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Laszlo
Kovacs Receives ASC Lifetime Achievement Award This article originally appeared in ICG Magazine in Jan. 2002 Sometimes seemingly impossible dreams come true. Just ask Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, who arrived in the United States as a political refugee in 1957. He had no resources and didn’t speak a word of English. His first jobs were taking Polaroid photos for identification cards and collecting pails of syrup draining from maples trees. Kovacs dreamed about becoming a Hollywood cinematographer, but the odds against him were overwhelming. He worked at the fringes of the industry and found a niche shooting low budget “biker films” for consumption at drive-in theaters. “They were always the same,” he recalls. “The bad guys rode into town on bikes and terrorized the citizens. A lone hero stood up to them. It was like High Noon with motorcycles instead of horses. I had my fill of those films, so my first reaction was negative when Dennis Hopper asked me to shoot a biker film with him.” Hopper convinced him that this film was different. Kovacs shot Easy Rider during a 12 week odyssey across the country with Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson and Terry Southern. In a retrospective review written years later, film critic Leonard Maltin labeled Easy Rider a landmark movie that changed the art of filmmaking. Kovacs has subsequently compiled an extraordinary body of work, including such classics as Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Slither, Paper Moon, New York, New York, What’s Up, Doc?, The Runner Stumbles, Little Nikita, Ghostbusters, The Last Movie,, Radio Flyer, Mask and Legal Eagles. His contemporary films include My Best Friend’s Wedding, Miss Congeniality and Return to Me. Kovacs will join a short list of distinguished artists when he receives the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers at the 16th Annual Outstanding Achievement Awards on Feb. 17. The only previous recipients were George Folsey, ASC, Phil Lathrop, ASC, Stanley Cortez, ASC, Charles Lang, Jr., ASC, Joe Biroc, ASC, Haskell Wexler, ASC, Conrad Hall, ASC, Gordon Willis, ASC, Sven Nykvist, ASC, Owen Roizman, ASC, Victor J. Kemper, ASC, Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, Bill Fraker, ASC and Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC. A recounting of his early years has almost a storybook quality. Kovacs was born and raised in a small village located some 60 miles from Budapest, Hungary, where his parents were farmers. His mother was friendly with a woman who ran a weekend cinema in the village school auditorium. Kovacs was around ten years old when he began distributing flyers advertising each week’s film in exchange for a free front row seat. “They were 16 mm propaganda films from Germany that were projected on a sheet,” he remembers. “I was fascinated by the flickering images which told stories about faraway places. I sat mesmerized through every screening.” When the Nazis were driven out of Hungary in 1945, the Russian army filled the void and established their own puppet regime. After that, most of the films screened at the makeshift village cinema came from Russia and Hungary. Kovacs recalls that the style was social-realistic, the images were compelling, and the stories were always about working class heroes. They sparked his imagination. Kovacs describes a vivid boyhood memory of standing in the middle of a railroad track which ran through the village. He searched the horizon, wondering where the trains came from and where they would take him. His parents sent Kovacs to school in Budapest during his teens. They wanted something better for their son than life as a farmer. His mother wanted him to become a doctor and his father urged him to study hard and become an engineer. Kovacs wasn’t enticed. He was bored by chemistry, science and math, and routinely skipped those classes. Instead, he watched two and three movies daily at local cinemas. When Kovacs heard there was an Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest, he applied for admission and was accepted in 1952. It changed his life. “My teacher was George Illes,” says Kovacs. “He was a great cinematographer in Hungary and like a second father to me. He taught me how important it was to study all of the arts. We drew charcoal portraits during our first year. He taught us how to see forms, light, tones, textures, and all the things you instinctively use in cinematography. We also studied music, literature, architecture and the history of art – you can learn a lot from painters. We were taught to be total masters of our tools.” Illes also opened a window to the outside world. There were movies from Western countries stored in the school’s archives. Students were allowed to view them informally on Saturdays. Kovacs describes a magical day watching Citizen Kane. “Everyone’s expectations were so high,” he recalls. “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, ASC. It had a stunning effect on everyone and it changed my visual vocabulary.” In October 1956, a spontaneous uprising broke out on the streets of Budapest in an ill-fated attempt to overthrow the communist regime. Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, who had graduated from the school a year earlier, were standing on a corner watching ordinary people attacking tanks with their bare hands. They decided it was important to document the brutally uneven struggle. Kovacs and Zsigmond borrowed a 35 mm camera and black-and-white film from the school. They carried the camera, film and a spare battery pack in a large shopping bag. One of them served as lookout watching for Russian soldiers, while the other one operated the camera. Just to put that into perspective, Russian soldiers were shooting people they found with cameras. It took about three weeks for the Russian army to overwhelm the last vestiges of resistance. Kovacs and Zsigmond were shooting all that time. They were warned that the Russians were arresting students who participated in the revolt. They decided to leave their motherland. Kovacs and Zsigmond stuffed the 30,000 feet of film they exposed into sacks and joined a band of about 100 people who were walking to Austria. The pair ran into a Russian patrol in a small village near to the border. Fortunately they had time to hide the film in a nearby cornfield. While they were being searched and questioned, Kovacs remembered he had hidden still negatives in his ski pants. After some delay, a Russian colonel let them go. He and Zsigmond recovered their film and crossed the border. A film lab in Vienna agreed to process their film, and a CBS-TV correspondent paid $100 for an option to buy it. None of the networks were interested. They sold their film to a producer who paid their lab bill and threw in an old Arriflex camera. A few years later, their film was featured in a CBS documentary narrated by Walter Cronkite. They heard the network paid $100,000 for their film. Kovacs and Zsigmond immigrated to the United States in March 1957, and spent time at a refugee camp in New Jersey. They tried to explain they were cameramen and wanted to go to Hollywood, but immigration authorities required a sponsor who was willing to guarantee housing and a job. Kovacs was sponsored by a photographer in upstate New York who put him to work taking Polaroid pictures and harvested maple syrup. “I was grateful, but I saw my dreams coming to a dead-end,” he remembers. “My cousin had a sponsor in Seattle who suggested that I move there. I rode the bus, so I could see the country. It was an unforgettable experience with so many impressions.” In Seattle, Kovacs was hired by Alpha Cine lab that processed kinescopes and news film for KING-TV. He worked there for nearly two years, mainly processing black-and-white reversal film. He and Zsigmond stayed in touch and agreed to meet in Los Angeles in 1960, to produce a short film directed by Joseph Zsuffa, another Hungarian film school expatriate. “Afterwards, we faced the cold reality of having no jobs,” Kovacs says. “It looked hopeless, but we were very confident, because there was no choice. This was always more than a profession. It was my life. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.” A title insurance company put Kovacs to work on the nightshift making prints from microfilm. By the early 1960s, he was shooting 16 mm industrial, medical and educational films. He also met Lee Lacy, an innovative commercial director who gave him the latitude to experiment with ways to create new looks for commercials. Kovacs shot a black-and-white Western during weekends in 1963 on a $12,000 budget. The film was never released, but Paul Lewis, the production manager, introduced him to a young director named Richard Rush. They subsequently collaborated on A Man Called Dagger, The Savage Seven, Hells Angels on Wheels and other biker films. Lewis also introduced Kovacs to Peter Bogdanovich in 1966 and Dennis Hopper in 1968. Hopper was interested in meeting Kovacs because he had seen Pysch-Out. “Some people have told me that was my best work from that period,” Kovacs says. “I think we succeeded in putting the audience into the middle of that film. My first instinct was to tell Dennis I didn’t want to do any more biker films, but he told me this one was different.” Kovacs met with Hopper, Lewis and art director Jerry Kay. Hopper tossed the script aside, and acted out all of the parts during a spellbinding three-hour meeting. At the end of that meeting, Kovacs asked Hopper when they were going to begin. The next day, he, Hopper and Lewis drove to New Orleans scouting locations along the way. Easy Rider was mainly produced on the road by a 12-person crew. They had one camera body, and packed all of the electrical grip gear into a five-ton truck. There was no room or money for a dolly, and a Chevy convertible served as the camera car, with a sheet of plywood held in place by a sandbag serving as the shooting platform. Easy Rider has the look and feel of an improvised film spiced with the flavor of reality, but Kovacs says every scene was carefully planned, rehearsed and staged. “The film has a spirit that people still like,” Kovacs says. “My favorite scene is the last campfire. It was incredible writing by Terry (Southern) and superb performances. I knew something important was happening and didn’t want to mess it up. It makes me feel good when people come out of festival screenings today and tell me the same things and ask the same questions I heard 33 years ago. It still shocks the audience when the characters played by Dennis and Peter are killed.” Around 1980, writing in Crawdaddy!, a music magazine, Ellen Wolf observed that Kovacs viewed his craft as one that required a coherent aesthetic beyond technical fluency. She credited him with espousing a collaborative ethic of filmmaking which inspired “a magical communal chemistry.” Wolf cited the wrenching scene where Hopper’s and Fonda’s characters are murdered. 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 improvised by putting the camera on one skid with counter-weights on the other skid. Then, he prayed for the wind to give the copter the lift it needed. Easy Rider premiered at Cannes, where the filmmakers were lauded by critics and audiences. It also rang up surprisingly big numbers at the box office, and earned Oscar nominations for Southern, Hopper and Fonda. Kovacs’ career was also finally ascending. Movie critics identified him, Rush and Hopper among a “new wave” of fresh American talent who were changing the industry. Maybe best of all, it was still the peak of the Cold War, but Easy Rider played for nine months at the biggest theater in Budapest. His mother and father were proud. However, Kovacs was still a Hollywood outsider, excluded from the camera Guild in Los Angeles, which meant he couldn’t shoot studio films. One day, he and Zsigmond decided to visit the ASC clubhouse in Hollywood to inquire about requirements for joining. They were crushed when a member ordered them to leave as quickly as possible. Within two years of completing Easy Rider, Kovacs lensed seven other films, including That Cold Day in the Park, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Movie and Alex in Wonderland. All four of those milestone films were budgeted under a million dollars. That Cold Day in the Park was Robert Altman’s first effort at directing a narrative film for the cinema. The company constructed a 13 or 14 room penthouse set. Altman told Kovacs he didn’t know the sequence yet, but there was going to be a handheld shot connecting every one of those rooms. “It was physically difficult doing long, handheld shots in those days,” Kovacs says. “There wasn’t any Steadicam and the cameras weren’t portable. It was the same with lighting. I didn’t want to shoot into flat light. I still remember that shot. Altman had it perfectly planned. It ended with a reflection of the characters in a brass planter.” Kovacs describes another scene from Five Easy Pieces filmed in a car driving along the Oregon coast. He was in the front passenger’s seat with the camera mounted on a plank looking in from outside the window. Nicholson was driving and two hitchhikers were in the backseat. “The sun was dipping toward the horizon and I was getting beautiful dappled light on both hitchhikers,” he says. “I kept reminding Jack to keep the sun on his left. In another important scene, Jack and Susan Anspach were sitting on the edge of a cliff. Bob (Rafelson) called for a close-up of Jack, but I saw something, and said, ‘No, no. We need Susan.’ Bob told me to go for it, but it wasn’t until we saw dailies when we both realized how perfectly her blue eyes matched the sky and the ocean at that moment. It was so beautiful it made me shiver. That unplanned shot captured the essence of the tone, texture and mood of the story. If we shot Jack’s close-up first, the sky would have been darker when we got to Susan.” Kovacs collaborated with Paul Mazursky on Alex
in Wonderland in 1970. “I was angry, upset, disappointed and discouraged,” he says. “All those emotions were flying around in my head. Paul told me I was going to have to trust somebody. Several people recommended Bobby Byrne (ASC). I arranged a lunch meeting and laid it on the line. I told Bobby I was used to operating my own camera, and I didn’t want any trouble if there were times when I wanted to operate. He was watching me with kind of a stern look, and asked if I wanted him to be a dummy. I told him I just wanted to handle some complicated shots. He agreed, and later I found out why. It was a big help having an operator, because Mazursky is a brilliant director, and having Bobby there allowed me to concentrate on lighting. I trusted Bobby more and more as the film went on. Finally, there was a big crowd scene and we decided we better use two cameras. It was kind of a montage, so Bobby and I did not want to know what the other one was doing. The next day at dailies, we couldn’t tell which was camera A or B. After that I trusted him completely.” In the wake of the financial success of Easy Rider, BBS, the production company, had the means to turn out a number of other meaningful films, including Five Easy Pieces and King of Marvin Gardens. The first was directed by Bob Rafelson. Kovacs recalls his first meeting with Rafelson. “He told me it was a road show with the hero, played by Jack (Nicholson), traveling to the Northwest to see his family,” Kovacs says. “I told him about my two years in Seattle and how I loved the spectacular settings. There was an important scene where Jack’s character is making a confession to his father. We wanted a very wide, long shot, where we see him pushing his father in a wheelchair.” Kovacs kept the image in his mind until one evening they were driving on the Oregon coast. It was close to sunset. There was a big dark, cloud on the horizon. “The sun was trying to peek through the clouds. It looked like a very long, sloping contour rimming the cloud,” he says. “We stopped the car, put a double for the father in the wheelchair, and got this dramatic, wide, long master shot of Jack pushing him with a wide strip of sunlight and a dark cloud in the background. Later, when we shot the close-ups, Jack was very sensitive about it. There was just Jack, the actor who played his father, Bob (Rafelson) and me. He didn’t want anyone else there.” He had a similar situation a few years later while filming King of Marvin Gardens with Nicholson again in a starring role. The actor had a monolog that closes the film. “It was very difficult for him emotionally,” Kovacs recalls. “It was very well written, but he was improvising and adding so much to it. He didn’t want anyone else there. I was looking at his face and he was so vulnerable. It was one of the great moments that I’ve seen with an actor who was willing to completely strip himself emotionally.” Kovacs says that the Atlantic City location provided an ideal setting for King of Marvin Gardens. The city was slowly decaying. Old hotels were being torn down. When a famous, old hotel was imploded, they instinctively used that as a background for a shot with Nicholson in the foreground. It was a symbolic image that was important to the story, because it reflected the decaying relationship between the two brothers played by Bruce Dern and Nicholson and their broken dreams. “We used huge lobbies that were empty with very little background action,” he says. “There were old people sort of shuffling, going nowhere. There was an establishing shot with Jack in this huge hallway leading into the lobby. The camera turned and revealed huge beautiful columns and grandeur. In the distance, there was a piano tuner, and you could hear, plink, plink, plink. It was chilling.” It was a perfect example of wordless visual story-telling. Kovacs lensed What's Up, Doc?, a comedy directed by Bogdanovich and starring Barbara Streisand and Ryan O’Neal in 1972. “Barbara was already a big star, and she was a fabulous talent,” he says. “She had great ideas about how to make scenes funnier or better. I only had one week off between What’s Up, Doc? and King of Marvin Gardens. They were totally different films in every way — composition, colors, camera movement and lighting. What's Up, Doc? was kind of cartoonish with a lot of primary colors and slapstick acting. King of Marvin Gardens was somber and heavy.” In 1973, Bogdanovich called Kovacs and with great news. He had a wonderful story, and he was planning to shoot it in black and white. Then, he hung up. Kovacs was wondering whether he heard it right. Black-and-white films were practically obsolete. The film, Paper Moon, was adapted from a novel called Addie Pray. Kovacs explains that the story is set in the depression era during the 1930s. Bogdanovich wanted it to feel and look like time has passed the characters by and their lives are standing still. It was perfect for a black-and-white aesthetic. “I sort of knew about the principals of black-and-white photography, and the basic filtration needed to enhance certain tones and repress others,” Kovacs says. “One of my tests was in the Mojave desert with rolling hills and different rock formations. There were lights and shadows and a cobalt blue sky that was flat with no texture. I shot 10,000 feet of black-and-white film just on that test. Peter told me that Orson Welles was his house guest and he invited me to visit one night. It seemed like I was in the presence of a giant. I didn't know what to say. Orson told me he heard Peter and I were going to make a black-and-white movie. He said, ‘Use a red filter, my boy.’” Kovacs experimented and ultimately found that he liked the red filters in exteriors and orange #1 filters in interiors. Shooting Paper Moon was like a dream come true, Kovacs says, as he describes a delicate scene where Madeline Kahn was dressed in high heels and a white dress, which seems three dimensional against the dark sky photographed on black-and-white film. In 1975, Kovacs got a phone call from Hal Ashby, who said he was making a movie about beautiful women. Warren Beatty was the producer and one of the stars. He wanted to make sure Kovacs understood how the decadent society at the center of the film worked. He told Kovacs Shampoo was about hair. “I had three of the most beautiful women in front of my camera, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn and Lee Grant,” he says. “I used a lot of backlight and kickers, because their hair was the main thing.” Radio Flyer is among his personal favorites from the early 1990s. The fantasy story is about two boys, seven and nine years old, who build a magical wagon that helps them escape from reality. Kovacs describes an extraordinary dream sequence. “A buffalo comes to one of the boys in a dream,” he says. “It looks through a window into the room where the boy is sleeping, and they talk. The buffalo tells the boy that it is possible that he may get his wish. We shot that scene with both a real buffalo and a mechanical one, because there are things a live buffalo won’t do.” For that shot, they moved off the set onto a dry lake bed in the desert. The only thing there was the boy and his bed. Kovacs distanced the camera from the scene where the boy awakens and sees the buffalo looking at him by using a 1200 mm lens which condensed and flattened the images. The camera was close to the ground, so the film recorded discernable waves of heat rising off the ground. It looked like a mirage. “The look has to come from the story,” Kovacs says. “You can’t arbitrarily choose a certain look and squeeze it into any story. Every story has its own life, and its own dimensions. The tones and colors are different for each story. This is what you have to understand as a cinematographer, and it’s usually a subconscious process.” There are innumerable stories about people he has worked with and films he has shot. Kovacs shot Ghostbusters, a big visual effects film in 1984. Richard Edlund, ASC, was the visual effects supervisor. Kovacs shot the live-action scenes, and Edlund filmed special effects elements in 65 mm format. Kovacs didn’t see the composited effects shots until he was timing the film. It was a totally different story when they collaborated on Multiplicity in 1996. The film featured Michael Keaton cast in four roles, the main character and three clones. Keaton appeared in multiple roles in many scenes. Every day there were effects shots involving Keaton’s multiple characters. Kovacs filmed all of the elements in anamorphic format. There was never a static shot. The actor was always moving and the kinetic energy was tactile. Eye contact by the different characters played by Keaton was vital. “Cinematography requires tremendous control,” Kovacs says, “and it is 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, 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. Cinematography is probably the most under-rated art form of the 20th century.” Kovacs has come a long way from the farming village where he was born and raised, but he has never forgotten his roots. “I asked George Illes, my teacher, 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. I’ll never forget that promise I made.”
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