Laszlo Kovacs, ASC
An Odyssey in Search of the American Dream

Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, recently photographed Jack Frost, a Warner Bros. movie based on a fairy tale about a snowman that comes to life. The film chronicles a magical winter when the snowman befriends a 10-year-old boy whose father was killed in an accident. The plot sounds like an impossible dream but that didn't deter Kovacs, who can testify that even your wildest dreams can come true.

Kovacs will receive the 1998 Lifetime Achievement Award at the CamerImage International Festival of the Art of Cinematography. The award recognized Kovacs' body of work and unique contributions to advancing the art of cinematography.

"Even during the Cold War, student filmmakers in Eastern Europe followed his work and hoped they would someday be able to follow in his footsteps," says festival director Marek Zydowicz. "Laszlo Kovacs is a source of inspiration for students and other young filmmakers everywhere in the world. He is living proof that with talent and determination anything is possible. Your best dreams can come true."

Kovacs was first recognized in Hollywood in 1969 for his extraordinary work on Easy Rider, a defining exercise in the power of minimalist cinematography. He was in the front ranks of a new wave of young filmmakers who invented fresh ways to make more realistic films. Kovacs photographed Easy Rider approximately a dozen years after a perilous escape from his native Hungary following a failed uprising against the communist regime and its Soviet masters. He subsequently added more than 60 narrative features to a diverse body of work, including Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Slither, Paper Moon, Shampoo, New York, New York, What's Up Doc?, The Runner Stumbles, Ghostbusters, Mask, Little Nikita and My Best Friend's Wedding.

Kovacs was born and raised in a small farming village in Hungary, located about 60 miles outside of Budapest. He has a vivid boyhood memory of standing in the middle of a train track that ran through the village. Kovacs remembers searching the horizon and wondering where the train came from and where it was going. During the Nazi occupation of Hungary, his mother was friendly with a woman who ran a temporary cinema on weekends. The 16 mm films were projected on a sheet that hung in a school auditorium. The seats were hard benches. The films were mainly propaganda movies from Germany.

From around the age of 10, Kovacs distributed flyers advertising each week's movie. He hung them on telephone poles and delivered them to shopkeepers. His pay was a free seat in the first row of benches. Kovacs was a tireless movie fan who usually sat through each screening of every film. He was fascinated by the flickering images painting the screen.

In 1945, the Nazis were driven out of the country, but the Russians arrived and set up their own puppet government. Afterward, most of the films that played in the village cinema came from Russia and Hungary instead of Germany, and they always extolled working class heroes. Kovacs recalls that the style was neo-realistic and the images were engaging. There were also occasional underground films from France, neo-realistic movies from Italy and even a few from the U.S. until 1948.

During his teens, Kovacs was sent to a high school in Budapest. His father and mother were farmers. His mother wanted him to become a doctor; his father preferred that he pursue a career engineering. But Kovacs never embraced their dreams. He regularly missed chemistry, math and biology classes, and went to the cinema instead, seeing two and three films a day. Kovacs heard about the Academy of Drama and Film Art in Budapest. In 1952, he was accepted in the film program.

"My teacher, who headed the cinema program, was George Illes, a great filmmaker," says Kovacs. "He was like another father to me. Once I asked how I could ever repay him for his many kindnesses, and he said that I should help other young filmmakers whenever I have the opportunity."

In an interview that was published during the 1970s in an undated issue of Take One Magazine in Canada, Kovacs reflected on his film school experience, which was a mix of art and liberal arts.

"They taught you how to see," he said. "The scope of the school was incredible. For instance, the art history courses - you can learn a lot from classic paintings. They are composition in freeze frame…like a painter, you were taught to be a total master of your tools."

Kovacs recalls that there were American movies in the school archives, and students were allowed to view them on Saturdays. He remember sitting on the floor of a screening room which was jammed with would-be writers, actors, directors and other filmmakers, who were there to watch Citizen Kane.

"Everyone's expectations were so high," he says. "It was like waiting for a miracle to happen. Everything about it was incredible, the story, the acting, the visuals and especially the lighting by Gregg Toland. It had a stunning effect on everyone. It changed my visual vocabulary."

In October 1956, there was a spontaneous uprising in Budapest against the communist regime. For a short while, it seemed like the revolt would succeed and a more democratic government would be put into place. Then the Russian army brutally intervened. Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC were standing on a street corner in Budapest watching tanks run down civilians. They decided that it was important to record those events on film. They appropriated a 35 mm Arriflex camera from the school, along with a supply of black and white film. They put the camera, battery pack and spare magazines in a shopping bag and wandered through the city documenting many acts of bravery and treachery.

Just to put that into proper perspective, Russian soldiers were shooting people on the spot if they were caught on the streets with cameras. Kovacs or Zsigmond were careful. One of them served as a lookout watching for Russian soldiers, while the other operated the camera. It went on that way for three weeks, until the Russian army crushed the revolt.

Kovacs and Zsigmond kept a low profile for awhile, but they heard that students who participated in the revolt were being arrested. They decided to leave the country and take the 30,000 feet of film they had exposed with them. The film cans were stuffed into potato sacks. Kovacs and Zsigmond joined a group of about 100 people who made a long trek through the forest heading for the Austrian border. They came to a village where Russian soldiers were searching for partisans.

Kovacs and Zsigmond hid the film in a cornfield and walked into the village as though they lived there. While they were being questioned and searched. Kovacs realized that he had some still photos of the conflict in Budapest hidden in one of his boots. He thinks a Russian colonel might have seen them, but after some delay the officer wished Kovacs "good luck" and told him he could leave.

"It was only about 4 or 5 p.m., but it was already very dark," Kovacs recalls. "I found Vilmos waiting in the forest, and we carried the film to a little canal on the Austrian border. There was another bunch of people waiting, and to our surprise, Hungarian border guards were ferrying them across the canal. We could see a big field was already lit up on the other side. The International Red Cross had tents and was receiving people. It was very cold and they were giving people hot drinks."

After arriving in Vienna, Kovacs and Zsigmond were shocked when they discovered that the American TV networks thought their film was old news. A lab agreed to process the film, and a CBS TV correspondent paid a $100 option to see it, but the network wasn't interested. Kovacs and Zsigmond sold the film to a Hungarian expatriate. He gave them enough money to pay the lab and an old Arriflex camera.

They immigrated to the United States in March 1957 along with some 30,000 to 40,000 other political refugees from Hungary. Kovacs was handicapped because he couldn't speak a word of English. A still photographer who worked in a small town in upstate New York became his first sponsor. It wasn't full-time employment, so Kovacs found a second job in a maple syrup factory. His next job was at Alpha Cine Labs, in Seattle, Washington, processing black-and white news film for KING-TV. Around that time, he heard a rumor that CBS had paid the German producer $100,000 for the film that he and Zsigmond had risked their lives to shoot and smuggle out of Hungary.

In 1959, Kovacs and Zsigmond, who had stayed in touch by mail, agreed that it was time for them to try their luck in Los Angeles. A title insurance company hired Kovacs, where he worked in a darkroom making prints from microfilm. He helped Zsigmond get a job on the nightshift.

Kovacs never gave up on his dream of becoming a filmmaker. By the early 1960s, he was shooting 16 mm industrial, educational and medical films.

"It was a great experience," he says. "During the next several years, I began shooting very low budget fiction films. A 10 to 12 day schedule was a luxury. If you had an interior scene, the most you could hope for was that the producer would let you rent a few quartz lights. We never had fill light or reflectors. I remember how elated I felt when a director allowed me to rent a zoom lens for a day."

During that period, Kovacs was one of a number of young, promising cinematographers to begin shooting commercials. He worked with Lee Lacy and other top directors who gave him the creative latitude to experiment with finding new looks. It was a pivotal experience because it allowed Kovacs to experiment with exposure values, colors and other components of the visual grammar of filmmaking.

In 1963, Kovacs shot a black and white Western on a weekend. The $12,000 budget was used to rent horses, saddles and guns. The actors brought their own wardrobe. CFI Labs processed the film, and provided an answer print against the promise of a deferred payment. The movie was never released, but it was an important step in his career. Paul Lewis, the production manager, later introduced Kovacs to a young director named Richard Rush. Kovacs subsequently shot a number of films with Rush including A Man Called Dagger, Savage Seven, Hell's Angels on Wheels and Freebie and the Bean.

"Richard encouraged me to improvise," Kovacs recalls. "Many of the images were made on the spur of the moment. Hells Angels on Wheels had a terrible script, and I made a lot of photographic mistakes, but the overall movement of the story was so strong that it kept the audience involved."

The bikers were actual Hell's Angels. Kovacs reminisces about the day he was staring off into a beautiful row of trees during a lunch break, when he suddenly envisioned a great shot. He quickly rounded up several of the bikers. Rush asked what he was doing? Kovacs explained his idea and the director embraced it. They sent the bikers into the woods and asked them to "kind of float with your bikes through the trees and have fun." The bikers came straight at the camera, and then swung around Kovacs while performing stunts including a mock bullfight. It was like a ballet on wheels.

Lewis also introduced Kovacs to Peter Bogdanovich and Dennis Hopper in 1968. He shot Bagdanovich's first feature, Targets, that year. During subsequent years, they collaborated on What's Up Doc and Paper Moon. Bagdanovich was the polar opposite of Rush. He designed each sequence so specifically that Kovacs initially felt there was no room for him to improvise.

"He demanded that you shoot what he saw in his mind," Kovacs explains. "At first, I was very annoyed. It's frustrating when a director tells you where to put the camera and what lens to use. I felt I couldn't contribute, but it only took about a half a day for me to realize what was important in making a film. I controlled the lighting and camera movement, and that's where the feelings come from."

Hopper was interested in meeting Kovacs because he had seen a film called Psych-Out, lensed by Kovacs, which was about the love children of San Francisco. "Some people who have seen Psych-Out have told me it's my best work from that period," says Kovacs. "I think we succeeded in putting the audience into the middle of that film. The tragedy was that the studio (American International) cut 12 minutes out of the film, and that removed its heart and soul."

By then, movie critics were referring to Rush, Kovacs, Hopper and other new filmmakers with a fresh outlook as "The New Wave," but Kovacs was getting tired of shooting exploitation films for drive-in theaters. In one year he shot eight biker films.

"They were all the same," he says. "Bikers rode into town. There was a conflict with a lot of action. So when Dennis (Hopper) called and told me he wanted to make another 'biker' film, my first instinct was to say I wasn't interested. Hopper told Kovacs, 'This is different,' and we agreed to meet."

Hopper arrived carrying a script under his arm. He had just finished working on it with Peter Fonda and Terry Southern. Hopper threw the script across the room. Kovacs recalls that pages were flying everywhere. Hopper said, "Just let me tell you the story." He acted out all the parts for three hours. It was spellbinding. The art director (Jerry Kay) and production manager (Lewis) were also there.

"We never suspected how revolutionary this film was going to be, or how successful it would become," says Kovacs. "All I knew was that it was going to be a very exciting project. When Dennis finished acting out the script, I asked him, 'When do we start?'"

Kovacs, Hopper and Lewis drove to New Orleans, selecting locations along the way. The film was Easy Rider, which Kovacs describes as "a story about two guys (Peter Fonda and Hopper) joined by a lawyer (Jack Nicholson) on an odyssey searching for the American dream."

The stunts and several sequences, including the whorehouse scene, were filmed in Los Angeles and then they went on the road for 12 weeks with a total crew of 12 people packed with all their gear into several trucks and vans. Kovacs recalls that a five ton truck was jammed with electrical grip equipment. There was no money for a dolly and no room to carry one. There was sound recording equipment, and a 750 amp generator. A second five ton truck carried the motorcycles. His camera car was a new Chevy convertible. The platform was a sheet of plywood held into place by a sandbag. The cast and crew piled into a few station wagons, and they began the trek to Louisiana driving on the old Route 66.

Easy Rider has the look and feel of an improvised film that captures and preserves the flavor of reality. It was shot with one camera and minimal light. But Kovacs notes that every scene was carefully planned, rehearsed and staged. Easy Rider was a sensation at Cannes and a surprise hit at the box-office. It earned an Oscar for Nicholson as best supporting actor, and put his career into orbit.

Kovacs says that he saw in Easy Rider "an opportunity to show the world, not just the American audience, my adopted country, and say, 'Look how beautiful it is.'"

Why was it so successful, when so many other road films were relegated to drive-ins?

Michael Goodwin, editor of Take One, ventured an opinion in an article that explored the impact of The New Wave. He speculated that the time was right. A new generation of movie-goers had a taste for the counter-culture story and style of filmmaking; Hopper contributed "visionary zeal" to the project, and Kovacs provided "stunning camerawork."

"That potent combination amounted to a style- one that fit the time, place and subject better than anyone could have suspected," Goodwin said.

Kovacs ventured an interesting opinion in that same article when he wondered whether too many young filmmakers tried to emulate the plot of Easy Rider instead of the production style.

Easy Rider played for nine months in one of the largest theaters in Budapest. A friend of the Kovacs family happened to be in Budapest. He saw an incredible line of people, and thought they were waiting to buy something until he realized it was a movie theater. He saw a movie poster in the box-office window and it had Laszlo Kovacs, cinematographer, written on it by hand.

"When he returned to the village, he asked my father, 'Is there any chance that could be your son?' My father said 'It could be,' but my mother knew. She said, 'Of course, it's Laszlo.' She knew from my letters. Practically everyone in the village rode a bus to Budapest to see the movie. My mother loved Easy Rider, but she felt that way about most films. They were like window on the world for her."

After Easy Rider, Kovacs shot That Cold Day in the Park for Robert Altman, Five Easy Pieces for Bob Rafelson and The Last Movie with Hopper during consecutive years, and all of those landmark films were budgeted under a million dollars. While his early films were characterized by realistic lighting and minimalist cinematography, Kovacs broke that mold during the 1970s with such comedies and musicals as Shampoo, For Pete's Sakes, New York, New York and The Last Waltz.

"I only look for two things when I shoot a movie," he says, "the quality of the director and the script. The cast is important, but it's not a decisive factor. The first question I ask myself is, do I believe in the director? I've been very lucky in that I've worked with a lot of great directors."

That Cold Day in the Park was one of Robert Altman's first ventures into long form, narrative filmmaking. They were shooting in Vancouver, Canada, where the company had constructed a penthouse set with some 13 to 14 rooms. Altman told Kovacs he didn't know the sequence yet, but there was going to be a handheld shot that covered every one of those rooms.

"It was physically difficult doing a long handheld shot in those days," he says. "There was no Steadicam and the cameras weren't very portable. It was the same with lighting. I didn't want to shoot into flat light. In the end, Altman had it perfectly planned. I still remember that shot vividly. It ended with a reflection in a brass planter with camera angles up from a very low floor angle."

He describes another scene in Five Easy Pieces of a car driving on the Oregon coastline. Kovacs was in the front passenger's seat with the camera on a plank looking in from outside the window. The sun was dipping toward the horizon, so he was getting a beautiful dappled light on Susan Anspach in the back seat. Rafelson kept calling for one more take.

"Jack was driving and I was reminding him to keep the sun on his left," Kovacs says. "He had to keep looking for roads where he could turn in the right direction. There was another interesting scene where Jack and Susan were sitting on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. Bob (Rafelson) called for a close-up on Jack, and I said, 'no, no', we need one of hers first."

Rafelson assented and Kovacs made the shot, but it wasn't until they were looking at dailies when both of them realized how perfectly Anspach's blue eyes matched the sky and water in the background. "It was so beautiful it made me shiver," Kovacs says. "This one unplanned shot captured the essence of the tone, texture and mood of the story. If I had shot a close-up of Jack first, the blue sky would have been a darker shade when we came back to Susan."

Kovacs believes that he was the first cinematographer to work with a Panaflex camera, which replaced the heavier and more cumbersome Panavision PSR. Bob Gottshalk, founder and first CEO of Panavision, brought the new camera to Kovacs while he was shooting Freebie and the Bean, in San Francisco in 1974. Kovacs was shooting a scene with Alan Arkin on the Embarcadero when Gottshalk handed him the Panaflex camera while a 16 mm crew documented that historic moment.

Writing in Crawdaddy, a pop culture magazine, in 1980, Ellen Wolf observed that Kovacs viewed his craft as one that requires a coherent aesthetic beyond mere technical fluency. She credits him with espousing a collaborative ethic of filmmaking, noting that Kovacs believed that the best films share a magical communal chemistry. Wolf cited that gut-wrenching scene at the end of Easy Rider, where Hopper and Fonda's characters have rebelled for the last time, and are murdered by their tormentors.

Hopper wanted to distance the audience from the tragedy and give them a glimpse of something beautiful and hopeful on the horizon. He envisioned a helicopter shot pulling away from the fiery demise of Fonda's character into a gorgeous panoramic view of the horizon. But the budget was already stretched thin. The 'copter was a relatively low-powered machine without a standard camera mount. Kovacs used a makeshift mount to put the camera on one skid with counter-weights on the other skid to keep the 'copter from tipping over. Then, he prayed for wind to give the 'copter the lift it needed.

By 1974, five years after Easy Rider, and 18 years after Kovacs had made his perilous dash for the Austrian border, Newsweek Magazine identified him as one of Hollywood's most celebrated cinematographers. Kovacs commented on The New Wave style of filmmaking:

"The environments that you shoot make many statements about your characters. The background becomes very organic. (For example) the foggy islands of the Pacific Northwest explained the tight little family world of Five Easy Pieces."

One of his personal favorite films from the 1990s was Radio Flyer, a story about a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old boy who build a magical wagon designed to help them escape from reality. They named the wagon Radio Flyer. There is an extraordinary dream sequence involving a buffalo.

"The buffalo comes to one the boys in a dream," Kovacs says. "It (the buffalo) looks through a window into the room where the boy is sleeping, and they talk. The message is clear. It's possible that he can get his wish. His dream can come true. We shot with a real buffalo and a mechanical one. There were some things we couldn't get the real buffalo to do, so we used low-key light to make it look real. "

For that scene, they moved off the set onto a dry lake in the dessert. There is the boy on his bed. Nothing else. He awakens, and sees the buffalo looking at him. Kovacs distanced the camera from the scene by using a 1200 mm lens which condensed and flattened the image. The camera was close to the ground, so it captured the discernable waves of heat rising off the surface. It was more like a mirage than a dream sequence, Kovacs says.

"The look has to come from the story, " he explains. "You can't arbitrarily choose a certain look and squeeze into a particular story. Every story has it's own life, and it's own dimensions. The tones and colors are different than other stories. This is what you have to sense. It's usually a subconscious process."

Kovacs believes that cinematography is an interpretive art. He cites a huge exterior scene in Radio Flyer that was filmed in the blackest part of night within the expanses of Griffith Park in Los Angeles. There were only a few street lamps and the moon to motivate light. The scene called for the darkness to be dense black, but Kovacs wanted a wide range of tonality and contrast in the shadow areas. He was using the 500-speed Kodak 5296 film. In this scene, he rated the film for an exposure index of 640. It was just a subtle difference, which pushed the film a notch higher on the sensometric curve. That was sufficient to create a sense of visual tension which amplified the mood of the scene.

Kovacs explored new territory in 1996 when he collaborated with director Harold Ramis and visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund, ASC on Multiplicity. The story is an improbable fantasy starring Michael Keaton and Andie McDowell. Keaton played four roles, including three clones of his character. Kovacs and Edlund had collaborated before Ghostbusters, another effects laden film produced in 1984. It wasn't much of a collaboration. Kovacs shot the live-action, and. Edlund filmed the effects elements in 65 mm format. Later, Edlund optically composited effects elements into comprehensive shots. Kovacs didn't see the results until he timed the film.

Multiplicity was a totally different collaborative process. Keaton was on the screen with one, two or three of his clones in most scenes. Kovacs met with Edlund at 7 a.m. on the days when effects shots were being made. Kovacs filmed all of the effects elements himself working with the same 35 mm anamorphic for used for live-action scenes, and using a portable green screen as background. Everything was storyboarded, rehearsed and the lighting was precisely blocked.

It typically took 60 to 90 minutes for Keaton to prepare for each role. Part of it was the need for new or re-touched make-up and costumes. Part of it was allowing Keaton time to prepare himself for the attitude of the character he was portraying. The many scenes with Keaton playing multiple roles were never static. They were never just sitting or standing and talking.

"The characters were interacting and moving," he says. "There was always a lot of kinetic energy. Characters would seem to have physical contact and they would move behind one another. Eye contact was very important. If Michael looked a little too high or low in any of his roles, there was no eye contact between the characters which would seem unnatural to the audience."

The eye contact problem was resolved by taping Keaton playing a part and placing TV monitor where the character would be standing or sitting. Basically, Keaton was looking at and talking his own image. If there were more than one clone in a scene, the others would be accounted for by placing ping pong balls on stands at eye level. Kovacs says that realistic lighting was the visual credibility.

As usual, Kovacs was painting with a fine brush. He used the Eastman EXR 5296 500-speed film for live-action sequences. "It's a little less saturated and a little more pastel, which was the look we wanted," he explains. "Green screen elements were shot with the EXR 5298 film. "It's also a 500-speed film, but there is less grain than the older negative," he explains. "You don't want grain when you are shooting elements of a digitally composited shot.

"We bent and broke a lot of rules," says Kovacs. "We were about six weeks into production before Richard (Edlund) realized that I was using a Tiffen Soft Effects diffusion filter on the camera lens. It didn't affect the blacks or highlights, and it was flattering to skin tones, but it's not something you would do if you were making optical composites, where you need the purest possible negative. Digitally, you can correct and match skin tones."

Kovac's next film is Jack Frost, scheduled for release by Warner Bros. in November 1998, just about 30 years after Easy Rider. They are polar opposites in every imaginable way. Jack Frost is a storybook fable. Charlie is a 10-year-old boy whose father is killed in an auto accident on Christmas day. A year later, the boy builds a snowman that comes to life and speaks with his father's voice.

There were several weeks of location photography to establish the setting, however some 60 percent of the film was produced on one 200x300-foot makeshift stage in a former airplane hanger in Long Beach, California. The set included the front of Charlie's house, the fronts of two neighboring homes, and the fronts of several houses across the street. The ground was covered with a thick blanket of artificial snow, three to four feet deep, consisting mainly of crushed ice. The two ends of the street were capped with large translights that makes the setting seem to extend into the distant horizons.

Kovacs lobbied to shoot Jack Frost in anamorphic format, because he felt it was more appropriate for the story and more filmatic. "It's a richer image which adds a layer to the creative process," he says. "It is a different way of thinking when you compose images for horizontal space. It allowed us to show the boy and snowman in their environment without a lot of cuts and close-ups."

Kovacs designed lighting schemes for day and night as well as transitions. He used the new Kodak Vision 500T film for both interior and exterior scenes on the set. Kovacs says it allowed him to keep the light level suppressed while shooting on a huge set where he wanted to maintain crisp depth of field. Kovacs says that created a more natural environment for the actors to perform.

Kovacs adds that the 500-speed film made it easier for him to judge visual nuances with his eye, including contrast and subtle differences in the range of colors.

"Cinematography requires tremendous control," he says, "and its getting more complex by the day, especially with the digital effects that are now integrated into almost every movie. It affects everything from production design to the director's concept. But, basically every movie comes down to the cinematographer's language. We express ourselves through the way we control light, whether it's nature's light or the light we create on a set. You start with black and turn on the first light and start to build a structure. At that point, it's just a vision in the cinematographer's mind. Some people consider us technicians, but that's not true. Most people aren't aware of who creates the images. I think cinematography is probably the most under-rated art form in the 20th century."