The Donn of Tiki Goes in Search of Don the Beachcomber

If you’re ever in a Tiki bar with Alex Lamb, just get him a Missionary’s Downfall. “Not every bar makes it,” he said, “but if you find a bar that makes it well it’s a really refreshing take on a Rum Rhapsody.”

As for Max Well, he has what he calls “a certain love for a Zombie.” And he means a proper, old-school Zombie, with four ounces of four different kinds of rum.

What those drinks have in common – except for being mainstays of the classic Tiki cocktail menu, is that they were both created by the same man. But so were so many of the drinks that define Tiki: the Pearl Diver, Three Dots and a Dash, the Cobra’s Fang, Navy Grog, the Test Pilot, the Rum Barrel. All the work of Don the Beachcomber, the man who revolutionized the great American cocktail and basically singlehandedly created the look, feel, and magic of Tiki.

Only there was no such man as Don the Beachcomber. Sure, with his pencil-thin moustache, aloha shirts, woven straw hat, endless badinage, and uncanny knack with a cocktail shaker, he was an international icon. But Don the Beachcomber was a character created by Ernest Raymond Gantt, a kid from Limestone County, Tex., who set off on a tramp steamer, circumnavigated the globe several times, and came back with a trunk full of knickknacks and a taste for rum, tropical fruit juices, exotic spices, and showmanship. Changing his name to Donn Beach, he became the godfather of Tiki, and the greatest mixologist of the twentieth century.

He’s also the subject of Lamb and Well’s new documentary, The Donn of Tiki, which screens in Austin Oct. 15 at the Regal Westgate. In the James Beard Award-nominated  film, Beach’s life as the drinker’s Walt Disney is finally revealed. It was a wild ride, filled with days under Hawaiian skies and nights with Hollywood stars. There were tales of rum runners and mob bosses, crooked deals, broken hearts, Oscar winners, and dreams of faraway islands where the waves lap at the shore, torches flicker at the luau, and gentle rhythms are beaten on the shark skin-covered pahu. And some of those stories are even true.

For Well, Beach’s life is just like Tiki, a glorious fantasy made from many truths. “It’s a little bit of everything, and it’s nothing,” he said. “The food is Chinese. Some of the décor is from Polynesia, some of it [is] from other places, and the drinks are based on Caribbean mixology. … It was all these things coming together at exactly the right time, and Donn Beach was the right guy to do this.”

Credit: Surf Monkey Films

Austin Chronicle: So who’s the Tiki guy out of you two?

Max Well: Well, sort of both of us now, but Alex was into it before we started the film. We started filming it in 2020, but he was into it a couple of years before that.

Alex Lamb: Yeah, Max was just the good friend who was willing to go into this deep dive into this subculture. But now we’re very much Tiki people.

Austin Chronicle: How did you fall into Tiki-dom?

Alex Lamb: I had friends who introduced me to it. I was really taken away with the experience of it. A lot of these bars, like Strong Water in Los Angeles, you go in and you feel like you’re somewhere else. And then I got into the drinks.

Austin Chronicle: Tiki culture is like a weird club – once you’re through the door, you’re in.

Alex Lamb: When we first started, it was a little intimidating – at least for me – because a lot of these bars that I had gone to, I was intimated to ask them for an interview because they’re the seniors. They are the ones who run this club. But the more we talked to them, the more people we met, the more it was, oh everyone’s really cool and likes this nerdy thing, and is really into it and very welcoming.

Austin Chronicle: There’s so much to talk about with Tiki, but what was it that made Donn the topic that jumped out?

Alex Lamb: When we first started doing this, it wasn’t a feature length documentary about Don the Beachcomber. We kind of started shooting this early on during the pandemic because we were both bored and thought, ‘We’re not filming anything and these tiki bars aren’t doing anything. It might be interesting to do a YouTube series about the history of these bars in Southern California, especially since they’re very vibrant and pretty to look at, and we can get into them because they’re all closed.

The first few interviews we would do, everyone would start talking about Donn and their eyes would light up. They’d tell us these stories, and I knew a little bit about Donn, but these stories were so crazy that it was telling us, if just a portion of these stories were true, we could make a feature length documentary about this guy.

Austin Chronicle: But you have the basic problem that he is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and then its folklore and tall tales from people who shared six drinks with him.

Alex Lamb: We made sure to explain early on that he was unreliable as a storyteller, so that we could get away with telling the story from his point of view for the rest of the movie without feeling we were misleading anyone.

Austin Chronicle: So when did you realize that you couldn’t trust his stories as objectively accurate, and that his version of things was much more interesting than the truth?

Max Well: One of the things we figured out early on, doing the research for this film, was that there were things we found out that could be corroborated with documentation, and some that were just lost to time. So, we decided to separate it into categories: There were certain things that we were going to present as fact, and certain things that we thought were the most likely case, based on the evidence that we had. And the third version was Don’s version of events, or someone telling a story about Donn that we can’t verify – it may be true, it maybe isn’t – and it’s OK to just let it be what it is.

In some ways, that’s part of Donn’s appeal. He’s this enigmatic mystery man, and we don’t know what’s true and what isn’t in some cases.

Credit: Surf Monkey Films

Austin Chronicle: One way you tell these stories is through animation, and you actually use two kinds. There’s the Fleischer-esque pen-and-ink sequences of his reminiscences, and then you show Donn himself using the classic Rankin/Bass style stop-motion.

Alex Lamb: We knew early on that animation was going to be important, and we wanted to make sure that we budgeted to have good animation in the film. The 2D, hand-drawn animation, we knew that we wanted that because it would differentiate between when it’s historical accounts or Don’s point of view.

We hadn’t really thought about the stop motion yet, and when we realized we wanted to have more than a reel-to-reel tape player, we’d kind of backed ourselves into a corner because we already had so many styles of animation and were in production on those. How are we going to differentiate Donn as an interview subject and have it consistent across the movie?

Max works a lot in toy commercials and works with a lot of stop motion animators, and we thought stop-motion would be the perfect way to present him because it’s different than any of these other styles and animation. And it’s real. It’s a puppet on a set and it’s lit. It’s an art form that feels much more physical and real.

Austin Chronicle: And it’s a stop-motion animator’s dream: a single character, in a chair. It’s all face work and him waving his cigar.

Max Well: Originally, we did envision him getting up out of the chair and fumbling with the microphone, maybe pouring himself a drink, but we realized pretty quickly that the amount of time that would take would pretty much decimate our remaining budget.

Austin Chronicle: And whatever the stories are, Donn undeniably revolutionizes cocktails.

Alex Lamb: That was something we learned very early on. Regardless of Tiki, Donn had a huge impact on cocktail culture and is a big part of how rum became palatable to an American consumer base. Donn was able to package it in a way that people were like, ‘OK, I’ll try that.’ Look at the industry today: It’s in a large part of Donn creating these cocktails.

The Donn of Tiki screens Oct. 15 at Regal Westgate, with a live Q&A from directors Alex Lamb and Max Well. Tickets available here. 

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