Meet Don LaFontaine, the most famous voice in Hollywood

In the history of cinema, there may be no one as ubiquitous, and yet as anonymous, as Don LaFontaine. More commonly known as "the trailer guy," he's the owner of the omnipresent voice featured in seemingly every film preview in the last 40 years, the man whose rich baritone has made "in a world..." part of the pop culture lexicon.

"From 1964 until now, I've been involved in about 5,000 [movie] trailers and have voiced about 3,500 of them"Having recently starred in a Geico commercial, where he dramatizes the tale of an everyday insurance customer, LaFontaine has finally come out from behind the mic, and in the process has added to his particular brand of celebrity. Radar caught up with the King of the Voice-over to ask what it's like, after all these years, to finally get noticed.

RADAR: Why did you decide to do the Geico commercial?
DON LaFONTAINE: It sounded like a fun afternoon. I had no idea it would have the impact on my career that it's had, because now people recognize me. It's a little unnerving, because it's not something I'm used to. But I didn't plan it that way.

Was there any concern that seeing what you actually look like could remove the mysterious quality that makes your voice so powerful?
That just recently occurred to me. I didn't think about it at the time. I got so used to meeting people over the years and their finding out who I was and saying, "Oh, you're that guy. I pictured you differently. I thought you were 6'5"."

You're not just a voice-over guy—you actually played a role in creating the modern trailer format, didn't you?
Yeah. I was lucky enough to be in on the ground floor [on the production end] when the business was just starting out, in the early '60s. That was when the studios began to go outside their own advertising departments to independent contractors and see what kind of advertising they could come up with. It started with radio spots, then television spots, then to the trailer side of things. So we had the opportunity, four or five of us, to be there when the whole thing started. Out of necessity, we sort of invented all these phrases.

What are some of the phrases that started with you?
I don't know if we were the first to say "in a world," or "in a time," or "in a place," or "in a year" or whatever, but we certainly made them popular by using them in the context of trailers. "In a world" is the one everybody uses as sort of a joke, but if you go to the theater and see it on the screen, no one laughs, because you're preconditioned to hear it.

How many times in your career have you said, "in a world...?"
Thousands. Thousands. There's no question.

And yet it always works.
Yes, because it's always in a slightly different context. There are only seven basic stories—every story falls within one of seven specific frameworks. So I've been doing that for 43 years, telling seven stories over and over and over again, but they're all slightly different and have to be treated that way. I approach each script as if it were the first time I was ever doing something like this.