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The documentary The King of Color brings us close to a figure whose spectral hand rests on almost every manufactured surface: Lawrence Herbert, the mind behind the Pantone Matching System (PMS). Before Herbert’s intervention in the 1960s, human color perception lived in a kind of chaotic, pre-linguistic shade. Asking for “rose red” invited five subtly different interpretations, a private tongue spoken by every print shop.
Herbert imposed a cold, beautiful order on that inconsistency. The PMS stands as an ontological grid, giving each perceivable hue a formula and a precise number, turning subjective sensation into repeatable data. This standardization supports global commerce, fashion, and media as a silent presence that passes through daily life without fanfare. The film’s essential aim is to pull this spectral architect out of the obscurity created by his own staggering achievement, granting him public recognition on the scale of other titans of industry and innovation.
The Weight of Numbered Hues
The film tracks the ascent of color from a craft of approximation into a science that insists on certainty. In the past, each printing process, lithography and screen printing included, produced its own slightly fractured result, separating the requested color from the one that landed on paper. Herbert’s system answered that drift by turning color into instruction.
Ink manufacturers could summon a vast palette from a limited material base, each shade anchored by its number and its exact chemical formula. Herbert’s work on the split fountain press becomes a technical high point, enabling the simultaneous printing of multiple precise colors in a parallel array.
Director Patrick Creadon gives this dense process a body the camera can hold. Graphics, animation, and archival footage work to translate chemistry and mechanics into images meant for ordinary eyes. The filmmaking stays smart and mostly clear, yet the principles of printing technology and colorimetry keep their stubborn complexity, a refusal to become simple on command.
Herbert calls his creation a “dictionary of color,” and the phrase lands with philosophical force. A dictionary claims authority over meaning; it sets limits; it promises shared reference. In the film, that promise becomes practical. Disparate fields, costume design and abstract art among them, gain a common terminology that resists dispute.
The Solipsism of Memory
The character study of Lawrence Herbert forms the documentary’s central, most philosophically troubling line of inquiry. The film proceeds as a first-person account, following Herbert from humble Depression-era roots in Brooklyn into his position as an industry monarch. Shot when Herbert was in his mid-nineties, the project begins with his explicit wish to leave a definitive, approved record of his life.
That desire carries the scent of canonization. The film, by necessity, becomes a self-commissioned portrait, shaped by the contours of a man looking back and choosing what remains. A family member’s remark that the venture seems “self-centered” hangs over the narrative like a truth no one fully speaks aloud.
The filmmakers include Herbert’s personal recollections, and many arrive with a self-serving or even hyperbolic tone. The earliest decades of his life appear through hand-drawn illustrations and old-school animation, a choice that quietly underscores subjectivity. This is life as it is remembered, then rendered. Memory takes on the texture of a myth that can replace raw experience, or at least smooth its jagged edges.
The film takes on a darker gravity when it turns toward rupture: the midlife crisis that dissolved his first marriage, and, most sharply, his time as a soldier in the Korean War. Herbert refuses detailed description of that trauma. He offers a stark fragment instead, saying those who were there did not wish to be, and he will not resurrect what happened. The silence becomes its own testimony. It suggests a human shadow under the luminous order of his corporate life, a remainder that numbering cannot capture.
A Lucid, Controlled Vision
Directed by Patrick Creadon, the documentary sustains an amiable, light, informative tone. It moves quickly, running just over eighty minutes, and it parcels out information with efficiency. The focus stays tightly on Herbert and his process, treating the film as a biographical and educational text that introduces a figure whose creation functions as an everyday language. Color theory and the psychological charge of specific shades sit at the edge of the frame, present as implication rather than lesson.
The film succeeds in sharpening the viewer’s attention to the finer shades already surrounding them, revealing an invisible algorithmic structure that supports global communication. The credit it gives Herbert feels earned, measured against the endurance of his impact. Still, the work remains affectionate, and it remains controlled by its subject’s hunger for a particular legacy.
What emerges is a lucid history of a major innovation, filtered through the determined memory of the man who made it. Even at the end, a question lingers in the air. A system built to fix meaning can still be carried by a voice that trembles, edits, and chooses. The numbers hold steady. The person behind them stays partially unresolved.
The documentary The King of Color tells the story of Lawrence Herbert, the man who forever changed the world of design and manufacturing by inventing the Pantone Matching System (PMS). The film premiered at AFI Fest in late 2025 and began its limited theatrical run in the United States on December 12, 2025, distributed by Picturehouse. Focusing on Herbert’s life from his Depression-era Brooklyn childhood to his revolutionary work in standardizing color, the film uses intimate interviews and vibrant animation to explore how a simple idea brought coherence to the chaotic landscape of global color reproduction. As of today, December 15, 2025, the film is playing in select theaters in major markets, with a DVD and Blu-ray release anticipated in February 2026.
Full Credits
Title: The King of Color
Distributor: Picturehouse
Release date: December 12, 2025 (Limited Theatrical Release)
Rating: PG
Running time: 82 minutes
Director: Patrick Creadon
Writers: Patrick Creadon, William Neal, Julia Szormba
Producers and Executive Producers: Christine O’Malley (Producer), Adam L. Lawrence (Associate Producer), H. Nelson Tracey (Associate Producer)
Cast: Lawrence Herbert, Lisa Herbert, Michele Herbert
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Sam Painter
Editors: William Neal, Julia Szormba
Composer: Alex Mansour
The Review
The King of Color
This is an insightful, swiftly paced biographical film that reveals the existential order underlying our visual world. The documentary successfully elevates Lawrence Herbert from obscurity, detailing the profound complexity of his standardization system. While the narrative is undeniably controlled, possessing the slightly self-serving hue of a requested memoir, it finds human depth in the subject’s traumatic past and personal failures. It is a necessary, albeit hagiographic, portrait of a man who coded the chaos of color into a universal lexicon.
PROS
- Successfully reveals the pervasive, yet uncredited, influence of the Pantone system on global industry and culture.
- Uses graphics and animation effectively to make complex printing and color chemistry concepts accessible.
- The film is strengthened by the inclusion of Herbert's midlife crisis and his reticence about his traumatic Korean War service.
- At around 80 minutes, the film is a smart, swift watch that keeps the viewer engaged.
CONS
- The portrait is self-instigated and affectionate, feeling at times like an "official portrait" that lacks controversy.
- Relies heavily on Lawrence Herbert's self-serving, potentially hyperbolic personal recollections.
- Focuses more on the man and the process than on the philosophical or emotional impact of color itself.
- Some of the granular, technical explanations remain dense for viewers without a science background.
