This is big, reaaally big — not because it showed that LaFontaine’s trademark movie-trailer catchphrase, as in “In a world where ... violence rules” or “In a world where ... men are slaves and women are the conquerors,” is so universally known.

LaFontaine has worked in Hollywood for decades, reached the top of his craft, earned plenty and won accolades. And yet, as he might say himself: In a world where exposure is everything, putting a face to the voice behind 5,000 movie trailers can give a guy a whole new perspective.

Suddenly this fixture of show business — one of its hardest-working, albeit obscure, artists — became something else: a kind of celebrity. Visibility brought newfound admiration to a behind-the-scenes star and his rather invisible industry.

Truth be told, there was one guy, behind the counter at a book store in Chapel Hill, N.C., who discerned LaFontaine’s locution as that from the “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” television promos.

But even the Geico advertising folks didn’t have a clue who he was when they were brainstorming “The Testimonial Campaign,” a series of spots featuring real customers and B-listers such as Little Richard and Charo.

“Somebody blurts out, ‘Hey, what about that movie announcer guy?’ The other one goes, ‘Well, what’s his name? What does he look like? Who is that guy?’ That’s how it all started,” explains Dean Jarrett of The Martin Agency.

Recognition, in all forms, just isn’t a part of the voice-over world, where an artist’s “stage” is an isolated sound booth and performers are known more for their voice-over pseudonyms than their given names. There’s “The Voice of Porky Pig” (Bob Bergen), “The Voice of Zatarain’s” Cajun foods (Rodney Saulsberry), “The Voice of Food Network” (Joe Cipriano) and so on.

There are no Oscars for voice-over work. An annual fest dubbed the “Golden Trailer Awards” does honor the movie preview medium, including a category for “Best Voice Over.” Still, film actors who lend their voices to trailers tend to take home the prize (a hefty trophy topped with a miniature trailer, as in Winnebago) rather than voice-over professionals like LaFontaine.

“You sort of take it for granted, those voices,” says LaFontaine’s wife, Nita, whose own response after learning years ago what her husband-to-be did for a living went something like: I never thought of people doing that.

LaFontaine insists he never cared that no one knew him, though everyone knew his voice. Voice-over artists “get credit in our bank accounts,” he quips.

At 66 years old, LaFontaine still averages seven to 10 voice-over sessions a day, with the potential for up to 40 different reads. He does all of this from a home studio his wife nicknamed “The Hole,” where an incessantly chirping fax machine delivers scripts hour after hour.

One recent afternoon, LaFontaine cranked out three takes for this summer’s “The Simpsons Movie,” four promo reads for the Fox comedy “The Winner,” followed by promos for “Trading Spouses” (“Will the conclusion of the same-sex swap turn violent?”), “Nanny 911” (“The amazing triplet tamer.”), “24” (“The race to stop a nuclear nightmare blows wide open!”) and more.

In the heydays of the 1980s and ‘90s, when LaFontaine might do 200 reads a day, he got his own limousine and hired a driver to shuttle him between studios.

The voice America has come to know in movie houses and on television developed at the tender age of 13, when LaFontaine’s prepubescent squeak went to bass and continued to grow deeper with time.

After working as an Army recording engineer, LaFontaine landed a gig at National Recording Studios in New York alongside radio producer Floyd Peterson. It was the early ‘60s, and Peterson was working on a new project: producing radio spots for movies, which until then had been advertised in print or with studio-made theatrical trailers.

LaFontaine pitched in, writing copy, recording, and mixing sound, and the two eventually went into business together — helping develop the format for the modern-day trailer and scripting some of those punchy phrases that pervade theatrical trailers to this day.

Lending his own voice to the words he wrote happened by accident. In 1964, when an announcer failed to show for a job, LaFontaine recorded himself reading copy and sent it to the studio with a message: “This is what it’ll sound like when we get a ‘real’ announcer.” The studio thought he was “real” enough, and thus “Gunfighters of Casa Grande” became LaFontaine’s first trailer.

His career took off when he moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1981. He’d planned on working as an independent producer, but he started doing promos for the major television networks, and the work — TV work, then movie work — just never stopped coming.

“The voice that launched a thousand movies ... thousands of movies, actually,” began a video tribute at The Hollywood Reporter’s Key Art Awards, where LaFontaine was presented a lifetime achievement award in 2005.

But even the greatest get sidelined, and LaFontaine notes that the bulk of trailer work these days is spread among other voice-over talent or done by actors actually featured in the films. Producers “want to discover the next hot voice,” LaFontaine says.

That hardly seems to matter now, because since last year’s premiere of his on-camera commercial, his face — not just his voice — is everywhere.

The Screen Actors Guild, at its January awards show, saluted LaFontaine and other voice-over artists in a tribute called “Heard But Not Seen” — where they were, actually, seen.

And LaFontaine suspects his budding celebrity had something to do with being asked, for the first time, to serve as an announcer at this year’s Academy Awards. He was the “Coming up next” guy, and the show included a brief on-screen glimpse.

His belated fame isn’t really about fame at all, LaFontaine says. It’s about finally knowing that folks like your work and appreciate you, because they finally know who “you” are.

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