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The American Cinematheque, L.A.'s Year-Round Film Festival, Celebrates 40 Years of Movies
The American Cinematheque, L.A.'s Year-Round Film Festival, Celebrates 40 Years of Movies originally appeared on L.A. Mag.
Film festivals have been bumming around Los Angeles since the dawn of the movie industry. The 1923 Motion Picture Exposition brought movie stars, wrestlers and stuntmen to an empty field near the Coliseum to drum up interest in silent movies. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unspooled the 1916 film Intolerance for the public in 1940. During World War II, the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax began showing vintage films year-round. More comprehensive programming started when LACMA came to Wilshire Boulevard — and when student director Gary Essert started scheduling films at UCLA in 1964. Four years later, the twentysomething Essert leased an abandoned nightclub in Hollywood to create a new kind of venue he called Kaleidoscope. 'We had hundreds of people sitting on the floor at the old Earl Carroll Theatre,' Essert's onetime colleague Marc Wanamaker says. 'We had a professional light show and then the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane would play, and then we'd show films on a big Cinemascope screen we made. It was a film orgy for 72 hours straight.'
Essert's Kaleidoscope evolved into the Los Angeles International Film Exposition, recruiting luminaries like George Cukor and Rosalind Russell to serve on its board. Filmex premiered The Last Picture Show at Grauman's Chinese in 1971, with Groucho Marx and Andy Warhol in the audience. By 1985, Essert was ousted from Filmex but, with help from filmmaker Sydney Pollack, turned his attention to building a permanent home for revival film; he called it the American Cinematheque.
Inspired by European temples to film, the complex included plans for three theaters, a cinema bookstore, shops and restaurants at the base of a luxury hotel built around the landmark Pan-Pacific Auditorium in the Fairfax District. But years of planning, fundraising and politicking went up in smoke, along with the building, at the end of the 1980s. The group tried to resurface at the old Kaleidoscope (by then the Aquarius Theatre), as well as what's now Harmony Gold and the Montalbán, before settling on a former dance school next to the Hollywood Roosevelt. Soon, Essert and his boyfriend and business partner Gary Abrahams succumbed to AIDS. 'They died around the same time,' Wanamaker says. 'It left a big void, and the Cinematheque also died for a while. Barbara Smith was our box office manager and nursed [Essert] in the end. It was in his will that she continue the Cinematheque, and a year or two after he died, she got it going again.' Smith was at the helm when the group purchased the earthquake-ravaged Egyptian theater for $1. She ran the restored movie palace for two decades before retiring in 2018. Two years later, the nonprofit sold the building to Netflix but continues programming on weekends.
Today, the Cinematheque also operates the Aero and a screen at the Los Feliz 3, selling out noir nights, Hitchcock revivals and glamorous premieres just as it did decades ago. 'Gary was a showman, a Barnum,' Wanamaker recalls. 'He would have been extremely pleased.'
This story was originally reported by L.A. Mag on Jun 13, 2025, where it first appeared.
