Laszlo Kovacs, the gifted cinematographer whose best work included the seminal counterculture film Easy Rider (1969) and the gorgeous black and white photography of Paper Moon (1973) died on July 21 in his sleep at his Beverly Hills home. He was 74.

He was born on May 14, 1933, in a small village outside of Budapest. A fan of cinema since childhood, he was just 19 when he enrolled in the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest and spent the next four years in academic studies. In 1956, a national revolt against the communist regime broke out. Kovacs, along with another film student Vilmos Zsigmond (who would later win an Oscar® for cinematography for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977) documented the civil unrest with a camera they hid in a shopping bag and fled with the footage to Austria. By 1957, they both had arrived in the United States as political refugees.

Once Kovacs settled in Southern California, it took a few years before he began adding some credible films to his resume. At first, his undeniably professional and occasionally innovative photography was the best thing about such cult titles as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!! (1964), The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966), and Mondo Mod (1967). It wasn't until Peter Bogdanovich tapped him for Targets (1968) that Kovacs finally had a respectable movie credit on his resume. The following year he broke through magnificently with the ultimate counterculture road movie Easy Rider (1969). And critics took notice too. Many of them marveled at his ability to capture the essence of the open road and enormous vista of the American landscape as if it was a character itself.

By the '70s, Kovacs' career was on the upswing, and he proved he could handle any kind of style in a variety of film molds: the gritty texture of Five Easy Pieces (1970); the low-key allure of the American Southwest for Pocket Money (1972); the elegant contrast of his black and whites for Paper Moon (1973); and the opulent, nostalgic color of the flavorful period piece New York, New York (1977). Although his output in the '80s didn't quite hit the highlights of the aforementioned films, movies such as Ghostbusters (1984), Mask (1985), Radio Flyer (1992), and Return to Me (2000) went a long way in displaying his versatility and fine compositional skills. He had recently finished work on a documentary about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 entitled Torn From the Flag (2006) which used some of the remarkable images that he and Zsigmond had shot before they fled their native country. In 2002, Kovacs received a most richly deserved Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers. He is survived by his wife of 23 years, Audrey; two daughters, Julianna and Nadia; and a granddaughter.

by Michael T. Toole