Reel News is sad to report the death earlier this week of Don LaFontaine, the man who popularized the now loved-catch phrase, “in a world where ...” and lent his voice to thousands of movie previews. He was 68.
LaFontaine died on Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles from complications in the treatment of an ongoing illness, said Vanessa Gilbert, his agent. He made more than 5,000 previews, called trailers, in his 33-year career while working for the top studios and television networks.
In an interview last year, LaFontaine explained the strategy behind the phrase.
“We have to very rapidly establish the world we are transporting them to,” he said of his viewers. “That’s very easily done by saying, ‘In a world where ... violence rules …’ ‘In a world where men are slaves and women are the conquerors …’ You very rapidly set the scene.” LaFontaine insisted he never cared that no one knew his name or his face, though everyone knew his voice.
LaFontaine went to work in the promo industry in the early 1960s. As an audio engineer, he produced radio spots for movies with producer Floyd Peterson.
When an announcer didn’t show up for a recording session in 1965, LaFontaine voiced his first narration, a promo for the film, Gunfighters of Casa Grande. The client, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, liked his performance.
LaFontaine remained active until recently, averaging seven to 10 voiceover sessions a day. He worked from a home studio his wife nicknamed “The Hole,” where his fax machine delivered scripts.
The 33rd Toronto International Film Festival opened yesterday, departing from the earnest films of yesteryears about war in Iraq, terrorism and US politics, to promote a bit of laughter.
“Curiously, we’ve moved away from Iraq and what we’ve seen in American cinema (of late) is a rediscovery of comedies,” festival director Piers Handling said.
The Toronto film festival had seemed fixated in its last three years on war and US President George W. Bush, showcasing a plethora of documentaries, feature films and shorts on these and related subjects.
It had become a reservoir for a flood of filmmakers disenchanted with American foreign policies.
“We could say we are (still) living in quite difficult times with wars and economic problems, but I think filmmakers understand that audiences just need a break sometimes from that,” said festival chief Cameron Bailey.
The festival features a dozen environmental films on “the planet and how we take care of it,” Bailey said, such as the condemnation of Japanese whalers in At the Edge of the World, and Upstream Battle about Native Americans’ struggle for their traditional fishing rights.
It also features nearly 30 comedies, including Zack and Miri Make a Porno starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks, Anne Fontaine’s La Fille de Monaco, and the Coen brothers’ dark comedy Burn After Reading.
Actors Ben Kingsley, George Clooney, Peter O’Toole and more star power than ever before are expected to be on hand, with one exception —Tea Leoni has cancelled appearances to promote her film Ghost Town since her husband David Duchovny checked himself into a clinic for sex addicts last week.
In Venice, Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme jolted film critics on Wednesday with a stirring new family drama that tightens the race for the festival’s Golden Lion prize.
His emotion-packed Rachel Getting Married stars Anne Hathaway as a recovering drug addict who shakes up her sister’s wedding with an overdose of honesty about their dysfunctional family.
With the action packed into a wedding weekend at a sprawling family home, the film, which also stars Debra Winger as the sisters’ mother, intentionally has the feel of a home video.
“My documentary work really came into play in a big way,” Demme said.
The idea was “to make it feel as much as possible like a home movie ... (with) the implication of truth, (to) enhance the sense of involvement for the viewer,” said Demme, who won an Oscar for Silence of the Lambs in 1991.
Asked about the multi-cultural aspect of the film — Rachel (Rosemary Dewitt) is white, Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe) is black, and the bride and bridesmaids wear saris — Demme said it reflected “the America that I feel very deeply connected to.”
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