Cinematographer László Kovács died in his sleep in his Beverly Hills, California, home on 22 July 2007. Born near Budapest, Hungary, on 14 May 1933, he “found international fame after treating the American landscape as a character in the landmark 1969 movie Easy Rider, according to the Los Angeles Times.
One of his first jobs in Hollywood was as an assistant camerman on 1964’s The Time Travelers. He was also an additional director of photography on 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
His usual credit, however, was as cinematographer. His genre jobs with this title include: The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964), Kiss Me Quick! (1964), Blood of Dracula’s Castle (1969), A Reflection of Fear (1973), Ghost Busters (1984), Predator: The Concert (1987), Copycat (1995), Multiplicity (1996), and Jack Frost (1998).
In 1952, Kovács was accepted into the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest. In 1956, during his senior year, a revolt against the communist regime broke out. He and a friend documented the event with a borrowed 35-millimeter camera and film from the school, hiding the camera in a shopping bag with a hole for the lens.
“We saw the Russian tanks driving back and forth and shooting indiscriminately,” he said in an interview in 2006. “People were jumping into doorways. We just looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s go.’ Wherever we heard gunfire, that’s where we went.”
With 30,000 feet of film hidden in potato sacks, they fled across the Austria-Hungary border, which was patrolled by armed Russian solders. They arrived in the United States as political refugees in early 1957.
Kovács is survived by Audrey, his wife of 23 years; his daughters Julianna and Nadia; and a granddaughter.