{"id":341986,"date":"2025-12-13T05:32:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-13T05:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/341986\/"},"modified":"2025-12-13T05:32:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T05:32:11","slug":"the-king-of-color-movie-review-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/341986\/","title":{"rendered":"The King of Color movie review (2025)"},"content":{"rendered":"

You know those little color strips you see in wall racks in stores where paint is sold? They\u2019re keys to unlocking Pantone Color Systems<\/a>, which brought a globally consistent way of identifying fine graduations of color into a world that had previously been fragmented and inconsistent, and assigning each hue a playful name<\/a> like sea mist, lavender fog, or papaya punch. <\/p>\n

The man who invented it, 96-year-old Lawrence Herbert, is the subject of a documentary, \u201cThe King of Color,\u201d from the makers of the popular \u201cWordplay,\u201d about the creation of the New York Times crossword puzzle. It\u2019s a character study that doubles as a first-person account of the evolution of color printing technology in the 20th century. It focuses on Herbert\u2019s techniques for creating a staggering array of hues and devising precise formulas for color combinations that would always yield the same result, no matter who followed the instructions. <\/p>\n

The above description might make \u201cThe King of Color\u201d sound dry and super-technical, and the movie is definitely granular in its explanations. Luckily, director Patrick Creadon and producer Christine O\u2019Malley (a husband-wife filmmaking team) are experienced teachers. They know how to use animation, graphics, archival photos, and clips from other movies to make things (mostly) clear, although when it gets into the math part, liberal arts-focused viewers (like this writer, an English major who checked out of mathematics after algebra) might still have trouble keeping up.<\/p>\n

Color printing predates the 20th century, of course. It\u2019s hundreds of years old and has undergone many technological and procedural variations, from woodcuts, lithography, and screen printing to photographic reproduction and laser printing. But they all had one thing in common: if you asked any five printers to show you \u201cred,\u201d you\u2019d be shown five slightly different colors, because they all had their own process for creating and assembling the raw materials and getting the result onto paper. Herbert\u2019s great innovation was the split fountain press, which allowed for the printing of 28 colors simultaneously, in an array of thick parallel lines that resembled an extruded, hyper-detailed cousin of the color wheel.<\/p>\n

Everybody everywhere uses Pantone systems now, because it allows everyone from fashion designers and magazine publishers to motion picture art directors and abstract painters to say \u201cI need oyster gray, autumn blonde, moonless night, and cream gold\u201d and be confident that collaborators in different locations can be convinced that they\u2019re all in agreement on what they all look like. Herbert refers to the classification system as \u201ca dictionary of color.\u201d<\/p>\n

You should know going into \u201cThe King of Color\u201d that it\u2019s a feature-length narrative equivalent of one of those official portraits that government officials, corporate executives, and other powerbrokers commission to hang in the foyers of their mansions. The project came about when Herbert decided in his mid-nineties that he wanted somebody to capture the story of his life and work while he was still lucid enough to be the storyteller. He says he did this mainly so he could have a Herbert-approved account he could refer people to, so he wouldn\u2019t have to tell the same stories constantly. One of his adult children\u2014a weird phrase for people who are probably in their sixties now\u2014says, \u201cI don\u2019t know why he wants to tell his own story. It seems a little self-centered, frankly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thankfully, the filmmakers who said yes insisted on having final cut, which lends a smidge of detachment in the movie\u2019s production, even though the result is so affectionate and suitably impressed by Herbert that you wouldn\u2019t be able to tell it\u2019s not supervised by its subject unless somebody told you. Herbert\u2019s recollection of key moments in his life comes across as self-serving and a bit hyperbolic, but no more so than most people\u2019s accounts of their own daily lives, in which they always come across as the hero or the wronged party, and say witty things that their antagonists are too impressed to respond to.<\/p>\n

Self-fluffing aside, the personal aspects of Herbert\u2019s story are engrossing and sometimes moving, especially when he and family members talk about the midlife crisis that dissolved his marriage in the 1970s, and his experience as a soldier during the Korean War, which traumatized him so severely that he still won\u2019t talk about it in detail. \u201cEverybody who was there didn\u2019t want to be there,\u201d he tells the filmmakers. \u201cThe things that happened there, I don\u2019t really want to resurrect.\u201d The re-creations of Herbert\u2019s first few decades of life rely on hand-drawn illustrations and old-school animation techniques, which subtly emphasize that what we are seeing is one man\u2019s account, not necessarily the correct one. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a smart, mostly light movie that will teach viewers a lot about processes they might not otherwise think about. You come away from the movie seeing the world in finer shades than when you went in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You know those little color strips you see in wall racks in stores where paint is sold? They\u2019re…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341987,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-341986","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341986\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}