The voice in the dark is Scott Rummell

Scott Rummell has a nice speaking voice. It's warm, friendly, clear; pleasant though not particularly striking. But it's Rummell's other voice, rather, his paid, professional voice, the one he turns on when he's positioned inches from a microphone, that has earned him work on "Angels & Demons," "Terminator Salvation," "American Idol" and "Oprah" and the reputation as one of the country's top voice-over artists.

"The guys that do the movie trailers, the perception is there's one guy or two or three, but there's probably 15 of us that work every day," said Rummell, 48.

The late Don LaFontaine was probably the best-known voice in movie trailers. Stentorian and authoritative, his "voice of God" was used to promote more than 5,000 movies over a 40-year career until his death last September. It was LaFontaine's voice moviegoers had come to expect when the lights went down and the "Coming Attractions" rolled.

But it wasn't always LaFontaine that the audiences were hearing. Often it was Ashton Smith or Ben Patrick Johnson or Rummell -- lesser-known but versatile talents who can mimic the so-called "trailer sound" LaFontaine pioneered -- skilled voice-over artists who know how to hold audience attention without overshadowing the power of the words that they are speaking.

"The nature of a voice-over is you should not be conscious of it," said Patrick Starr, vice president of creative advertising for Fox Searchlight. "You don't want to be aware of it, but it's the same person who's telling you the story. It's very difficult to command a presence but be in the background. Voice-over is really hard to do."

A day with Rummell proves Starr's point. He records dozens of promos daily, often just moments after he's received the scripts for them on a fax machine that's constantly whirring with copy. In a single hour on a recent Tuesday at his paper-cluttered home studio, he recorded spots for the TV shows "Lie to Me," "American Idol," "Prison Break" and "Dollhouse," as well as for the upcoming movies "Rango" and "Orphan."

"Tell me about 'Orphan,' " Rummell asked the producer for the trailer, who was on the other end of the digital phone line that connected Rummel's in-home studio to the movie trailer production house.

"It's kind of how it sounds," said the disembodied voice. "A family adopts this girl and weird stuff starts to happen. Like she starts killing people."