Palm Springs, CA
When you sit down to watch The Donn of Tiki, you realize quickly this is not just another documentary about cocktails or a clever bar trend. It is a layered story about Donn Beach, the restless visionary born Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, who essentially invented the modern immersive restaurant and is remembered as the father of tiki culture. Beach didn’t just pour drinks; he crafted entire worlds. He fused environment, narrative, theatrical design, exotic food and cocktails, and immersive atmosphere into the prototype for what we now call “themed entertainment.” Without him, there might never have been Trader Vic’s, the tiki bar revival, or even Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room.
The film, co-directed by Alex Lamb and Max Well, is a richly textured work that acknowledges the contradictions in Donn’s life. It doesn’t flinch from the mythmaking, the exaggerations, or the cultural appropriations, but it also recognizes his enormous influence on how Americans came to escape their everyday lives through hospitality and spectacle. At its heart, this is a film about invention and reinvention — about a man who transformed bartending into mixology, and then into something larger, a kind of cultural theater.
Stylistically, The Donn of Tiki is a delight. The filmmakers use retro-style animation that calls back to early Disney shorts, even pre-Snow White, alongside stop-motion sequences that recall the claymation charm of Wallace & Gromit. These flourishes do more than entertain; they mirror Donn’s own love of theatrical illusion, reminding us how much of tiki was always about performance and imagination. The inclusion of Shag (Josh Agle), the Palm Springs artist known for his bold mid-century tiki-inspired work, grounds the film in a design tradition that spans both Donn Beach’s Hollywood beginnings and the desert modernism of Palm Springs. If you’ve ever visited Shag’s gallery in Palm Springs — and perhaps left with one of his prints inspired by Disneyland’s immersive experiences — you’ll recognize the playful guilt of indulgence the film captures so well.
The documentary is also smartly cut, blending interviews with historians, family members, and cultural critics, all while keeping the pace brisk. It is both critical and celebratory, walking that fine line between showing Donn as a pioneer and acknowledging the broader questions around authenticity and cultural borrowing. What stands out most is the way the film connects Donn’s singular vision — the tiki bar as a fully staged environment — to larger currents in American design, hospitality, and entertainment.
For Palm Springs audiences, the film found a particularly resonant home. On October 18, as part of Modernism Week’s fall preview series, The Donn of Tiki will screen at a local Palm Springs theater, reminding viewers that this city itself is one of the world’s living museums of mid-century modern design and tiki revival culture. The screening underscored how much Palm Springs owes to that era’s bold experiments in architecture, art, and entertainment — experiments that Donn Beach helped set into motion decades earlier.
Looking forward, the film will continue to tour select U.S. cities in a roadshow format, with wider availability to follow through film festivals, specialty screenings, and eventually streaming platforms. For now, catching it in theaters is the best way to experience its colorful animation, lush archival footage, and immersive sound design — the kind of work that deserves a communal audience.
In the end, The Donn of Tiki is more than a biographical documentary. It’s a cultural time capsule, an ode to invention, and a mirror of America’s thirst for escapism. For anyone who has ever sipped a Zombie, ducked into a tiki bar for an evening of fantasy, or sat enchanted in Disneyland’s Tiki Room, this film connects the dots. Donn Beach may have been a storyteller who blurred fact and fiction, but his legacy is real: he taught us that a cocktail could be an art form, and that a restaurant could be a world unto itself.
Tickets can be purchased here: https://modernismweek.com/october-2025/unique-experiences/film-screening-donn-of-tiki/
The writer, Marty Treinen, is an artrepreneur, arts educator, writer, and co-author of Universal Creative Intelligence: How the Arts and Sciences Propel Human Experience. His career bridges the arts across the full spectrum of creative practice, cultural experience, and education—all grounded in the belief that the creative process is essential to human evolution. Treinen’s work underscores how creativity shapes not only how we tell stories but also how we live them.
Artwork / Photography by Marty Treinen © www.marty-treinen-art.com