THE KING OF COLOR movie poster | ©2025 Picturehouse

Rating: PG
Stars: Larry Herbert, Lisa Herbert, Vicky Herbert, Richard Herbert, Loren Herbert, Michele Herbert, Billy Chien, Jon Glover, Mark Barbour, Sean Adams, Leatrice Eiseman, Kassia St. Clair
Writers: William Neal & Julia Szormba & Patrick Creadon
Director: Patrick Creadon
Distributor: Picturehouse
Release Date: December 12, 2025

People in certain professions – printing, costume design, fashion – are highly aware of the Pantone color system.

For those less familiar with Pantone, it is an internationally accepted way of categorizing colors, shades and hues, so that, for example, a costume designer in Los Angeles can reach out to a cloth dyer in Thailand, ask for cotton in Pantone 13-4306, aka Ice Melt, and receive exactly the right pastel blue required. It doesn’t matter if the designer and the dyer don’t work for the same company, deal with the same vendors, or speak the same tongue – Pantone is understood all over the world.

“Everything you see and everything you touch has a Pantone color on it,” we are informed early on. This turns out to be empirically true.

So, how did this come about? THE KING OF COLOR is here to explain this to us. Its principal subject turns out to be less Pantone than its creator, Larry Herbert.

As he sits down to be interviewed for THE KING OF COLOR, Herbert is just short of his ninety-fifth birthday. He is articulate, mobile and still able to drive his own car, achievements that would be worth celebrating even without his innovations.

Directed by Patrick Creadon and written by Creadon & William Neal & Julia Szormba, THE KING OF COLOR, takes Herbert’s life from his modest Brooklyn beginnings during the Depression through the present.

The movie turns out to be educational in ways we might not immediately expect, such as how a combination of diverse practical experiences and some unfulfilled aspirations came together to put Herbert in a place where his color-matching skills revolutionized multiple industries.

Herbert isn’t shy about being the moving force behind THE KING OF COLOR. He (and likely his second wife Michele, who speaks of helping publicize her husband) wanted to get this information out. His original thought was to write a book, but since his first love was movies, a film seemed more in line with his narrative proclivities.

This is certainly fair enough, but it means that there is absolutely nothing in THE KING OF COLOR that could be considered controversial. It also means that there is as much or more about the Herbert family as there is about color.

Creadon has included a number of experts on color here, but those looking for details of, say, why one particular shade might evoke an emotion that another does not should look elsewhere.

THE KING OF COLOR is a documentary that is first about a man, secondly about his process, and thirdly about what turned out to be the invention of a language. It’s amiable, informative and, at just eighty minutes, a fairly swift watch.

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