Series Honors LACMA’s Ron Haver : Movies: ‘Favorites’ will honor the late head of the museum’s film department, a man known as a Hollywood scholar and showman.

Ronald Haver, who headed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art film department for 20 years until his death at 54 in May, 1993, was a romantic who loved classic Hollywood movies yet presented rare, often difficult, films from all around the world during his long and fruitful tenure at the museum.

The mustachioed Haver was a stylish, good-humored gentleman familiar to his audiences for his countless introductions to the films he presented in the museum’s Bing Theater.

Haver’s greatest passion was for “Gone With the Wind,” which he said he saw 118 times while working as an usher as a teen-ager--his first job--at Oakland’s palatial Grand Lake Theater; his hero was its producer, David O. Selznick. It is fitting that LACMA’s “Ron Haver’s Favorites” tribute series begins Friday with 1 and 8 p.m. screenings of “Gone With the Wind.”

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Both showman and scholar, Haver spent years on his “David O. Selznick’s Hollywood,” a massive coffee-table-book survey of Selznick’s career published in 1980 that was as elaborate as any Selznick production. Later, Haver extracted from it a softcover book on the making of “Gone With the Wind.”

He then wrote another book, one of the best written on how Hollywood worked as its golden era drew to a close, on the making, cutting and subsequent restoration of the 1954 “A Star Is Born.” He had been able to retrieve 20 of the film’s missing 27 minutes, and he filled in the remaining 7 minutes with stills, some shot during the film’s production, others photographed especially for the restoration. At the time, in fact, he expressed a genuine childlike thrill at being able to have his own arm stand-in for that of James Mason in one photograph.

One of his dreams--unrealized--was to uncover the missing footage from Billy Wilder’s “The Private Lives of Sherlock Holmes” when it was cut from its original roadshow length.

Haver was one of four men claimed by AIDS within a six-month period who had been longtime major figures in the local film scene. He had been friends since junior high with Gary Essert, who, with his partner, Gary Abrahams, had been founders of Filmex and, later, the American Cinematheque; Essert and Abrahams died within weeks of each other in late 1992.

And Haver had worked closely with Douglas Edwards, theater and special events administrator for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, on the restoration of George Cukor’s “A Star Is Born.” One of Haver’s final public appearances was at an academy memorial for Edwards, who died in February, 1993.

Throughout Haver’s tenure at LACMA, the film department, housed in cluttered, memento-strewn offices upstairs in the Bing Theater, was treated like a poor stepchild--his phrase--but Haver was not one to complain. Since he tended to be caught up in the intricacies of scheduling and in his writing, he was fortunate to have Joan Cohen, a skilled film researcher (and guest curator of “Ron Haver’s Favorites”), as his indispensable assistant for 13 years.

“Working with Ron Haver was like working with an old-time Hollywood producer,” Cohen recalled recently. “Every film series was his production. His sense of showmanship and his genuine love of film influenced an entire generation of filmgoers and filmmakers.”

The series:

Today: “Gone With the Wind,” at 1 and 8 p.m.

Saturday: “A Star Is Born” and “What Price Hollywood?,” with an appearance by Fay Kanin, who was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences during the restoration of “A Star Is Born.”

Jan. 13: “Notorious” and “Sudden Fear,” at 1 and 8 p.m.

Jan. 14: “Vertigo” and “Black Narcissus,” at 8 p.m.

Jan. 20: “Rebecca” and “Purple Noon,” at 1 and 8 p.m.

Jan. 21: “Leave Her to Heaven” and “Bonjour Tristesse,” at 8 p.m.

Jan. 27: “Casablanca,” with an appearance by author Aljean Harmetz, and “The Magnificent Ambersons,” plus cartoon “Der Fuhrer’s Face.”

Jan. 28: “King Kong,” with Fay Wray in person, “Mystery of the Wax Museum” and “Duel in the Sun” plus two Warner Bros. cartoons and an excerpt from “Anchors Aweigh,” featuring Gene Kelly dancing with Tom, from the Tom and Jerry cartoons.

Information: (213) 857-6010.