As a boy growing up in occupied Hungary, Kovacs fell in love with the movies. After he was accepted into Budapest’s Academy of Drama and Film Art he saw Citizen Kane (1941). The film “changed my visual vocabulary,” he said, and he decided to become a cinematographer — the director of photography who does the photographic work on movies.
He escaped Hungary in 1956, bringing with him 30,000 feet of film of the Hungarian resistance against Communism, which later was used in a documentary. Arriving finally in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, he worked on National Geographic TV specials. And in 1969, he filmed his breakout movie: Easy Rider, putting his own stamp on the motorcycle trip film based on his own bus ride from New Jersey to the west coast.
Other seminal films included Five Easy Pieces, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, Ghost Busters, Shattered, My Best Friend’s Wedding — more than 70 in all. “He was one of the great wave of cinematographers in the 1970s who basically changed the way movies had looked up until that time,” said Richard Crudo, a former president of the American Society of Cinematographers. Kovacs died at home July 21, apparently from cancer. He was 74.