American Cinematographer - September 2008 - 58

A Tale of 2 Cinematographers Right: Chressanthis captures footage of Dennis Hopper, who hired Kovacs as his director of photography on the landmark road movie Easy Rider. “[Laszlo] was the greatest telephoto operator I’ve ever seen,” Hopper says. Below: Actor Peter Fonda offers his own memories of Kovacs and the freewheeling Easy Rider shoot. crushed the 1956 insurrection. The two young friends risked their lives by shooting footage of the uprising, which they then smuggled out to the West. Kovacs shares a defining memory from that time, recalling that the arduous flight from Hungary took him and Zsigmond through an icy, forbidding field. “It was a most incredible sight,” he says. “It was a plowed field but frozen and very hard to walk on, [with] very heavy fog. We could see from the right and all the way to the left little tiny figures going [in] the same direction — they were all going toward the Austrian border. The image haunts me and has followed me the rest of my life.” Both Kovacs and Zsigmond relate their determined struggle to break into Hollywood. Speaking by phone, Zsigmond remembers the pair’s first visit to the ASC Clubhouse: “A film critic who appreciated our work said, ‘Why don’t you become ASC members?’ and gave us the address. So we went there and knocked on the door, and one of the members literally threw us out! He told us, ‘Come back when you learn English.’ The same exact thing happened with the union. Later on, it was, ‘Get a job first and then come back.’ Of course, we couldn’t get a job because we were not union members. It was a totally closed shop.” Speaking to this point, Malatynska offers, “I feel I have a small glimpse of where they came from, as my parents left Poland with little or nothing to go back to. When you have lost everything, you have nothing to lose. Laszlo and Vilmos leaped for their dream.” Excluded from the mainstream, Kovacs and Zsigmond made a name for themselves working on non-union, ultra-low-budget features, including a number of Roger Corman films with such entertain- ing titles as The Nasty Rabbit, Psycho a Go-Go, Blood Creatures From the Prehistoric Planet and, most memorably, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? With the benefit of hindsight, Zsigmond reflects, “We came at the right time. Things were changing and the style of movies was changing. The young, upcoming directors were influenced by European films and needed a different style on a very low budget. We were ready to do that because we were doing low-budget movies. In Europe, we didn’t have much equipment, and we had to be creative. That’s how we got into the mainstream movies.” The breakthrough film for Kovacs was Easy Rider (1969), which he turned down at first. The film became a cultural watershed and is especially notable for Kovacs’ innovative, freewheeling camerawork. During his comments in No Subtitles, Hopper asserts, “I can’t imagine what Easy Rider would have been without [Laszlo],” adding that Kovacs “was the greatest telephoto operator I’ve ever seen.” Chressanthis notes that Kovacs brought a personal perspective to the road-movie genre, gained in part during a cross-country trip he took after arriving in the States. “Laszlo didn’t invent the road movie, but he certainly perfected the genre. He told me that was one of the great lessons he’d learned unconsciously. He made a brilliant decision to go from New York to the West Coast by bus. He sat in the front section of a Greyhound bus for four or five days, right by the driver, watching America roll past his eyes. He said he didn’t realize how much he was influenced by that experience until much later.” The American landscape is a main character in both Easy Rider and another classic road movie, Five Easy Pieces, which Kovacs shot for Rafelson. A key contributor to No 58 September 2008

American Cinematographer - September 2008

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