Thomas Sutcliffe: The voiceover that was the main feature

We learnt this week of the death of the man rumoured to be the Screen Actors Guild's busiest member – a performer very few people will ever have seen on screen but who a staggering number of people around the globe will have heard and – what's more – be able to imitate.

Most of those impersonations of Don LaFontaine wouldn't be terribly good, but they would probably convey the essence of his enormously successful career, which was the knowing deployment of sonorous bombast. Mr LaFontaine was, to all intents and purposes, the voice of the American film industry when it was trying to sell you a ticket, a voice of gravelly urgency that eventually became a short-hand for the idea of a movie trailer itself. Indeed, his domination of the industry was such that even his rivals were obliged to adopt the same basso-profundo rumble on the rare occasions that they were called to the microphone instead of him.

Judging from his media interviews LaFontaine was a rather charming man with a dry sense of humour, a quality he deployed in television commercials that played on his invisible celebrity (if you see what I mean) but very wisely kept out of his work for the studios. If you want to know what his extraordinary career tells you about Hollywood I think you would have to begin with that calculated solemnity. One quality LaFontaine's voice had in spades was gravitas. Artificial gravitas, maybe, but beggars can't be choosers. The deep, Dolby-boosted, rumble of his vocal cords made it sound as though God himself was suggesting that it would be a good idea for you to go and see Waterworld, or Friday the 13th or some other popcorn classic. And executives – dimly aware that much of what they produce is featherweight and insubstantial – were drawn to a voice that implied otherwise.

The larger lesson, though, lies in the success with which LaFontaine made his own personal timbre into an industry standard. He fell into the business, after an actor failed to turn up to read the trail for Gunfighters of Casa Grande, and Don, a recording engineer at the time, filled in for him. But, however successful that result was, is it really conceivable that LaFontaine's eventual position was down to merit and nothing else? Or does it reveal just how parochial and imitative and cautious Hollywood is? There must be countless ways of producing an effective trailer, but why risk innovation when there is an established model? The more that people used LaFontaine the deeper the rut became – so that innovation would require ever-increasing boldness. In Hollywood pretty much everybody knew Don, and pretty much everybody used him. The result was a genuinely startling homogeneity of style. The sound of his voice implied global scope and millennial range. The fact that you heard it so often revealed that all this came from a village, and an inward-looking one at that.

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