It's That Announcer Guy From the Movies

April 13, 2007 — -- Don LaFontaine is a Hollywood icon. But before last August, few people had any idea who he was -- until he opened his mouth. LaFontaine is the voice or, as Geico labeled him in a recent commercial, "that announcer guy from the movies."

He is the veritable Babe Ruth of movie trailers with just as many nicknames: "the King of Movie Trailers," "Mr. Voice," "Thunder Throat," "the Voice of God.

"I'm called the trailer guy, the voice of the movies because I've done so many of them over a long long period of time," LaFontaine said in an interview with ABC News.

With a thunder-throat like his, you'd think that LaFontaine would get recognized everywhere he goes -- the dry cleaner's, the super market, certainly at the movie theater -- but not so, he said.

"People don't recognize my voice at all really.  My conversational voice is the same voice that I use when I'm working, but when I'm working it's more, it's a bigger, a little more over-the-top kind of voice that, if you used it in normal conversation, you would have people calling security."

So, for most of his career, LaFontaine lived in relative anonymity. Then Geico Insurance Co. began running ads featuring LaFontaine and a "real" Geico customer. Seemingly overnight, LaFontaine went from faceless voice to a YouTube celebrity.

"The Geico ad changed my life. It was amazing what happened," he said. "The public isn't necessarily unfamiliar with me, but this Geico spot just exploded to the point where now I am recognized virtually everywhere I go. And it's a little disconcerting, because I've been anonymous for over 40 years doing this, and now I've got people watching me to see how I eat. It's a little weird."

When LaFontaine began his career in the early 1960s, movie trailers were nonexistent. "Up until the early '60s, believe it or not, the primary advertising vehicle for motion pictures was the theatrical trailer, the previews, the coming attractions or the print ads. They did very little or no advertising on radio or television, so this was a brand new idea," he said.

So, LaFontaine and his partner, Floyd Peterson, wrote their way into motion picture and pop culture history with the familiar Geico intro, "In a world where … "

"We realized very early on that what the trailer does, essentially, is take the audience, which is sitting in the theater, and transports them to a different time, a different place, a different situation in which something is going to happen," he said.  "We felt it was necessary to set up the time, place, situation so they knew where they were, so they could locate themselves before we told them what happened.  So we would say, 'In a world where' … and we would tell them where it was or what was happening."

Initially, a recording engineer at New York's National Recording Studios, the voice that launched thousands of films almost wasn't. "I started voicing [trailers] by accident more or less," said LaFontaine.

One day, while working on a deadline for a movie, an announcer he had hired failed to show, so he stepped up to the microphone and recorded the trailer for his first film, the 1964 blockbuster, "Gunfighters of Casa Grande."

"Since I had written [the spot], I knew how I wanted it to sound. So I went in and did it myself, and put together what we call a scratch mix, sort of a demo. [The producers] said, 'No, this is fine. We'll use you,' and that's where it started."

For the next few years, LaFontaine said he did "a word here, a sentence there, a complete spot," and before he knew it, "I had about 1,000 films under my belt." In the decades since, LaFontaine has only added to that number, amassing an eye-popping 5,000 films, including "Fatal Attraction," "Cast Away," "The Godfather" and, his personal favorite, "Elephant Man," among about 35,000 narrations.

Nowadays, LaFontaine, who works from his home in Los Angeles, averages between seven and 10 jobs a day but has recorded as many as 35 in a single 24-hour period.

"My wife calls my studio, which is in the basement, she calls it the hole -- which she insists I go into and disappear into, much like the rabbit in 'Alice in Wonderland,' and never come out of until the end of the day, which is basically true. I treat it like a nine-to-five job more or less," explained LaFontaine.

It is this professionalism, this dedication to his craft, which has led to the respect and praise of his colleagues. "Within the industry, he's known as the Man, the Michael Jordan of his game," said friend and colleague Paul Pape.

According to LaFontaine, an effective voice-over has less to do with tenor of the voice, than the passion and emotion evoked by the reader. "It's not the quality of the voice that counts or really matters," he said. "It's the quality of the read. It's nice to have a thunder-throat like I do, but some of the most successful people in the business don't. What you have to have to be successful is veracity? You have to have some sort of affinity for the words, some feeling for it, some passion for it and that's where the veracity comes in."

But there's more to it than just a good read. LaFontaine describes his voice-over work much like an artist would talk about a painting or a sculpture. "You are painting oral, a sound picture with your voice," he said. "It's like reading to a child. A child could be lying in bed with their eyes closed listening to the story, and they are painting the pictures in their mind based upon what you are saying to them.  It's really as simple as that."