Laszlo
Kovacs, ASC... by Bob Fisher In November, Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, received two lifetime achievement awards
from different film festivals recognizing his artistic contributions to
advancing the art of cinematography. He received the awards at the Hawaii
International Film Festival and at the CamerImage ’98 International Festival
of the Art of Cinematography, in Torun, Poland. The Hawaii festival recognizes
films produced in Pacific Rim countries. CamerImage is an international
festival.
Both festivals celebrated the extraordinary impact Kovacs has made in
advancing the art of filmmaking. They also cited his influence on young
filmmakers in every part of the world. Kovacs has compiled more than 60
narrative films credits, including Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The
King of Marvin Gardens, Paper Moon, Shampoo, New York, New York, What’s
Up Doc?, The Last Waltz, The Runner Stumbles, Ghostbusters, Mask, Little
Nikita, F.I.S.T and My Best Friend’s Wedding.
His parents wanted a better life for their son, so they sent him to Budapest,
where he lived in a boarding house and attended a local secondary school.
At least, that was the plan. By that time, the Nazis were defeated and replaced
by the Soviets who installed their own puppet government that answered to
the communist regime in Moscow. Kovacs routinely skipped math, biology and
chemistry classes, and spent that time at local cinemas. It wasn’t unusual
for him to see two or three films a day. Most were Russian and Hungarian
propaganda films which lauded heroic factory workers who exceeded their
quotas. There were also glimpses of something bigger with occasional screenings
of New Wave films from Italy and France.
It was all the same to Kovacs, who was fascinated by the process of filmmaking.
He was already interested in cinematography, though he wasn’t exactly certain
about what that entailed. On the second try, despite his spotty academic
record, Kovacs was accepted at the Academy of Drama and Film Art, in Budapest,
where George Illes, a legendary Hungarian filmmaker and head of the cinema
department, took him under his wing.
Kovacs was in his final year at school in 1956, when a spontaneous revolt
that began on the streets of Budapest seemed to be on the verge of moderating
the communist regime. Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, a recent graduate,
borrowed a 35mm camera from the school, along with a generous supply of
film. They used the camera to document incredible acts of bravery as citizens
armed only with homemade weapons tried to stop Soviet tanks and soldiers
when they poured into the city en masse and brutally crushed the revolt.
Kovacs and Zsigmond packed 30,000 feet of film into potato sacks, which
they carried through a forest en route to the Austrian border. It was a
daring and remarkably courageous act. By then, Russian soldiers were trolling
the border, searching for ‘counter revolutionaries’ as they characterized
those who joined the revolt.
The best that Kovacs and Zsigmond could hope for if they were caught was
a trip to a Soviet concentration camp. However, chances were that the film
they were attempting to carry out of the country would be their death sentence.
At that point, Russian soldiers were shooting Hungarians who were caught
with cameras.
“We felt it was important to get that film out of the country,” Kovacs
explains, “so, the world could see what really happened.”
They were caught and searched once near the border, but managed to hide
the film. A villager who spoke Russian probably helped them survive, when
he told an officer they were local citizens who had been foraging in the
woods for food. They made it into Austria, toting their film that evening,
with the help of Hungarian border guards.
Kovacs and Zsigmond arrived together in the U.S. as political refugees
in 1957, and they began the slow process of learning to speak English one
word at a time, and trying to find a place for themselves in the film industry.
It was an improbable, if not impossible dream, but Kovacs never considered
the possibility of failure. Not after coming so far.
He worked for a still photographer in upstate New York, and then at a
motion picture lab in Seattle, where he processed black and white newsfilm.
In 1959, Kovacs agreed to meet Zsigmond in Los Angeles, where they intended
to pursue their careers as cinematographers. There were no open doors. None
were even partially ajar.
Kovacs found work with a title insurance company, making prints from microfilm.
Eventually, he found opportunities to shoot 16mm industrial, medical and
educational films, as well as occasional documentaries. In 1963, he and
four other aspiring filmmakers pooled their resources and shot a Western
film with a $12,000 budget.
“We never expected it to be released,” Kovacs says, “but finally I would
have a sample of a film with a story I had shot that I could show people.”
The following year, Paul Lewis, the production manager on that project,
introduced Kovacs to a young director named Richard Rush, who liked the
sample footage. A few days later, Rush asked Kovacs to shoot a low-budget
film, A Man Called Dagger. Kovacs subsequently worked with Rush on
a number of other films, including Freebie and the Bean, which was
probably the first film shot with a Panaflex camera.
Kovacs also met Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich through Lewis, and
he worked on a number of their earliest films. In 1969, Lewis introduced
Kovacs to Dennis Hopper who was getting ready to shoot a film with Peter
Fonda and Jack Nicholson.
In the first conversation, it sounded like another exploitation film about
motorcycle gangs, destined for a short run at drive-ins. Kovacs had had
his fill of that type of film, having shot eight in one year. He said he
wasn’t interested, but Hopper was persistent, and a few days later they
met and he acted out all of the parts of the script.
“At the end of that meeting, I asked when we could start shooting,” Kovacs
recalls. “That’s how I happened to shoot Easy Rider. We knew it was
something special, but none of us realized that it would win awards and
become so influential.”
Easy Rider was filmed during a 12-week journey from Los Angeles
to New Orleans, entirely at practical locations. Kovacs augmented available
light sparingly. His tools were limited to what he could carry in a five-ton
truck, including an old Arriflex camera with a single zoom lens and a blimp
to muffle sound, a single power generator and a smattering of lamps, cable
and other gaffer gear. Kovacs recalls that the only color negative film
available from Kodak at that time was rated for an exposure index of 50.
It has been a long journey from Easy Rider to his current film
Jack Frost, and an even longer one from that village 60 miles outside of
Budapest where he grew up on a farm.
On receiving the lifetime achievement award at CamerImage, Kovacs spoke
enthusiastically about workshops he conducted for some 300 students at
the festival. “I once asked George Illes how I could thank him for everything
he has done for me,” Kovacs recalls. “He said I could thank him by helping
young filmmakers. That’s what this award is about. It’s an opportunity
for me to say thank you to my mentor.” (Editor’s note: Zsigmond owns a
tee shirt that says, “I’m not Laszlo.” He says that no one ever asks him
who Laszlo is. That’s how far they have come.)
|
Maybe he
can finally retire that tee shirt. The one that says, ‘I’m not Vilmos.’
Kovacs
was born and raised in Hungary during the World War II Nazi occupation of
his native land. His parents were farmers, who lived in a small village
some 60 miles from Budapest. Kovacs began developing a taste for movies
when he was 10 years old. On weekends, a room in the schoolhouse was converted
into a temporary cinema. Kovacs used to deliver flyers advertising each
week’s film. In exchange, he was granted a front bench seat free of charge.
He never missed a screening.