The King of Color Review: Shades of Pride

The King of Color
(USA, 82 min.)
Dir. Patrick Creadon
Prod. Christine O’Malley

 

If anyone’s biography tells a story of living in colour, that honour belongs to Larry Herbert. The 96-year-old inventor of the Pantone Matching System fuels this engaging take on developing industry standards with style and business sense. Herbert makes no effort to hide that he wants his life’s story on the record. That honesty helps with the straightforward salute that The King of Color gives him. Herbert’s daughter calls the self-congratulation gaudy, but completely in line with her father. That spirit rings true as Herbert relates his journey towards developing a voice as a businessman and the confidence to be competitive. For every shade of red that Herbert beams with pride, there’s a Pantone colour to match it.

Herbert serves as a great guide for his own story. Director Patrick Creadon gives Herbert a direct address interview, and the Pantone man proves a terrific raconteur. He likes telling stories and provides a great eye for the details that shape character and build an empire. For example, he remembers growing up in a small New York apartment above a store to hardworking parents. That modesty upbringing, he explains, instilled a strong work ethic from an early age. But he knew that his ambitions and working class background made dedication to his work essential. Herbert situates his story by remembering the early days working in a print shop. Manning the printing press, he admits, was pretty boring, especially when wartime limited production to black ink.

However, as he shares an early gamble in which he applied various shades to the plate, and captured colour progression through a single press that let the tones bleed, he saw the potential for colour print production on a large scale. Cut to a new job with Pantone, which he says was actually two companies—a marketing firm and a printing house—and he remembers the formative work that inspired his system. There are funny stories in The King of Color as Herbert and fellow historians contextualize the matching system. Back in the day, they explain, every printer simply created a colour to match a requested tone. This means that any request for, say, mustard yellow could yield a variety of results.

Understanding that consistency is key in colour production, Herbert developed a guide that could revolutionize printing, paint, and fashion. Fans of art and design will enjoy the nerdy insights about creating the codes and formulas for the Pantone system using a mere eight colours, plus black and white. Herbert admits that his competitive drive and faith in the product helped to mobilize the market. Moreover, he shares how differing ability to see colour from his right and left eyes gave a sense of how colours would look both when wet and dry.

There’s also a single great story in the Pantone that gives The King of Color its heart. Herbert gets emotional while recalling how his entrepreneurial spirit needed $50,000 to realize his ambitions. After expressing his concerns to fellow traveller Elsie Williamson, with whom he shared a frequent commute, she offered to put up the cash. Herbert credits the test of faith for making his dreams reality, but the payback yields greater rewards.

The Pantone man reveals that Williamson refused interest on the repayment and declined shares in the company. She tells him that, as a German and he a Jew, she saw the transaction as a gesture of atonement. As Herbert gets teary-eyed, the weight and catharsis of the story reflects the burdens that carry across generations. It follows the only moment where his storytelling falters him, as he decides to break for tea when time comes to discuss the Holocaust.

The King of Color balances Herbert’s career success with the ups and downs of his family story nicely, making his story a classic example of the American dream in motion. His children provide animated talking heads alongside experts from the design world, as Creadon finds a nice spectrum to complement the key storyteller. The film should especially please fans of arts docs like Brian D. Johnson’s The Colour of Ink, which seems like a kindred spirit for this story about idiosyncrasies of design and the colourful people behind the palettes.

Much in the fashion of Ron Mann’s Clairtone doc, too, The King of Color conjures an amiable Mad Men vibe as it explores the world of art and design. There are great vintage nuggets among the archives and a good sense of play with the material. It reflects the wholesome ’60s spirit of the ad world that went hand-in-hand with the Pantone system’s success. This documentary serves an appropriately bright tale to illuminate the story behind a tool that nearly everyone uses, but probably doesn’t know how it came to be.

The King of Color screens at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema on Feb. 6 and 14.

 

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