Pantheon Studios

Pantheon was founded in 1994 by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Isbouts and Marketing Executive Catherine Labrador.

 

Isbouts was born in Eindhoven, Holland and studied Attic Greek and Latin before continuing in archeology, art history and musicology at Leyden University. He completed his doctoral research at Columbia University in New York.

 

In 1981, Isbouts wrote and directed his first film in the United States, Van Gogh Revisited, starring Leonard Nimoy. This film was subsequently released on laserdisc by Philips in both the U.S. and Europe, and ranks as the world’s first interactive entertainment program released internationally.

 

Later, Dr. Isbouts was appointed head of the Authoring Group, a global software engineering firm owned by Philips Electronics, followed by his appointment as head of the ArtSpace Studio, a unit of Philips Interactive Media in Los Angeles, CA. In 1992, Isbouts was promoted to Managing Director of Philips Media Europe, supervising multimedia production at 28 studios in 8 countries. Upon his return to the United States in 1994, he founded Pantheon Studios in Santa Monica, CA, as a production studio for broadcast and multimedia content.

 

During the next twenty years, Pantheon became a studio of high-end programming in association with leading international publishers and Hollywood studios.  In 1994, Isbouts designed and produced one of Germany’s first all-multimedia encyclopedias (the Lexikon, for media publishing giant Bertelsmann), and also designed and produced the first multimedia encyclopedia in Dutch (the Standaard Encyclopedie.) The latter was a run-away commercial success and is one of the few multimedia programs to be awarded a Platinum CD. 

 

In 1996, Isbouts co-wrote and directed Hamlet: A Murder Mystery, a massive game based on the Castle Rock Entertainment epic starring Kenneth Branagh, followed by the acclaimed two-part program Charlton Heston’s Voyage Through the Bible, for Agamemnon Films and Jones Digital Century.

 

In 1997, Isbouts and his team began production on an encyclopedia on the life and work of Walt Disney, commissioned by the Walt Disney Family Foundation and written by Disney historians Richard and Katherine Greene. The CD-ROM was released by Disney Interactive in 1998, and would lay the groundwork for the feature-length film Walt: The Man behind the Myth, also directed by Isbouts, which premiered in Monte Carlo in 2001 and was subsequently broadcast by ABC in prime-time.

 

In 1998, together with Sir David Frost and Porchlight Entertainment, Isbouts co-wrote and produced Inside the Cold War, the acclaimed History Channel mini-series released both for television and on CD-ROM.

 

In 2000, all of Pantheon’s multimedia operations were acquired by Global Learning Systems. In 2001, Pantheon continued as, exclusively, a studio of television and feature-length programming. Its output includes the historical drama Manet in Love (MZ Films, 2002); The World of Dogs (for Public Television, 2004) and The Quest for Peace (Hallmark, 2005).

 

Isbouts also created the first surround-view digital film (in 1998, in collaboration with Silicon Graphics, using an Onyx-2 supercomputer) and is credited by Apple Computer as the first director to edit a theatrical film entirely on the Apple Final Cut Pro platform.

 

In 2007, Isbouts wrote and directed two films: Beyond the Golden Compass, for Schwartz & Company (released by Koch Entertainment) and Miraculous Health, a 3-part mini-series for Public Television. In 2008, Koch Entertainment and Anchor Bay Distribution released Pantheon’s feature doc-drama Operation Valkyrie.

 

In 2013, Pantheon began production on The Mona Lisa Myth, based on Isbouts' book, "The Mona Lisa Myth," co-authored with Dr. Christopher Brown.

 

Dr. Isbouts was previously Professor of Digital Cinema at Los Angeles-based National University and is currently Graduate Professor of Media Psychology at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, CA.

 

A prolific author, Isbouts' recent books include Charlton Heston's Hollywood (GoodTimes Publishing); Discovering Walt (Hyperion); From Moses to Muhammad (Bertelsmann); a major publication on biblical and archaeological history, published by National Geographic, entitled The Biblical World (2007) and National Geographic's In the Footsteps of Jesus (2012).

 

For more information about Jean-Pierre Isbouts and his literary work, please visit his website at www.jpisbouts.org.

 

Catherine Labrador is Vice President at Pantheon Studios, and the company’s principal producer. Prior to joining Pantheon, Ms Labrador was Vice President, Creative Services at Philips Media in Los Angeles and responsible for the launch of Paramount, Orion and MGM films released on VideoCD, a precursor of the DVD.

 

Previously, Ms Labrador was Vice President, Communications at Wold Communications, a worldwide satellite services company based in Los Angeles.

 

Pantheon has shot films in regions across the globe, including Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.