[3] Growing up on Kraljice Natalije Street near the Zeleni Venac open market in Belgrade, young Dobrivoje, nicknamed Bata, was a lively kid with a keen interest in football.
After spending six months on loan with Hannover, in the summer of 1955, he was offered a contract to play for Montreal Hakoah FC of the National Soccer League in Canada.
[2] Simultaneously, young Tanasijević began drama lessons with Jeff Corey in Malibu to improve his accent when speaking English as he tried to break into acting.
[3][4] Corey, a banned actor turned acting teacher after being blacklisted in Hollywood during the Second Red Scare (McCarthyism) witchhunt in the United States, thought Tanasijević's looks and accent might enable him to play 'bad guy roles' in films.
Tanasijević, now going by Americanized Dan Tana, soon made his cinematic debut in a small part of a Nazi torpedo engineer in 1957's The Enemy Below, starring Curt Jürgens and Robert Mitchum.
[2] Ever since first arriving in California in 1956, while attempting to transition professionally from playing football (soccer) to acting, Tana took various odd jobs—working in a tuna cannery and washing dishes at the Villa Capri restaurant—as his main source of income.
Gradually, unable to support himself from sporadic acting gigs, and unwilling to go back to Europe to continue pursuing his journeyman football playing career, Tana began working in hospitality.
[8] In 1964, twenty-nine-year-old Tana launched his own eatery by taking over the Dominick's hamburger restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood from an art-gallerist friend Chuck Feingarten for US$30,000 (US$287,000 in 2023)[9] with a three-year payment schedule of US$10,000 annually.
[10][11] For decades prior, the location had also housed food hospitality venues: first, Black's Lucky Spot Café counter-style lunch joint catering to the workers doing maintenance on the Pacific Electric's old Red Car Trolley that ran outside along Santa Monica Blvd.
[10] Described as "resolutely untrendy" while offering classic Italian pasta dishes such as fettuccine, lasagna, and eggplant parmesan, the new dinner restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard would start becoming a favourite Hollywood hangout two years into its operation, after struggling for a steady clientele at first.
[16][15] Benefiting from its proximity to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) headquarters at the Marquis Theater just around the corner on Melrose Avenue, Dan Tana's emerged as a spot for the film industry personalities and professionals to commingle.
[12] By 1967, Dan Tana's was already established among the entertainment industry insiders—and hopefuls looking to break in—as the "right place" in town to be seen and make social connections that could be leveraged into business ones.
[4] In 1968, Tana hired fellow Yugoslav, Miljenko "Michael" Gotovac, initially as a waiter before moving to bartender;[16] Gotovac—a Croat born in 1943 in the village of Lećevica before leaving Communist Yugoslavia in 1964 as a young gastarbeiter to West Germany and eventually arriving in the U.S. in 1967—would go on to become one of Dan Tana's staples for the following 52 years, displaying a gruff, big-hearted personality while tending the bar and pouring drinks in what some saw as curmudgeonly fashion.
[10][19][20] Into the 1970s, already frequented by a great number of film industry individuals—from major showbusiness eminences such as John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Karl Malden, and studio boss Lew Wasserman to emerging New Hollywood personalities such as Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nicholson, screenwriter Carole Eastman, and director Bob Rafelson[15]—the eatery was embraced by the hugely popular television personality Johnny Carson after he moved his highly-rated nightly program The Tonight Show to the West Coast in 1972.
[4] As a result of the nearby Troubadour club beginning to book big stars like Elton John and Van Morrison, Dan Tana's did away with its customary 11 p.m. closing time, keeping its kitchen open late until 12:30 or 1 a.m. in order to cater to the concert-goers looking for a late-night dining spot after the shows ended.
[1] Due to its location next to the Troubadour nightclub, Dan Tana's also saw many musicians come in to eat and drink over the decades, including members of The Byrds, The Mamas & the Papas, and the Eagles as well as Frank Zappa, Elton John, and Bette Midler.
[14] The Eagles' guitarist Glenn Frey and drummer Don Henley were said to have been inspired into writing their 1975 hit "Lyin' Eyes" after once eating at Dan Tana's while observing the many beautiful women in the restaurant, many of whom were with much older wealthy men.
[5] Some of them, such as singer Linda Ronstadt[22][23] starring at the time in a Broadway staging of The Pirates of Penzance, went even further; upon hearing of Tana facing a multiple-month delay just to get building permits approved by the city, she asked her boyfriend, California governor Jerry Brown to help.
[2] The series ran for three seasons with Tana reportedly receiving US$500 per airing (first-run episodes, re-runs, and syndication) in royalties, altogether making US$500,000 that he donated to charity.
The restaurant is referenced in movies such as Get Shorty and Hail, Caesar!, TV sitcom The Larry Sanders Show as well as in the songs "Small Clone" by Mayer Hawthorne, "But I Am A Good Girl" from the Burlesque soundtrack, and "Christmas in LA" by The Killers and Dawes.
Michael Connelly’s series of novels featuring the Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller, often has the character dining at Dan Tana’s as well as several other popular Los Angeles restaurants.
Calling on his Yugoslavia football connections, Tana put the new Oakland Clippers NPSL franchise in touch with his former Red Star Belgrade boss, dr. Aca Obradović, who would soon reach an agreement to become the Clippers general manager and in turn bring a head coach and number of Yugoslav footballers from Red Star, FK Partizan, and OFK Beograd to Oakland: head coach Ivan Toplak as well as players such as Ilija Mitić, Mirko Stojanović, Momčilo Gavrić, Dimitrije Davidović, Milan Čop, Ilija Lukić, Sele Milošević, and Dragan Đukić.