Don LaFontaine dead at 68

News with far-reaching consequences:

Don LaFontaine has died.

If you’re reading this post, and even if you’re not, I can virtually guarantee that you’ve experienced Don’s work at some point in your life even if you’re not familiar with him by name.  He achieved a supremacy in his field that is arguably unequalled in the annals of art, and his passing has a significance somewhat beyond the already considerable matter of a man having died.

Don LaFontaine was Trailer Voice Guy.  He provided the instantly familiar voiceovers to movie trailers.  Which movie trailers, you ask?  All of them, basically.  Thousands.  Sure, he’s provided voiceover work for all sorts of things besides movie trailers, but the trailers are where you know him from.  His was The Voice, and the words that voice spoke were often contrived and overwrought, but they were an integral part of the modern western movie-going experience.  The whole landscape of how we’re first introduced to upcoming movies has changed forever.  This is not a small matter.

One of two things could happen, here.  On the one hand, the strange cult of celebrity that rose up around Don LaFontaine could lead to some manner of contest or search to produce a replacement with a similar voice.  This is a pretty likely state of affairs, and I don’t entirely support it.  The alternative (on the other hand) – and almost a necessity given that, even if someone with a similar voice could be found, there’s no guarantee that they would be able to keep up with Don’s enormous output – is something of a schism, broadly defined, whereby we enter once more into a time in which the voiceover work for movie trailers is provided by all sorts of different people.  Studios can experiment to see what works; higher voices, faster voices, voices with stranger intonations and diction.  Maybe there’s even an ideal female voice type out there just waiting to tell us what’s what.  I wouldn’t be surprised.  Now is the time to find out.

You will be missed, Don, and it is perhaps a tribute to your art that many who will miss you will do so without ever having heard of you.