Andrew Laszlo - Life and Career in The United States (1947-1996)

Life and Career in The United States (1947-1996)

On arrival, Andrew was taken under the wings of his Uncle, George Laszlo, who was a painter, inventor and lithographer already living in New York City. Andrew quickly adjusted to life in Manhattan. As he stated in his own words for the documentary Cinematographer Style:

"My main objective was to keep my head above water, work and have enough money to live, learn the language, the faster the better, because that was the most essential element in getting work. Most importantly, I was trying to get work that was in some ways connected with photography.

For some time I worked in the laboratory of a company that printed textiles and wallpaper with a photographic process. I worked in the darkroom, as I put it, to keep my fingers in the developer. At one time, I worked as a door-to-door baby photographer. I had a camera and a few lights I could do the work with.

Then the greatest break of my life came. I was the number one person from New York City to be drafted by the army for the Korean War. I wound up in the U.S. Army motion picture school, which was wonderful. We not only had all the equipment, the school insisted we shoot 35mm motion picture film, day-in and day-out, thousands of feet and, of course, doing it is the greatest way to learn.

When I came out of the army it was a little bit rough. I was a young fellow, trying to enter the industry, which was very difficult because I had no track record. I tried absolutely everything to get work. In fact, I resorted to gags that nowadays I’m actually a bit self-conscious to talk about. I was turned down by so many producers, even smalltime ones; I couldn’t even get past secretaries. At one point, I sent out hand-printed résumés on sandpaper just so they would remember it. I sent out résumés on shirt cardboard so they couldn’t crumple it up and toss it in the wastebasket. The breaks finally came. I took any job offered to me, as long as I had a chance to be behind a camera, do some lighting, experiment with lenses and so on. Then better jobs were offered and that is how I got started. As I said earlier, the important thing is to stick with it."

Shortly before his discharge from the US Army Signal Corps, Andrew married his New York-born sweethart, Ann Granger. Soon, the family grew to three with the arrival of his first son, also named Andrew. With perseverance, he landed a job as a camera operator on The Phil Silvers Show. This was followed by a number of other TV shows, including Naked City where he served as the Director of Photography. With greater opportunities came the necessity to work on locations around the world. Resisting the temptation to move to Hollywood, Andrew settled with his family in the suburbs of New York where three more children (Jim, Jeffrey and Elizabeth) arrived in quick succession.

Andrew started to work with TV personality Ed Sullivan in 1953 and filmed programs in Portugal, Alaska and Ireland. In 1959, Ed 'kidnapped' Andrew to Havana, Cuba under the pretense that they would be filming a segment in the Dominican Republic. Ed's real goal was to do an interview with Fidel Castro who had just overthrown the Batista government. Ed, unfortunately, did not realize that the electrical system in Cuba would not support the camera equipment and lighting normally used in the United States. This created enormous technical issues for the crew with the possibility that the equipment could cause a blackout in the entire neighborhood. Somehow, the footage turned out OK if only passably so.

In 1962, Andrew was offered his first feature film, One Potato, Two Potato, a controversial film about the interracial marriage of a black man and white divorcee. In 1966, he filmed Francis Ford Coppola's You're A Big Boy Now, with Geraldine Page receiving an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress. This was followed in 1968 by The Night They Raided Minsky's, a big-budget musical marred by the mid-production death of Bert Lahr.

On August 15, 1965, The Beatles were scheduled to give a concert at Shea Stadium in New York City. Andrew took on this Ed Sullivan production with trepidation and excitement since it would be the first extremely large rock concert to be filmed for television. Even with careful preparation, the film crew was not prepared for the piercing screams of an audience made up of 56,000 teenagers. The sound system was completely overwhelmed, making it necessary to dub much of the song tracks in postproduction. Nevertheless, and using 14 cameras scattered through the place, the crew managed to film not just the Beatles but much of the audience in the stands and the security detail that was hoping that a major stampede would not break out. When all was said and done, the crew had recorded over 200,000 feet of film of which only 10,800 made it into the finished documentary. As a long-lasting effect, Andrew's hearing was never to be normal again.

In 1979, he filmed the Walter Hill cult film The Warriors. This movie gave Andrew the opportunity to devise several cinematic techniques, including the innovative lighting used for subway car interior shots. Musing in his 2000 book "Every Frame a Rembrandt," he says:

"If made today, The Warriors would probably be an altogether different movie. The availability of fast and more sensitive, more forgiving negative and positive film stocks, faster lenses in all focal ranges, smaller, more powerful lights, electronic postproduction - all would add up to different photographic techniques, which would negate the need for the same ingenuity in dealing with the difficulties of cinematography in 1978."

Movie buffs may get the chance to see if Andrew was right, when the remake of The Warriors comes out sometime in 2012.

Returning to television, Andrew was the cinematographer on the 1980 five-part NBC miniseries Shōgun starring Richard Chamberlain. Filmed entirely on location in Japan, the production had many difficulties including the challenge of conversation with and direction to actors and extras who spoke no English. An unfortunate but funny anecdote often retold by Andrew was the premature kickoff of a fierce action sequence in Osaka harbor including guns blazing, extras jumping into the water, bombs exploding and boats sinking everywhere. Unfortunately, the cameras were not rolling. The whole scene had to be reshot at great cost of time and money. The details of this incident are recalled in Adrew's book "It's a Wrap."

His last feature film Newsies, filmed in 1991, was about a newspaper delivery-boy's strike that took place in 1899. The film starred Christian Bale and Robert Duvall. Although the movie was a box-office flop, it gained a cult following and was turned into a stage musical at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. It will move to Broadway for a limited run from March to June, 2012.

With Newsies in the can, Andrew decide that it was time to change his focus from TV and film production to teaching, fly-fishing, and woodworking.