00:26my husband's building shelf after shelf and he wants to know when he can
00:30i've heard finney say the word completist you're out of your mind
00:36the growth just continues it's nuts if you base my collection on these prices it'd be half a million
00:42dollars the one thing i gotta start off with because you know looking at some of the behind
00:48the scenes and everything color both in obviously creating you know your place you know doug but
00:54also in the actual film you know it's hard to describe sometimes going to some of the
01:00these places i have been um how you feel when you go in there and how the colors overwhelm you
01:06uh well you know the thing about tiki is and it's hard is it's escapism so our environment has to
01:13be
01:13truly transformative it should not you know it's why they have no windows uh why once you get in
01:20there like we made a very deliberate decision to not buy any restaurant commercial restaurant
01:27furniture uh we built everything you know in this time when it's really an amazon driven culture
01:33and you can have anything delivered right here by 5 p.m you know it i think the world tends
01:38to take
01:38tends to take on a certain homogenous you know look and when you take people out of that uh i
01:45think it's
01:45important to really uh particularly with a speakeasy thing you know i've seen a lot of speakeasies that
01:51might have been a bar that didn't do so well so they just move the door to the back right
01:55and now
01:55it's like but if there's no reveal if there's no thing that when you go in and you automatically
02:03have a a fit that doesn't fit with what's outside it's a completely transformative uh experience
02:11and uh i think that that that came out of a lot of that came out of modernism there's a
02:16very very
02:16classic uh frank Lloyd Wright quote where he says you know he felt that uh each building was an
02:23ambassador to a completely and that a person would be absolutely transformed when they walked in and
02:31i think that's where we talk about in the film where architecture translates itself into art what
02:36was your transformative moment that made you sort of you know because you know you're obsessive about
02:41this stuff and that's the greatest kind of thing well because you can go into any of these places
02:45and if the owner knows his shit did backwards and forwards it's unbelievable because you feel like
02:51they've lived it and you have lived it no no i think it was uh obviously disney i i think
02:57uh you know
02:57when i was when i was growing up in the you know as very young in the in the late
03:0260s and the early 70s
03:04and we would make that pilgrimage like all uh arizona zonies do to to disneyland every year it was like
03:10okay all bets are off like real life doesn't really apply right right and i think that that's what you
03:17know he was just one of those guys and if you look into tiki it had sort of the disney
03:22equivalent right
03:22as as people realized that you could create these atmospheres that were not real that tiki bars were
03:30you know in essence doing that they were using fantasy and i think walt disney was the guy who
03:35made it okay for everybody to leave the real world you know for a while in a physical sense
03:41not just through entertainment hi my name is josh dragan and i'm the director of kabali and the tiki mug
03:47obsession i wanted to just talk a little bit about the palette of the film
03:57you know one of the most beautiful things about the tiki world is just how colorful it is so we
04:03wanted our audience to really really get a feeling of that as well so when i reached out to ryan
04:08mahali
04:09the cinematographer he knew exactly where i was coming from i mean ryan's a photographer he's also a
04:15gaffer so he understands light and color and then the other part of that equation is the colorist i reached
04:20out to david taylor a buddy of mine who i worked with for a number of years colorists are often
04:25the
04:25unsung heroes in documentaries because they come in at the end and bring out the colors and the
04:30vibrance and all the shots and david just really knocked it out of the park
04:39could you talk about that from the film point of view because i think you guys got together
04:42to make this film many many years ago correct it started that three yes more than we bargained for
04:49yeah yeah yeah yep and we're still friends yeah yeah yeah yeah um i would say um the very first
04:59conversation that i had was about the color and the lighting with my cinematographer ryan mahali
05:07that was the first conversation i had i said you know i'm interested in making this film and there's a
05:13there's a very particular palette that i want to you know present to audiences because the world of tiki
05:21is just so colorful right like it's just so colorful so how do you bring your audience into that world
05:26well you do that with music and you do that with colors and light and you know the characters are
05:32already there right like everybody in our film is is colorful in their own way right personality wise
05:37right but like visually and sonically you want to do that as well so ryan knocked it out of the
05:43park
05:43and like i have to give praise to david taylor who was the colorist we went on many different journeys
05:51color wise with this film we even added a touch a very very little touch of grain to the film
05:57just to
05:57give a slight vintage and high contrast appeal so you know we were very uh very conscious of the way
06:04it
06:05looks very intentional in it i knew that we were going to need some house poles which are your
06:12your standard tiki poles and it was jimmy's idea jimmy carr said you know matt could do this
06:26i've been in tucson long enough that i know a lot of people who do good stuff
06:32he knows that i'm sort of a jack of all trades as an artist i can draw i can sculpt
06:39i can make things
06:40look like a designer's drawing he's like way open-minded and he's a great artist i've never
06:46worked subtractively at all i've never been a carver before and i haven't really worked in this
06:53way with wood so this is pretty new for me he said i'll take the job and i'm gonna learn
07:03to carve
07:04to do it
07:08and jimmy starts delivering these beautiful pieces of wood i'm just like oh my god
07:14to have an actual tree to sculpt one single piece of material to subtract from and to allow
07:21something to be revealed from that that's exciting and even tia tiki rub i mean these guys lived and
07:29breathed it you know as well as everybody in these i mean i've been i have i was supposed to
07:34go to tiki
07:34and go-go this year uh but i didn't get to go but like all these places i grew up
07:39near the mai
07:39time you know and so i would go there i went first time i went there was when i was
07:4316 and it
07:44opened your eyes um could you talk about sort of the it's the subculture you know because you can sit
07:51down and talk to somebody about drinks you know cult a culture you can talk about fashion you can
07:57talk about everything not just the mugs the mugs are insane because every door opens another i would
08:02think certainly and that was a that was a very conscious decision that both finnie and i made at the
08:06very beginning of this i mean tiki is huge like you said it's it's art it's music it's clothing
08:14it's mugs it's so many things for us and what i found appealing about finnie's story was the mug
08:21and and i think to quote jay strongman he said the mug represents it was like this thing you could
08:26hold
08:27that you could look at and it kind of represented tiki so the mug was like our guiding light for
08:33this
08:33it kept us on track many times we'd have conversations and i can go into i have so much
08:38on the cutting room floor okay but the mug was our focus because that was finnie's
08:43a passion and so that's what kept us on track and and and it's just such an interesting object
08:49it's a functional piece of art and finnie speak more to that i think that it was a wise decision
08:55because you could do an entire uh limited series or mini series on tiki because it's such a expansive
09:02and unwieldy you know subject to try to wrangle into 90 minutes so i think were you thinking about
09:09that was that a back and forth yeah because you know clearly you know you we use the term in
09:14the in
09:15the film obsessive completist right i wanted to have a complete vision and if that meant using the
09:21mugs as a device or kind of the the rails that kept the bobsled on the course uh that made
09:29that
09:29made good sense because then we could tell one story that was a microcosm of tiki sort of in its
09:36entirety and that could check that obsessive completist box you know in my head but it you
09:41know to say that okay we're because otherwise it would leave people uh wanting you know more if it
09:49was just a little bit of this it would become sort of a tiki stampler and we didn't want that
09:53and so
09:53i think the mugs you know it was and i think it was uh very clear uh from the from
09:59the outset in
09:59josh's mind that the mugs were going to be sort of the construct that held this story yeah yeah i
10:07mean
10:07the first interview we did with uh with baby doe and otto she's like this is great like you're you're
10:13doing a documentary on mugs like this is a such a cool idea like because because it is sort of
10:20like
10:21intoxicating no pun intended to go down all these other rabbit holes i mean oh my god i mean there's
10:28you could do a doc on any one of those things the mugs allowed us to introduce to people that
10:34have
10:34no idea about tiki this world it opened it allowed us to show that world to those folks
10:41so
11:04you
11:04you
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