Vilmos Zsigmond and the late Laszlo Kovacs shot some of the epochal films of the past 40 years, including Easy Rider, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Five Easy Pieces and, for better or worse, Heaven's Gate. And just as their careers were made in Hollywood, their story of how they got there is a silver screen classic as well. Born and raised in Hungary, having witnessed both World War II and the Cold War that followed, Zsigmond and Kovacs were film students in Budapest when the Soviet tanks rolled in to squash the October 1956 uprising there. After three weeks of filming, they escaped Hungary with 30,000 feet of film hidden in corn sacks, just as the crackdown was taking effect. They made their way to America, and eventually, the fringes of Hollywood, where they cut their teeth on such indelible delights as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies before they graduated to more stately fare.

Their story is told in No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos, a documentary by Jim Chressanthis that airs tonight on PBS'Independent Lens.

For an article about the film, from the July-August 2007 issue of Documentary, click here.