Don LaFontaine: He Talks a Good Trailer

Don LaFontaine goes to work each morning in style. The most sought-after narrator for movie trailers--he’s known in the business as The Trailer King--LaFontaine travels from job to job in a chauffeured limousine. How fast does he work? Look at this way: His limo driver keeps the motor running.

“The limo is just more convenient and anyway, it’s a write-off,” says the 50-year-old veteran narrator, whose deep, smoky voice is the aural equivalent of a juicy sirloin steak. “I do promos for all four networks, mostly at Fox, plus the movie trailers, so I keep pretty busy.”

LaFontaine’s credits are impressive. His voice has adorned trailers for “Home Alone,” “Ghost,” “Dick Tracy,” “Batman” as well as the “Rambo,” “Die Hard,” “Indiana Jones” and “Terminator” series.

You might call his booming baritone a lethal weapon. “I can whisper and my voice will cut through anything, from explosives to fires,” he says. “You can always hear me.”

As the top narrator in the business, LaFontaine says he earns well over $1 million a year. LaFontaine doesn’t see himself as an announcer but as a voice actor, whose vocal timbre can lend a sense of comedy, horror or drama to a film.

“If you want to scare somebody, contrary to popular opinion, you don’t make your voice hard and try to intimidate people,” he says. “When I’m doing a horror film, I make my voice go soft and slow and insidious, with a touch of menace, as if I was on the side of the evil characters.”

LaFontaine got his start writing, editing and producing radio and TV trailers. He even served a three-year stint, beginning in 1978, as vice president of advertising at Paramount Pictures. So he realizes his voice is simply part of the sales machinery.

“You should never be intrusive. My job is to be informative. You want to create enough excitement and energy so that the picture will make it on opening weekend. If the movie is good, it’ll take over from there.”

There are several other top trailer voices, including Chuck Riley, Gene McGarr, Brian Cummin, Al Chalk and Percy Rodriquez. But LaFontaine is on the top of most lists. “The Hard Way,” a recent comedy which featured Michael J. Fox as an actor studying to play a tough cop movie role, opened with a movie trailer spoofing the “Indiana Jones” series.

Guess who narrated the parody trailer? “Yeah, that was me,” says LaFontaine. “It made sense--I did the real ‘Indiana Jones’ trailers too.”

He laughs. “I charged them the regular rate I get for doing a real trailer. Except this time I’m actually in the movie, so I’ll get residuals too!”