In A World...
... where no one narrates movie trailers anymore... one man (me) asks... uh, what happened?
You don’t know his face. You don’t know his name. But you know his voice.
“In A World…” , “This summer…”
These were the oaken, gravel-edged utterances of a man named Don LaFontaine, sometimes known as the “Voice of God.” LaFontaine narrated over 5,000 movie trailers and is credited with selling more movie tickets than anyone in history.
For over 40 years, his voice was everywhere. Then, in 2008, it fell silent. And in the years since, movie trailers have stopped using voiceovers altogether.
Why?
The Voice in the Dark
Don LaFontaine was born in 1940 in Duluth, Minnesota. His voice cracked early, dropping to a honeyed baritone when he was just 13. After high school, he enlisted in the Army and was stationed at Fort Myer, Virginia, where he served as a recording engineer for the United States Army Band and Chorus.
After his discharge, LaFontaine moved to New York City, where he worked as a sound engineer and editor. It was the early 60s, and alongside a young producer named Floyd Peterson, LaFontaine co-founded Kaleidoscope Films - one of the first companies dedicated exclusively to motion picture advertising. Not only did they craft movie trailers, they also pioneered radio ads for films. One of their earliest projects was a radio spot for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
Movie trailers had existed since the early days of cinema. The first, for The Pleasure Seekers (1913), played after a movie - hence the name “trailer.” By 1919, a company called the National Screen Service (NSS) had monopolized the industry, using a rigid cookie-cutter format and ludicrously unsubtle narration to hype films. The trailer for Frankenstein (1931) promised to “shock women into an uncontrolled hysteria!” while Gone with the Wind (1939) declared, “The screen has never known a love story to compare with this!”
When the NSS monopoly was broken up in 1955, trailers began evolving. Filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick experimented with cryptic, narration-free montages and playful fourth-wall-breaking appeals to audiences.
On a fateful day in 1965, Don LaFontaine was waiting for a voiceover actor to record narration he had written for an MGM “grind” western called Gunfighters of Casa Grande. When the scheduled talent never showed, Don had to jump in the booth himself. “I took the 82 dollars and ran like a thief,” he later quipped. MGM loved the result, and LaFontaine’s voiceover career was born.
He went on to narrate some of the most iconic trailers of all time: Doctor Zhivago, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather Part II, Friday the 13th, Die Hard and Terminator 2: Judgement Day. He even wrote lots of his own narration, including for David Lynch’s Elephant Man, which LaFontaine considered his proudest achievement.
The Busiest Actor in Hollywood
LaFontaine maintained a grueling schedule for decades, recording up to 35 sessions a day. Based on sheer volume of contracts, he was the busiest actor in the history of the Screen Actors Guild. Somehow, he managed to maintain a novice’s passion for his craft. “Words speak to me, scripts speak to me. I’ve always been enchanted with the language,” Don said of his work, which he sometimes described as acting for the blind. “You’re having to create an aural sound picture for people’s imaginations.”
Famously, LaFontaine zipped around Hollywood in the back of a white stretch Lincoln Towncar with the vanity plate “DLF,” equipped with a car phone and fax machine, which would constantly spit out scripts. Despite being known as the “King of Coming Attractions” and the “Voice of God,” LaFontaine remained modest and generous, mentoring young voiceover actors and supporting charities.
Beyond movie trailers, LaFontaine lent his “thunder throat” to television promos for The Simpsons, Entertainment Tonight, and The Insider, as well as commercials for Budweiser, Ford, Coca-Cola and more. In 2006, he appeared in a Geico commercial, poking fun at his own ubiquity.
End of an Era
On Friday, August 22nd, 2008, LaFontaine was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles with a pulmonary embolism. Ten days later, the Voice of God was gone. He was 67 years old.
Gone, too, were the glory days of the movie announcer. Trends were shifting away from original movies and toward the “IP” era of Harry Potter and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where audiences already knew the characters, and didn’t need additional explanations - just flurries of enticing spectacle and earsplitting BWAAAs and BWOWWs. While some modern trailers draw inspiration from the auteur experiments of Hitchcock and Kubrick to good effect, many give away too much. With the rise of social media, theatrical trailers became merely one part of a sprawling multimedia marketing strategy. And now, with AI-generated voices, the future of human voiceover actors is uncertain.
Don LaFontaine not only changed the sound of movie trailers, he revolutionized the way movies were sold. “He gave [them] urgency, importance, intelligence and a point of view,” voice artist George DelHoyo said. He made them feel monumental.
Today’s trailers are louder, but they aren’t always “bigger.” And while technology marches forward, no amount of sound and fury may ever replicate the gravitas of a single, unmistakable human voice in the dark, bellowing - “In a world…”
And now, today’s Underexposed Movie Pick:
World on a Wire (1973)
(1973 ‧ Sci-fi, Mystery). Before The Matrix or Westworld, there was World on a Wire, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s prescient and brain-bending foray into science fiction. Originally a two-part German TV miniseries, this shaggy noir follows Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), a cybernetics engineer who takes over a cutting-edge simulation project, only to uncover a conspiracy that shatters his perception of reality.
Fassbinder’s standard mix of paranoia, mirrors, and meticulously framed decadence is in full splendor here, brought to life with his signature efficiency - he filmed it in just 44 days. Many of the set pieces, featuring unnerving mannequins and corporate sterility, wouldn’t be out of place in a Kubrick or Gilliam flick, or on Severance. World on a Wire was long unavailable outside Germany, existing mostly as a cult curio until its 2010 restoration and rerelease, when I finally saw it. As Fassbinder’s only sci-fi movie, World on a Wire remains a fascinating detour - one that feels eerily prophetic.
Where to Watch World on a Wire
Available on special edition disc through Criterion.
News Reel
This week, I wrote an article for LitHub about Paul Schrader’s auteur-to-edgelord trajectory, Cinema May Be Dying, But Shitposting is a Thriving New Artform: “Over the past few years, the chronicler of broken men and urban despair has been mastering the forme d’art of our broken, despairing times: trolling.”
Filmmaker Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), who was our first guest interview here on Underexposed, has sold the majority stake of his production company Jigsaw Productions to the philanthropist Wendy Schmidt. “Documentary companies like Jigsaw rely on studios and streaming services to distribute their content. Such partners have cut back — especially on social justice topics — in the face of continuing weakness at the box office, higher labor costs and increased profit pressure from Wall Street.”
In our world of tech mega-platforms, bankers, not filmmakers, are deciding which movies get made. In a new research report, management consulting firm Bain & Co. shares its creative guidance: “Own the consumer, own the intellectual property (IP), or own nothing.”
In brighter news, here’s a happy story about a little indie that could: After debuting at Sundance just ahead of the pandemic, it seemed Adam Carter Rehmeier’s punk comedy Dinner in America would never get the release it deserved. Just this past week, it enjoyed sold-out screenings at the Music Box in Chicago, with 1400 tickets sold.
Underexposed turns SIX MONTHS OLD this week! Huge thanks to all of you for celebrating woefully under-appreciated films with me every Friday. An extra special shoutout to my incredible paid subscribers - your generous support keeps Underexposed entirely reader-funded and ad-free. If you’d like to help sustain this project and unlock exclusive bonus material, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Beyond the paywall, we have two bonus features - Cinematic Foreplay: Five Teasers That Hooked Us Hard and Club Silencio: Rare David Lynch Ephemera.
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