PICTURE PERFECT

The Baltimore Sun

Any time you're watching a motorcycle chase and you feel as if you're sitting on the handlebars, any time the sun flares across the composition of a romantic scene and seems to warm the lovers' bodies, any time black and white lighting molds old storefronts into eloquent portraiture, you're witnessing the legacy of Laszlo Kovacs, the Hungarian-born cinematographer whose fearless approach to filmmaking energized directors as different as Robert Altman, Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich and, later, Cameron Crowe.

Like his friend Vilmos Zsigmond, Kovacs, who died Saturday at the age of 74, took everything he learned while studying at Budapest's Academy of Drama and Film Art and chronicling the Hungarian uprising against the Soviets in 1956 and gave generations of American filmmakers audacious blends of elegance and immediacy. A short list of his greatest work would contain Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, Richard Rush's Getting Straight, Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Bogdanovich's Paper Moon, Ashby's Shampoo and Crowe's Say Anything.

A decade after he and Zsigmond made it to the United States (in 1957), with little more than their smuggled footage of the Soviet crackdown in Hungary, they became a potent team influence.

Shampoo's screenwriter, Robert Towne, said yesterday, "The way he shot Easy Rider was a seminal exercise - he did things that were never done before, like shoot straight into the sun. He had a wonderful sense of exteriors; he knew how to pull you into the landscape."

But Kovacs had been doing all that for years. What's wonderful about his career is that it spans Europe and America, high-end and low-end production, seat-of-the-pants improvisation and exquisite scene-making. It reminds us that the renaissance of American film wasn't just about creating new techniques but rediscovering everything that already had been great in the history of American film. In fact, with Easy Rider, Kovacs was doing with motorcycles what the first American filmmakers did with horses and rattletrap cars.

It was for Rush (later known for the cult masterpiece The Stunt Man) that Kovacs developed his celebrated early style. Rush was making quirky, often comical exploitation movies, and he needed a cameraman for a James Bond parody called A Man Called Dagger. Kovacs showed him footage from National Geographic and Time/Life TV specials and said he'd never shot a feature before, keeping quiet about soft-core porn credits like Kiss Me Quick and The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill.

"He turned out to be the best hand-held cameraman I've ever met before or since," Rush said yesterday. "And that was very important in those days because we did everything on location and had to catch everything on the run. We had to invent in the moment, and he was good at it. He was the kind of guy who would jump in with both feet and a shovel - sometimes literally, because we used a nonunion crew and we couldn't afford cranes. So we had to improvise camera mounts and sometimes bury the dolly to get low angles. I'm just looking at a still of the two of us looking very disgusted right next to a wrong-way sign that probably reflects something we'd just done."

Kovacs and Rush stretched their flexibility on Hells Angels on Wheels, The Savage Seven and Psych-Out, the Haight-Ashbury trip film that caught Hopper's eye for Easy Rider. Along the way, Kovacs and Rush perfected the zoom-lens technique Rush dubbed "'critical focus,' in which, in the same shot, you can change the focus from the foreground to a face in the background, and have one element crystal-clear and the rest of the elements disappear. It's very smooth and makes for an entirely different poetic effect than the cut."

Rush brought Kovacs and his crew into the ranks of Hollywood union filmmakers with the big-studio campus-riot flick Getting Straight. Soon afterward, Kovacs shot Five Easy Pieces for Rafelson and Jack Nicholson (who appeared in Easy Rider and starred in several Rush quickies). To Rush, Kovacs proved his sensitivity on Rafelson's film about a man divided against himself: "You have to remember that in those days we didn't have a video assist. You relied on your cinematographer to tell you how your actors' emotions registered on screen. When you had Laszlo, you could trust him."

To cinematographer James Chressanthis, writer-producer-director of the forthcoming Laszlo & Vilmos: The Story of Two Refugees Who Changed the Look of American Cinema, Kovacs' masterpiece was the Depression tale Paper Moon. "It was subtle in a way that was very right for the story," says Chressanthis. Kovacs put the density and purity of Walker Evans' stills into a moving image.

Kovacs achieved something completely different for Shampoo: in Towne's words, "an effortless pastel look that was perfect for Southern California and perfect for the tone of this particular movie. There was nothing mannered about his work, he never employed an overactive camera - and that simplicity was right for comedy. So when he did come up with a flourish like strobe-lighting in a party scene, it really registered."

On this Warren Beatty production, Kovacs "was as much a blithe spirit as any Middle European ever gets to be," says Towne. "Warren and I were a little more dour in disposition, so it was great to have a person around who was so wonderfully positive."

The Greek-born cinematographer Phedon Papamichael (Sideways), now directing From Within in Havre de Grace, considers Kovacs and Zsigmond pioneers in the globalization of Hollywood cinematography. At this year's Oscars, Zsigmond lost to a Mexican, Guillermo Navarro. Kovacs was never nominated for an Oscar, but he received several Lifetime Achievement Awards, including one from the American Society of Cinematographers in 2002.

He increasingly poured his high spirits and sense of vocation into what both Chressanthis and Papamichael call "giving back" to a rising generation of cinematographers. Papamichael regularly attended Camerimage in Lodz, Poland, a festival devoted to cinematography that Kovacs supported for the past five years. "It attracts 2,000 to 3,000 students from around the world, and he would go every year despite illness, staying up every day till 5 in the morning. For this festival, and for Laszlo, it was all about love for the craft."

michael.sragow@baltsun.com

Kovacs' career highlights

Miss Congeniality (2000) My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) Multiplicity (1996) Say Anything (1989) Mask (1985) Ghost Busters (1984) Frances (1982) New York, New York (1977) Shampoo (1975) Freebie and the Bean (1974) Paper Moon (1973) Slither (1973) What's Up, Doc? (1972) Five Easy Pieces (1970) Getting Straight (1970) Easy Rider (1969) The Savage Seven (1968) Psych-Out (1968) Hells Angels on Wheels (1967)

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