AN APPRECIATION : The Two Garys--Zealots With a Passion for Film : Movies: Filmex’s Gary Essert and Gary Abrahams died within weeks of each other. The cost of AIDS epidemic hasn’t often seemed so clear, mournful.

There are millions who love the movies in a nice genteel way. Then there are those who love the movies with a passion bordering on obsession, and whose devotion to film overshadows almost everything else in their lives.

These are the zealots who search out the lost prints and the obscure works and the forgotten filmmakers, who compile the archives and the filmographies and found the film societies and celebrate the moving image in all its glories from the vaultingly cerebral to the surpassingly corny. The motion picture--considered either as art or commerce--would be poorer without the zealots, and so would society.

One of the zealots, Gary Essert, died of the complications of AIDS on Wednesday at the age of 54, and the cost of the epidemic to the society at large and to the world of the arts in particular has not often seemed so clear and so mournful. Esserts’ professional and personal partner for 20 years, Gary Abrahams, had died, also of the complications of AIDS, only a few weeks earlier.

The Garys, as everyone who knew them thought of them, had founded Filmex, Los Angeles’ first film festival, in 1971, against seemingly impossible odds. That was to say, in the face of the difficulty of winning support from so fiercely competitive and short-sighted an enterprise as the movie business.

Filmex was born in some nondescript upstairs offices in a building on Hollywood Boulevard (a perfect Raymond Chandler setting) and I sat in on some of the early meetings, sad that so good an idea (so many decades late in happening) seemed destined to be stillborn. But the Garys, with their youthful smiles, youthful verve and iron wills, won some key recruits, notably George Cukor and Rosalind Russell. Filmex began and flourished and grew.

It was propelled by a lot of razzle-dazzle (yards of red carpet and, at one memorable festival, a pink elephant enlivening a Century City mall). Along with the sideshows, Filmex identified the city’s very large audience for very good films, independent, international and inscrutable as they often were. The peril of so many good works in a two-week period was a kind of filmic indigestion; Filmex was exhaustively wonderful.

But if the beginnings smacked of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and “Who needs a theater, we can stage it right here in the barn,” Filmex grew so successful so fast it outran its funding and its organizational skills. For the Garys the dream burst like a toy balloon and they were out.

The festival survives under American Film Institute auspices, its selections still a sampling of the world’s best, but minus the pizazz that was the Essert-Abrahams specialty and attracting loyal but smaller audiences. Yet even under new auspices it remains a diminished monument to its zealous founders, and an invaluable cultural asset in the city.

Undaunted and with zeal intact, Essert and Abrahams quickly launched the American Cinematheque, another dream--not yet realized and possibly endangered by the deaths of its prime movers--of a permanent installation like Henri Langlois’ Cinematheque Francaise in Paris. It would be a center for film appreciation, with a priceless archive of the world’s films and cinemas in which they could be seen daily.

Like Filmex, the Cinematheque seemed, and seems, an idea that was long overdue for Los Angeles, of all the cities on Earth. How could the film capital of the world not have a film center? It is easier to explain why than to justify the lack.

Again the Garys recruited some potent supporters, including director Sydney Pollack. Again they used some razzle-dazzle, especially at an elegant annual ball, to launch a building fund. At the same time they started a series of weekend retrospectives honoring film figures as various as Don Ameche and Andy Warhol, to demonstrate, rather teasingly, just what the joys of a cinematheque could be.

Then, with its terrible wasting swiftness, illness seized both men. I stopped in to see Gary Essert a few days before he died. Faint-voiced and frail, he sat in his window-wrapped living room. The hopes of a brand-new building for the cinematheque as part of a Hollywood Boulevard development had just fallen through. But he and the trustees were considering alternate, existing sites, and Gary reeled off a whole string of ideas on how the sites could be used.

There would be weekly programs for children to convey the joy of movies early, he said, and series that would celebrate films and filmmakers from all over the globe, in a variety that would suggest the spectrum of the form from light to dark. The cinematheque would be a gathering place for everybody who loved the movies as he did; there would be something doing all the time.

He paused and looked out the window into the winter sky, spent by the effort of speaking and only too aware, as his visitors were, that he would not be around to see it all happen.

I hope it does happen. It would be not least an affecting reminder that there have been zealots among us. The worry that deepens the sadness of the deaths of the Garys is that it will require later zealots to keep their dreams going. But the best kind of zealots are always in short supply, and we are losing them at a rate the society can ill afford.