Casting His Hat Back Into the Reviewing Ring : Television: Film expert Leonard Maltin returns to the job he was hired to do 12 years ago on ‘Entertainment Tonight.’

The familiar “ET theater” seat that Leonard Maltin has warmed for the past 12 years is gone this season. In its place is a cavernous film vault, a stylized celluloid repository with arching wood ceiling beams and gray, tomblike walls.

Maltin’s “Entertainment Tonight” colleague, John Tesh, jokingly likens it to “the Starship Enterprise with film cans.”

The new set is just one of the changes for Maltin this season. He also has returned to reviewing films, the job he originally was hired to do 12 years ago, near the end of the show’s first season. He hasn’t done film reviews for seven years, focusing instead on feature stories.

The pioneer syndicated entertainment newsmagazine has undergone periodic changes over the years to keep things fresh. But one thing remains constant: the bearded and bespectacled Maltin--if not America’s most famous movie buff, certainly its most enthusiastic.

There’s no question Maltin loves what he’s doing. And although he has interviewed his share of contemporary celebrities--from Robert De Niro to Meryl Streep--his forte is movie history. Maltin does stories that no one else on TV’s entertainment beat might even think of doing.

How about an interview with veteran ventriloquist Senor Wences? Or a piece on forgotten silent film comedian Lupino Lane? Or Dorothy Granger, “the Queen of Two-Reel Comedies”?

“He is invaluable because there is only one Leonard Maltin,” producer Bill Olson says. “Above all, he’s an expert--a world-renowned film buff--but he’s a fan underneath all of that. He just loves it and he never tires of it.”

Maltin’s biggest thrill?

“When I went to my first Golden Boot Awards and within five minutes met both Roy Rogers and Gene Autry,” he said. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

Maltin’s film-buff dream job at “ET,” however, is only part of his workload. If his life were a movie, this is where a quick-cut montage would be inserted.

He recently completed a 10-day tour to promote the 25th anniversary edition of “Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide” (Signet: $7.99). The compilation of capsulized film reviews, which he and a staff of seven contributing editors revise each year, is now as thick as a club sandwich: 1,580 pages, with more than 19,000 entries.

Maltin, who was only a 17-year-old high school senior in Teaneck, N.J., when he was signed to do the book, received name-above-the-title status a decade ago thanks to his exposure on “ET.”

In October, his latest book, “Leonard Maltin’s Movie Encyclopedia” (E.P. Dutton), arrived in bookstores. The author of a dozen books on filmmaking spent the past year--working weekends, early mornings and evenings--on the comprehensive volume, which contains career essays and biographical information on 2,000 actors, directors and writers.

If that weren’t enough to keep him busy, he hosts “Leonard Maltin on Video,” a daily, one-minute syndicated radio show that airs locally on KNX-AM (1070). He also does monthly movie commentaries for the cable TV service Starz and recently completed a three-year run as an on-line columnist for Prodigy. He has produced, written and hosted a number of cable-TV programs and a series for Republic Pictures Home Video on the making of classics such as “High Noon” and “The Quiet Man.”

“ET,” however, remains his bread and butter.

He’s the first film critic ever to work out of an actual Hollywood film studio, a stroke of luck that hardly goes unappreciated by a man who grew up setting his alarm clock so he could wake up to catch a 2:30 a.m. showing of “My Man Godfrey” on “The Late Late Show” and spent his formative years in the balcony of the New Yorker Theater and other Manhattan revival houses doing what he calls his “basic training.”

“I never get blase about coming here,” said Maltin, 43, walking along a studio street after a recent “ET” taping. “Alice and I are constantly pinching ourselves, almost literally, because this is like living in Fantasyland for us, a couple of movie lovers.”

Leonard and Alice Maltin’s Toluca Lake home is a treasure trove of movie memorabilia, from a plaster Buster Keaton life mask to a back-lit collection of silent-era glass coming-attraction slides. Hundreds of movie books, still photograph files and even more memorabilia fill the converted guest house out back that serves as Maltin’s office.

“Collecting is a disease; it’s just less dangerous than drugs or something like that,” observed Maltin, sipping tea from a yellow Tweety mug.

Maltin’s infatuation with the movies began at an early age.

Here’s an encapsulated “Movie Guide”-style version of his movie-mad life story: New Jersey kid falls in love with Laurel and Hardy, “Our Gang” and Buster Keaton comedies on TV at 4, turns his love of old movies into a writing career at 13 and at 15 purchases Film Fan Monthly for $175.

Maltin continued to publish the little fanzine, which boasted a readership of 2,000 hard-core films buffs around the world, until he was 24.

“Talk about personal journalism, this really was,” he said. “I never had to worry that a reference was too arcane or obscure in this magazine because, if anything, some of the readers were hipper than I was to some of the oddities of old moviedom.”

By the time he was in high school, Maltin said, “I was pretty well eating, sleeping, breathing movies. That was it. I fell into a crowd in New York of die-hard old movie buffs who had several little private film societies that would gather several times a week and show rare films, double and triple features.”

That’s how he got to see “all sorts of great stuff and really learn a lot.” But, he said, it did nothing for his social life.

Fittingly, Maltin met Alice, then a secretary in the sales department at Bantam Books, at a film society silent movie double bill in 1974. In Alice, he found a kindred spirit, someone who grew up in a family that remained seated to watch the movie credits roll.

“I got depressed one time,” he said, “because I didn’t really have any social life and I didn’t know how to pursue one, but I didn’t really want to give up what I was doing because I liked it. I’m awfully happy I met Alice when I did.”

Maltin’s high-profile job on “Entertainment Tonight,” needless to say, changed his life.

His favorite part of the job, he said, “is that I’ve gotten to do stories that nobody else does.”

When “Forrest Gump” came out, he said, “I did a story on Lon Chaney, because there’s (actor) Gary Sinise being legless through the art of digital computerization and I thought, well, let’s compare that to Lon Chaney, who bound up his legs and really did it.”

Maltin flashed that familiar grin.

“I call it doing my missionary work, getting to actually possibly turn people onto things that they don’t know. So what a wonderful feeling, spreading the gospel of old movies.”