Don LaFontaine and the Voice of the Movie Trailer

A trailer voice is the part of film marketing the audience hears and never sees, and one man owned it for decades. This page covers how Don LaFontaine got the job, what his opening line does and where trailer narration stands now.

The voice

Don LaFontaine recorded more than 5,000 film trailers and about 350,000 television commercials. His nicknames included Thunder Throat, The Voice of God and The King of Movie Trailers. He called himself just a generic VOG, a regular old Voice of God.

LaFontaine said his voice cracked at 13 and gave him the bass tones that made his career. After the Army, where he was a recording engineer with the U.S. Army Band and Chorus, he was assigned in 1962 to Floyd L. Peterson, a radio producer making commercials for Dr. Strangelove. He joined Peterson in January 1963. Their company was one of the first to work exclusively in film advertising, at a time when most film promotion was done in-house by the studios.

The voice itself came by accident. When an announcer failed to show for a job, LaFontaine recorded the copy himself and sent it in with a note that it was what the spot would sound like with a real announcer. MGM bought the spots, and his career as a voice-over artist began. Gunfighters of Casa Grande, a 1964 western, was his first trailer.

What “In a world…” does

LaFontaine explained the strategy in a 2007 interview: the trailer has to establish very rapidly the world it is taking the audience to, and the phrase sets the scene. He wrote most of his voice-overs and sometimes, with collaborators, came up with lines such as “a one-man army,” “one man, one destiny” and “nowhere to run, nowhere to hide and no way out”. He said his company with Peterson came up with many famous trailer catchphrases, this one included.

One thing nobody can tell you: when the phrase was first used. No source dates the first use of “In a world” or ties it to one named trailer, so its origin is undocumented, and the earliest firm date is his first trailer, in 1964. The phrase is now overused and a subject of parody.

It got a face in 2006. A GEICO commercial introduced him as that announcer guy from the movies, and he began with the trademark line. For most moviegoers the spot was the first time a face accompanied the familiar voice. His final television voice-over line, in an episode of Phineas and Ferb, was the phrase followed by “There, I said it. Happy?”

The work

At his peak LaFontaine voiced about 60 promotions a week and sometimes as many as 35 in a single day. He traveled between studios in a chauffeured limousine, with the driver keeping the engine running between sessions. With ISDN technology he later built a recording studio in his Hollywood Hills home, where he averaged at least seven voice-overs a day. His rule was to believe what he was reading, even if the film was a piece of junk.

His trailers included Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Shrek, Friday the 13th, Batman Returns, Cast Away, The Elephant Man and Ghostbusters. In the trailer for The Simpsons Movie the film’s characters echoed his lines. In 2007 he named The Elephant Man his favorite. The Dr. Strangelove work was radio spots, not a trailer.

He later said he considered himself a voice actor, not an announcer, matching tone and timbre to the genre he was hired to hype. Voice artist George DelHoyo said LaFontaine changed the form from a list of who was in the film to one with urgency, importance and a point of view. He was one of the busiest performers in Screen Actors Guild history.

What happened to him

He was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on August 22, 2008, with a pulmonary embolism. He died there on September 1, 2008, at 68, from complications of a pneumothorax. His agent described it as a collapsed lung. His last movie trailer was for the documentary Call + Response, which he voiced without a fee.

The film named for the line

In a World… is a 2013 American comedy written, directed, starring and co-produced by Lake Bell, who plays a vocal coach doing trailer voice-overs. The title was inspired by the phrase LaFontaine used to start many trailers, and the film opens with an homage using footage of him. Bell started writing it six months after his death.

The film debuted at Sundance in January 2013 and reached U.S. theaters in August 2013. Bell won the Sundance 2013 Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for the script (distributor’s page). She shot it in 20 days for under a million dollars, and it grossed $3.1 million. It is also about how few women voice major trailers: a Telegraph feature names Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), voiced by Melissa Disney, as the only case.

Before and after him

Trailers were mostly made by National Screen Service until the late 1950s, and most had narration in stentorian voices. Art Gilmore’s voice featured on some 3,000 trailers, and Percy Rodriguez narrated the Jaws trailers and its sequels. After LaFontaine, voice-over use declined. Trailers now lean on music, sound effects and film dialogue.

No single voice has replaced him. The big jobs sit in a few hands: a voice-over agent told The Telegraph in 2013 that only eight to 10 men get them, and that 80 percent of the trailers that play in cinemas have no narrator at all. Marketers, in the words of the Golden Trailer Awards co-founder Monica Brady, want to give audiences a familiar voice. The top names record from home studios and phone in their lines, and Christopher Kent, whose credits include The King’s Speech and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, is one of the rare English voices in the business.

Hal Douglas, once described by a Miramax publicist as perhaps the most recognizable trailer voice in the business, died on March 7, 2014, at 89. The cliché has been played as satire in the trailers for Comedian and Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. For a current name, check the credits of the trailer in front of you.

His name lives on in the industry. The Golden Trailer Awards, which honor trailers, teasers, TV spots and posters, give a Best Voice Over award named for him, listed on the awards category page as The Don LaFontaine Award. The same awards have a voice-over category for TV and streaming series.

The voice is only one layer of a campaign, and the film marketing section covers the rest. Teaser trailer vs theatrical trailer shows how the two cuts divide the job, and movie poster size covers the print side.