Hal Douglas and the Dying Craft of the Trailer Voice-Over

The idea that voice-over artists have no identity beyond the syllables they utter took a hit last year when Don LaFontaine died. LaFontaine, affectionately known in the business as "Thunder Throat", actually had a memorable face to go with his voice. His round, bald head with its prominent eyebrows shading heavy lids entered the eye with the immediate impact of a cartoon drawn with a few bold strokes, and in his last years he developed a side career parodying himself in TV commercials and other appearances. Writing in The New York Times, Stephen Heyman notes that LaFontaine "had an almost absolute monopoly on network television promotional spots" and that "his distinctive face and noise-canceling baritone made him the embodiment of a business whose stars were all previously unseen." Who is the new face of the unseen? One contender is the 84-year-old uber-professional Hal Douglas, although Douglas, who in the course of six decades in the business has cut trailers for such films as Philadelphia, Men in Black, and Forrest Gump and "served as the voice of the WB network", has a wryer style and is the last person in the world to suggest any comparison between his work and that of his late colleague. Jeff Keels, who is working on a documentary about voice artists, says, "Hal was the only guy that in some way, shape or form could be mentioned in the same breath as Don. But there's a difference between Don and Hal. When Don said, 'In a world ...,' it sounded like a spot. It grabbed you. But when Hal says it, it transports you."

Douglas's path to what Heyman calls "the apex of a group of 15 to 20 voice actors whom Hollywood has deemed trailer-worthy" began when, after serving in the Navy during World War II, he enrolled at the University of Miami on the G.I. Bill and, he says, "chased pretty girls into the drama department." He now regards himself as a craftsman who takes pride in being one of the more prominent workers in his field: "The fact is, my voice has been out there. And it hangs out there. You sit down in the theater and sometimes in three out of four trailers I'd be on them." It hangs there in defiance of those who think that Douglas's way of doing it, and even what he does, is old hat. Another trailer artist, Bill Ratner says, "When you look at the demo that typically goes to the cinema, the 18-to-24 male crowd, they're always going to get a booming, unsubtle voice to say, 'Go and see Transformers immediately, or die!' These days the classiest fall releases often don't use an announcer at all." "There's nobody as old as Hal and me," says Don Morrow, an 82-year-old who voiced the trailer for Titanic. "I'm sure that you've heard more than one story about guys that retire. They die.