Laszlo Kovacs: 1933 - 2007
July 24th, 2007 in Movie News, The Movie Biz
What do Easy Rider, Ghost Busters and My Best Friend’s Wedding have in common? These were among the over seventy films that Laszlo Kovacs served as cinematographer. It was recently announced that Kovaks died in his sleep at age seventy-four on July 21.
Even before he become one of the top Hollywood cinematographers, Kovacs made history when he and fellow filmmaking student Vilmos Zsigmond shot footage of the Russian tanks putting down the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Kovacs and Zsigmond, along with the film, were smuggled out of Hungary. Starting out on documentaries, Kovacs eventually worked on some of the exteme low budget films for people like Ray Dennis Steckler and Al Adamson on the periphery of Hollywood. It was at American International where Kovacs first became associated with young directors such as Peter Bogdanovich and Richard Rush, as well as an actor named Dennis Hopper, that Kovacs had the opportunity to develop his reputation as a low budget artist.
After Easy Rider became a major hit in 1969, Kovacs was invited to be cinematographer on mainstream Hollywood films, although some of his past work was released well after it was completed into the early Seventies. Kovacs received a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 2002.
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