Early life and education
Beggs is a native San Franciscan, born and raised in the Bay Area. His formal training was in visual art: he holds a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts. He has described his approach to sound as rooted in the same principles as painting, drawing parallels between light, mass, contrast, texture, and color in visual work and their sonic counterparts.
During the 1960s Beggs was a passionate audiophile interested in both classical and contemporary music. He began his path into audio as a volunteer field recorder at KPFA radio in Berkeley, eventually establishing a home recording studio in his garage. In 1972 he moved his work to the Kingston Trio Studio in San Francisco's Sentinel Building, which became a creative hub for Bay Area artists and musicians.1
Career
Francis Coppola and the breakthrough
In 1974, when Francis Ford Coppola purchased the Sentinel Building, the two men began working together and formed Beggs/AZ studio. Coppola ultimately bought out Beggs' interest in the space and brought him on as sound designer for Apocalypse Now (1977 production, 1979 release). That film set the terms of Beggs' career. Working without the benefit of later digital tools, he created the film's opening signature sound, the so-called "ghost helicopter," entirely through pure synthesis on a Moog synthesizer, using white noise, envelope generators, filters, and sequencers performed in real time.
In 1979, Apocalypse Now won the Academy Award for Best Sound, shared by Beggs, Walter Murch, Mark Berger, and Nat Boxer. He later received a TEC Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Film Sound.12
Major film work
Over the decades that followed, Beggs built one of the most varied bodies of work in Hollywood sound design:
- Rain Man (1988, dir. Barry Levinson)
- The Godfather Part III (1990, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
- Bugsy (1991, dir. Barry Levinson)
- Adaptation (2002, dir. Spike Jonze)
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004, dir. Alfonso Cuarón)
- The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005, dir. Andrew Adamson)
- Children of Men (2006, dir. Alfonso Cuarón)
He also designed sound for the complete feature filmography of Sofia Coppola: The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), Somewhere (2010), The Bling Ring (2013), and The Beguiled (2017). That partnership is one of the longer sustained director-sound designer relationships in contemporary American cinema. Beggs received Golden Reel Award nominations for his work on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Children of Men.12
Beyond film, Beggs composed scores for three contemporary ballets, including The Awakening, for which he received an Isadora Duncan Award. He has exhibited visual art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Oakland Museum of Art.2
Teaching and institutional work
Beggs taught film sound at California College of the Arts and has conducted master classes for SFFilm. He holds the position of associate fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University. He served on the board of directors of the San Francisco Arts Education Project from 1986 to 2013. His studio is based at the San Francisco Film Centre in the Presidio.2
Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters (1984)
Beggs was hired as sound designer on Ghostbusters, directed by Ivan Reitman. His work on the film produced some of the most recognizable equipment sounds in science-fiction cinema.
The Ectomobile siren. The distinctive wailing alert of the Ectomobile came from an analog process centered on a leopard snarl. Beggs edited, pitched, and otherwise processed the snarl entirely in the analog domain, using an Ampex AG-440 recorder, quarter-inch tape, variable speed operation (VSO), a razor blade, and an Editall splicing block. The resulting sound, part of which was played back in reverse, produces the urgent, otherworldly quality that separates the Ecto-1's siren from any conventional emergency vehicle.3
The proton stream. For the proton pack firing sounds Beggs used a feedback loop in a harmonizer, generating a rhythmic pulsing between a uniform base sound he built first and a Moog synthesizer layer. The interplay between those two elements creates the characteristic crackling oscillation audiences associate with the beams crossing on screen.3
Sound libraries per character. Rather than applying a single universal thrower sound, Beggs constructed a library of raw sounds organized into six or seven distinct families, covering different dramatic situations: a gentler, "whimpery" register for powering the thrower on, variations calibrated to degrees of violence or impact, and one distinct sonic identity for each of the four Ghostbusters' streams.
Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016)
Beggs provided original sound effects for the 2016 Ghostbusters directed by Paul Feig, lending continuity between the new film's audio design and the sounds he created for the 1984 original.
Documentary
Beggs participated in Cleanin' Up The Town: Remembering Ghostbusters (2019), the documentary by Claire and Robert Spengler covering the making of the original film. He was among the crew members interviewed in the California leg of filming during 2010.
