Is your voice so husky, growling and croaky that it borders on the emphysemic? It is? Great – Hollywood’s got an opening for you.
That’s because Don LaFontaine has died. You know Don LaFontaine – he’s the man who has done the voiceover for every single movie trailer in the history of time. The man with the voice so intimidatingly authoritative that if he slipped the phrase ‘now take off your trousers’ into a trailer, cinemas everywhere would end up full of shivering confused people in their knickers. Yeah, him. He’s dead.
It’s being reported that Don LaFontaine died of complications arising from pneumonia, but let’s hope he hasn’t gone to heaven. Chances are his voice would have made God’s sound weedy and effeminate in comparison, and we hear that God gets really quite vengeful when he thinks someone’s got a bigger willy than him.
Don LaFontaine was born with a voice that was always going to lead him down one of two career paths – voiceover artist or devil-worshipping serial killer. Fortunately he ended up choosing the former, and the rest was history.
Blessed with a voice that made it sound like he’d been chainsmoking vinegar-flavoured crack through a cactus made of sandpaper since he was three, Don LaFontane provided the voiceovers for approximately 5,000 movies – including Terminator 2 and Fatal Attraction – and more than 350,000 adverts. He was so in demand that he even had a limo and a full-time driver to ferry him around the 60-plus voiceovers he recorded each day, the flash git.
He was also the man who made Meet The Robinsons sound exciting enough for us to actually pay to see it, which makes him a bit of a bastard, but let’s not go into that now.
Because Don LaFontane is dead. The Hollywood Reporter reports:
Don LaFontaine, the undisputed viceroy of voiceovers, died Monday of complications from the treatment of an ongoing lung-related illness. He was 68… SAG president Alan Rosenberg: “Don was a phenomenal actor and a prodigious and amazing voice talent who could, like the best voice artists, make any material uniquely his own. His contributions on and off ‘mike’ enriched the profession and the guild. He will be greatly missed by all of us.”
While quite sad in its own right, Don LaFontaine’s death is also going to have an immense effect on the world of movie trailers. Without his trademark melodramatic growl around, chances are that Hollywood’s going to start making trailers with vague high-pitched voiceovers.
Would you go and see a Steven Segal film if Mark Owen did the talking in the trailers? Of course you bloody wouldn’t. In fact, we’re pretty sure that Don LaFontaine’s death has killed the trailer industry, and therefore the movie industry, and therefore all culture, forever. Thanks a lot Don, you selfish mortal sod.
magnetite says
Ooo, give the job to Andy Dick. I never go to the pictures anyway. You’d know that your film was a draw if people still came to see it even with Dick’s squeak over the trailer. Bags I the earplug concession stall.