Документальный фильм об изобретателе тики-баров Донне Бич выходит на стриминговые платформы

Max Well and Alex Lamb's film about Donn Beach, aka 'Don the Beachcomber,' inventor of the tiki bar, lands on all platforms August 28 after an Apple TV bow and a 40-plus-city roadshow tour. Pour one out — or rather, into a tiki mug. The Donn of Tiki, Max Well and Alex Lamb's animated documentary about tiki culture inventor Donn Beach, hits all streaming platforms this Friday, August 28, after landing on Apple TV last Friday and touring 40-plus cities on a coast-to-coast roadshow. A Blu-ray release follows this fall. The live-action / animation hybrid film sets out to separate fact from fiction in the life of tiki's "founding father" — Donn Beach, born Ernest Raymond Gantt, aka Don the Beachcomber, namesake of the restaurant chain whose re-launched locations still operate today. His story has been frequently embellished, and at times flat-out fabricated, and the doc chases the legend back to the 1932 opening of the world's first tiki bar. At its center sits a never-before-heard longform 1986 interview with Donn, re-created in stop-motion aesthetics reminiscent of 1960s Rankin/Bass specials and woven together with traditional animation and never-before-seen footage. It's a story involving old Hollywood glamour, Prohibition-era bootlegging, 1950s Hawaii, and the Chicago mob; along the way, the documentary resurrects the myths behind the Zombie, one of Beach's most potent and lasting cocktail legacies. AWN premiered an exclusive clip from the film back in June 2025 — Donn spinning a Marlene Dietrich story — during the doc's theatrical roadshow. Interviews include cocktail archeologist Jeff "Beachbum" Berry, "The Book of Tiki" author Sven Kirsten, and rum expert Shannon Mustipher. The film carries a James Beard Award nomination and drew coverage from Vogue and WBUR's nationally syndicated "Here and Now." Surf Monkey Films, which Lamb and Well founded in 2009, produces. More on the film and upcoming tour dates is on the doc's official site. Source: Surf Monkey Films Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.