removed) of Captain James Cook, the man whose arrival arguably set in motion the erosion of Hawaiian culture that Don the Beachcomber later tried to restore, however imperfectly. I’ve never fully untangled these feelings, and neither, it turns out, does the film.
It’s a lot of ground to cover—Beach lived an epic life, with stops in Hong Kong, Singapore, and his final destination, a lagoon flotilla in French Polynesia. The filmmakers use wonderfully engaging storytelling devices to drive the narrative. Stop-animation brings Beach back to life, where he playfully narrates his story (captured on audio before his death, in 1989) from a rattan chair in a bar, a cigar in one hand, a tiki mug in the other. Cartoons help reenact pivotal moments in his chronology, drawn in the style of black-and-white Steamboat Willie shorts, which shift to color as the decades roll forward.
A murderers’ row of tiki all-stars weigh in on the culture that Beach spawned: master mixologists like Beachbum Berry, pop culture historians like Sven Kirsten, and collectors like Tim “Swanky” Glazner, who cowrote the film with Lamb and Well. (I’m curious if the absence of a mention of Trader Vic’s—the tiki bar–restaurant chain that launched around the same time in Northern California and was a major competitor—was intentional or the result of something crucial being left on the cutting-room floor.) The experts, decked out in Hawaiian shirts and muumuus and surrounded by enough tropical decor to furnish the seabed in a Spongebob movie, bemoan, as do I, the Jimmy Buffettization of tiki that took place after the movement’s decline in the 1980s, which watered down the drinks and cheesed up the aesthetics. I wish the filmmakers had added another beat to build the bridge from there to today’s renaissance, evident in the plethora of young enthusiasts we rightly hear from in the film, or asked the talking heads to explain more fully what hooked them on tiki culture to begin with. The film gets the “what” of the current revival but not the full “why,” other than escapism, which feels like an emotional gap.
When Ernest Gantt reimagined himself as Donn Beach, he created a mythology where fact was hard to discern from fiction. “I think the legacy is just like, Do you,” cocktail consultant and spirits educator Shannon Mustipher says in the film. “There was no template for the kind of lifestyle he was trying to live.” Beach drew a map to a world he wanted to create and invited people in. Given the world we now live in, maybe escapism is enough.•
Mary Melton is Alta’s editor at large. The former editor in chief of Los Angeles magazine, she founded the editorial consultancy company Smakdab.
