Laszlo Kovacs

László Kovács, cinematographer: born Cece, Hungary 14 May 1933; married 1984 Audrey Vaught (two daughters); died Beverly Hills, California 22 July 2007.

The cinematographer László Kovács was a key figure in Hollywood's "new wave" of the late Sixties. He photographed the seminal film Easy Rider (1969), which followed two hippies as they traversed the United States on their motor-bikes. Rarely has the world of roadside diners and dusty landscapes been captured as authentically as by Kovács, who superbly visualised the arid atmosphere of desert towns and nights in the brush.

It was the first of several films he made with actor Jack Nicholson, including Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), the latter with its evocative depiction of a faded Atlantic City in the wintertime. "He was willing and happy to change the conventional rules of film-making," said Rafelson. "He could film air like nobody I've ever seen . . . You had a feeling of environment and atmosphere like in very few films I have ever seen before or since."

Kovács was celebrated for his ability to improvise on location, and is credited with helping to change the look of American cinema, moving away from studio-bound sets to natural locations. He was also one of several cameramen who worked on Spielberg's UFO epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and his later work extended to such hits as Ghostbusters and My Best Friend's Wedding. Surprisingly, he was never nominated for an Oscar, though his highly regarded work also includes what is regarded as one of the finest black-and-white films, Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon (1973). Bogdanovich, like Nicholson, was a champion of Kovács and used him on several films, including What's Up, Doc? and the musical At Long Last Love.

Kovács was born on a farm in Cece, near Budapest, Hungary, in 1932, and later said that it was seeing Citizen Kane in 1948 that inspired him to take up photography. In 1952 he attended the Academy for Theatre and Film Art in Budapest, and he was in his final year when the attempted anti-Communist revolution of 1956 broke out. He and his fellow student Vilmos Zsigmond managed to acquire footage of the event by hiding a borrowed 35mm camera in a shopping bag with a hole for the lens. "Wherever we heard gunfire," he later related, "that's where we went."

The pair then fled across the Austria-Hungary border, dodging armed Russian soldiers, with 30,000ft of film hidden in potato sacks, and reached the United States in 1957 as political refugees. Their exclusive footage was shown by CBS in 1966 as part of a documentary, Ungarn in Flammen (Revolt in Hungary).

Kovács initially had trouble finding work, and took jobs making maple syrup, printing microfilm documents in an insurance office and working in a television laboratory. In 1963 he became an American citizen, and the same year he photographed his first American film with Zsigmond, a short entitled Lullaby which gained them entrance to the technicians' union. In 1964 he was camera assistant to Zsigmond (the pair billing themselves as William Zsigmond and Leslie Kovács) on a low-budget musical comedy The Nasty Rabbit (also known as Spies A-Go-Go), in which a germ-laden rabbit is smuggled into the US by a Russian agent. Kovács also played a small part in the movie.

His first film as director of photography was a little-seen exploitation movie, The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1964). In 1967 he photographed Richard Rush's biker tale, Hells Angels on Wheels, which featured Jack Nicholson as a bored petrol-station attendant who finds excitement with a group of violent motor-cyclists. It was followed by another Rush/Nicholson vehicle, Psych-Out (1968), set in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district at the height of the flower power era.

Kovács was then asked by Peter Bogdanovich to photograph the former journalist's first feature film, Targets (1968), which merged the story of a random sniper with the appearance of a movie star (Boris Karloff) at a drive-in cinema. He worked with Jack Nicholson again on Easy Rider (1969), a film that came to symbolise a whole drop-out generation of disaffected youth. Shot entirely on location with a minuscule budget, this tale of bikers making a trip from California to New Orleans became a key film of the era, making a fortune at the box-office and influencing a generation.

"Kovács was the greatest telephoto operator that I have ever seen and I could never have made Easy Rider without him," said Hopper.

Kovács then photographed Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, described by critic Clive Hirschhorn as "enhanced by László Kovács' gentle, unflamboyant photography which captured all the subtle beauty of the Pacific Northwest". Kovács was now sought after by the era's most individual maverick directors - he worked on Robert Altman's That Cold Day in the Park (1969), Paul Mazursky's Alex in Wonderland (1970), Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie (1971), Alan Myerson's Steelyard Blues (1973), Stuart Rosenberg's Pocket Money (1972) and several films by Bogdanovich, including Paper Moon (1973), with its entrancing evocation of the rural Mid-West in the Thirties that prompted comparisons with John Ford's work.

Describing him as a "great cameraman", Bogdanovich said, "He was just reliable. He could make things look gritty as we did on Paper Moon or very glamorous like we did with Streisand in What's Up, Doc?" Kovács' stunning photography for the musical At Long Last Love was the result of Bogdanovich's request that he make it look "like Top Hat or Swing Time if they had been filmed in colour."

In all, Kovács was cinematographer on more than 70 films. He photographed Barbra Streisand a second time in For Pete's Sake (1974), and captured the glossy world of Beverly Hills celebrity in Shampoo (1975), Hal Ashby's racy saga of a flirtatious hair-dresser (Warren Beatty, as a character based on Jay Sebring, who died in the Sharon Tate massacre).

Kovács was one of seven cameramen who captured the Band's farewell performance on Thanksgiving Day, 1976, in Martin Scorsese's classic documentary The Last Waltz (1977). He also photographed Scorsese's ambitious musical New York, New York (1977), with its potent evocation of the post-war ambience plus striking lighting and photography in the style of Forties musicals for Liza Minnelli's numbers. For The Rose (1979), with Bette Middler as a rock star loosely based on Janis Joplin, he created a murkier world of smoke, drugs and alcohol.

He proved his ability to work with dazzling special effects in Ghostbusters (1984), and more recent films included the chilling hriller Copycat (1995), the hit comedy My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) with Julia Roberts, Rupert Everett and Cameron Diaz, and Miss Congeniality (2000) with Sandra Bullock. Kovács rarely worked in television, but in 1987 he photographed the syndicated special, Elvis' Graceland.

In 2002, Kovács was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Society of Cinematographers.

Tom Vallance

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