Thunder Throats sold Movies

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The lost art of the movie trailer voice-over
As Lake Bell's new film, In A World, dives into the sub-genre of the movie trailer, Horatia Harrod explores the bizarre history of this much mocked art form.
By Horatia Harrod
The Telegraph
7:00AM BST 13 Sep 2013

In the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, there was only one voice that Hollywood trusted to sell their films. They called him “Thunder Throat”, or “the king”, and his sonorous, undulating bass had a talismanic significance for film producers: if you wanted your trailer to be a hit, you’d better hire Don LaFontaine for the voice-over.

In his prime, LaFontaine would glide from studio to studio, recording up to 35 spots a day; his chauffeur kept the engine running between sessions – you could squeeze in a couple of extra spots if you didn’t bother to find a parking space. The car was a white stretch Lincoln Town Car bearing the monogram “DLF”, anointed with a coronet. It was equipped with a wildly expensive ship-to-shore phone and a fax machine that whirred out scripts en route to each recording. “I’m just a generic VOG,” LaFontaine used to say: just your regular, old Voice of God.

Film trailers are big business. The unveiling of a new trailer has become an event in itself, so much so that it’s often preceded by a teaser, a 30-second squib that trails the trailer. There is even a special awards show for the art form: this year brought the 14th annual Golden Trailer Awards, whose categories included the Don LaFontaine award for best voice-over.

LaFontaine died in September 2008, at the age of 68. Six months later, actress Lake Bell started writing a script that would become the film In a World…, which opened in Britain today. The title is an homage to the classic opening line of many trailers – a line that LaFontaine invented and popularised – and the film concerns the battle between a father and his daughter to become the trailer voice for a new blockbuster, “The Amazon Games”. Bell, who also directed the film, plays an underachieving vocal coach, Carol, and Fred Melamed – who was for 20 years one of the leading commercial voice-over artists in the United States – is her vain father, Sam Sotto, a wannabe LaFontaine.

If the world of voice-over is small and highly competitive – when Bell first came to Los Angeles, she found there was one woman who did almost all the car advertisements, and another who had tampon advertisements sewn up – the world of trailer voice-over is freakishly tiny and feverish. And it’s almost exclusively a man’s game. As Sotto tells his daughter in the film: “The industry does not crave a female sound.”

Trailers have been around for as long as films have. The earliest trailers date from the silent era, and were simply a succession of inter-titles. With the arrival of the talkies came the founding fathers of the trailer voice: men such as Art Gilmore, a stickler for proper enunciation, who brought a dictionary to all his recordings. His commanding, fatherly, all-American voice featured on some 3,000 trailers, classics of every genre, among them Vertigo, It’s a Wonderful Life, Dumbo, South Pacific and Ocean’s 11. The word tells you how to say it, he would explain. Exciting words should be spoken excitedly; downbeat ones with a lower tone. “It’s a pretty sweet gig,” says Dean Panaro, a voice-over agent whose clients include Melamed.

From the Twenties to the late Fifties, a company called the National Screen Service had a virtual monopoly on the production of trailers. LaFontaine helped to break its stranglehold by getting into independent trailer production in the Sixties, and then established a monopoly of his own when he stepped in front of the mic. The first trailer he did was for Gunfighters of Casa Grande in 1964, purely out of necessity – the man he’d hired to do the voice-over didn’t show up.

It was a happy accident, but in some ways a surprising one, as LaFontaine had had a big voice since he was a teenager. “I was a boy soprano until I was 13,” he once said. “I was about 4ft 9in. I had four little lulu curls across my forehead. And all of a sudden, I opened my mouth and Orson Welles fell out.”

Only once has a woman been the voice of a major film trailer: in 2000, Melissa Disney gave a purring “Hello boys” read for the trailer for Gone in 60 Seconds. Since then – silence. “I think what movie marketers are trying to do is to give you a familiar voice,” says Monica Brady, co-founder of the Golden Trailer Awards. “It’s all about associations with things you’ve liked in the past, about auditory recall. Perhaps they think throwing a female voice in there confuses people.”

The biggest voice-over stars – and Panaro suggests there are only eight to 10 men who get all the big jobs – have home studios. With the advent of high-quality digital communications, they really do phone in their lines. Many of the top people carry portable equipment. Among them is Christopher Kent, one of the rare English voices in the business, whose credits include The King’s Speech and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. “I was recently in a hotel room in LA,” he tells me, “and I set myself up with an ironing board and a duvet over my head and a microphone, and that’s how I recorded some quite major stuff.”

LaFontaine used to say he kept his voice in shape by not smoking, drinking a nip of brandy every evening, and not shouting at his children. He was part of the professionalisation of the industry. Panaro remembers an earlier time, when voice-over guys might roll in drunk, surly and late – a condition known as “announcer’s disease”. As the money got more serious – LaFontaine became a millionaire, and today’s most successful voice-over artists regularly earn six or seven figures a year – so did the business. “You’ve gotta be good,” says Panaro. “There’s just too much competition out there.” Kent tries to avoid dairy products, because they produce mucus; others avoid gluten, which is thought to close up the throat.

Since LaFontaine’s death, voice-over has been on the wane. “Now when you go to the movies, 80 per cent of the trailers don’t have a narrator,” says Panaro. “It’s a horrible trend, which I hate.” Trailers are cut with music or dialogue from the film instead. Those portentous lines that LaFontaine invented – “In a world…”, “In a time…”, “There was a man…” – now have the stink of parody. Jerry Seinfeld’s trailer for Comedian, which showed voice-over artist Hal Douglas reading all the clichéd lines in succession, may have been the final nail in the coffin.

In the latter years of his life, LaFontaine’s profile grew; he broke through the fourth wall with a car insurance commercial in 2006, and suddenly a line of work that had been strictly behind the scenes had a face. In that regard, he was exceptional. “I always compare voice-over work to the Gobelins tapestry weavers,” says Kent. “They never came out from behind the tapestry. As a voice-over talent, you’ve got to understand that that is your place.”

In a World… (15 cert) is now on general release