"When I'm lighting, I like to feel that every light has a dramatic logic and function in the composition. It really is like painting; each piece of light is a brush-stroke, giving different emotional values, defining and texturing each part of the shot from foreground to background, highlighting what's important for the audience to see."
Laszlo Kovacs, quoted by Jason Whyte in "The Storytelling of Laszlo Kovacs."

Laszlo Kovacs told the stories America needed to hear during the heady creative revolution of the '60s and '70s that historians would later dub the "Hollywood Renaissance." The Hungarian refugee had started his career in exploitation films but quickly developed working relationships with such young mavericks as Dennis Hopper, Bob Rafelson, Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich. Together they would re-define American cinema. And yet his work may have been too much ahead of its time for the Hollywood establishment, making Kovacs arguably the best cinematographer never to be nominated for an Oscar®.

Kovacs was born in Cece, a Hungarian farming community about 60 miles from Budapest, in 1933. As a child he attended weekend film screenings at a nearby schoolhouse, launching a lifelong love affair with the movies. His parents sent him to high school in Budapest, but he often cut classes to go to the movies, where he quickly developed a taste for Italian Neorealism and the first films of the French New Wave. He also fell in love with Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), which would prove a major influence on his later work. But even with poor grades, his dedication helped him win a place in the Hungarian Academy of Drama and Film Art.

When the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 started, he and fellow student Vilmos Zsigmond borrowed a 35mm camera from the school and secretly shot footage of the revolt and the Soviet Union's violent response. At the time, the Soviets were shooting any Hungarians they caught with cameras. To get their footage to the world, they smuggled the film into Austria in potato bags, then emigrated to the U.S. in 1957. By the time they arrived, however, the revolution was old news. Their film would not be seen until 1961, when it was screened as a part of a CBS News documentary.

Kovacs began the slow process of building a career in the U.S., where he would receive citizenship in 1963. He worked a variety of jobs, including making maple syrup, shooting stills, developing film and making prints from microfilm. After meeting Zsigmond in Los Angeles, he began finding jobs shooting medical, industrial and educational films in 16mm. Then he pooled his money with four other young filmmakers to make a Western for the princely budget of $12,000. That provided a calling card that got him into features.

At first, however, his credits were confined to low-budget exploitation films such as Ray Dennis Steckler's hilariously bad The Incredibly Strange Creatures who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964), in which he can be seen briefly as "Man at Carnival." At the time, however, exploitation films were the training ground for young filmmakers. The budgets may have been low, but the films helped Kovacs forge connections with directors Richard Rush, Robert Altman and Bogdanovich and actor Jack Nicholson.

All that paid off when Dennis Hopper screened Rush's Psych-Out (1968), starring Nicholson, and decided he wanted to work with its cinematographer. At first Kovacs turned down his offer, not wanting to do another biker film. But as Hopper pitched the plot to him, Kovacs realized that his film about two bikers on a cross-country trip was far from the average genre film. Easy Rider (1969) would prove Kovacs' breakthrough film. All he had to work with was an old Arriflex camera with just one zoom lens, a 1968 Chevy Impala convertible and a half sheet of plywood, but he turned seeming mistakes like lens flares and reflected lights into his artistic language. Columbia had so little faith in the film that Kovacs had to pay his own way to the Cannes Film Festival. When Easy Rider won Best First Work there, however, it launched the film careers of all involved.

Suddenly, Kovacs was one of Hollywood's hottest cinematographers. He had shot the low budget Targets for Peter Bogdanovich in 1968 and would go on to make five other films with the director, more than any other cameraman. When they collaborated for the period comedy Paper Moon (1973), Kovacs finally got to pay homage to Citizen Kane by mimicking its use of deep-focus black and white photography. Kovacs was having trouble working out the best way to shoot in black and white, so Bogdanovich arranged for Kovacs to meet Welles, who suggested the red filters that gave the film its distinctive look.

Other key figures Kovacs worked with in the '70s included Bob Rafelson, for whom he shot Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972); Hal Ashby, with whom he worked on Shampoo (1975); and Martin Scorsese, with whom he developed the stylized look for New York, New York (1977). He also was hired for more traditional films such as the 1974 re-make of Huckleberry Finn, Ghost Busters (1984) and Say Anything (1989).

Kovacs' career continued into the 21st century, with pictures like My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), with Julia Roberts, and Miss Congeniality (2000), with Sandra Bullock. In his sixties, he was the recipient of lifetime achievement awards from the Hawaii International Film Festival, CamerImage, WorldFest, the Hollywood Film Festival and the American Society of Cinematographers, which voted him its highest award in 2002.

Kovacs' final project was a very personal one, the documentary Torn from the Flag (2006), incorporating his and Zsigmond's footage of the Hungarian Revolution, the first story he had ever told on film. He passed away in 2007.

by Roger Fristoe