It was Washington Irving who first took liberties with the history of Astoria. His 1836 book, Astoria, was commissioned by John Jacob Astor to put a heroic spin on the founding of his fur-trading post at Fort Astoria on the mouth of the Columbia River in 1811. 174 years later, a new legend came to life on the movie screens, courtesy of the screenplay for The Goonies. Here, the long-dead bloodthirsty pirate One-Eyed Willie hides his gold-laden ship in a secret cavern just outside town. While that cave was actually a Hollywood set, the film’s main house in Astoria’s fictional “Goon Docks” section overlooking the Columbia is still a local tourist attraction. And while the teenaged Goonies spent more time adventuring than in a classroom, undercover teacher Arnold Schwarzenegger has his hands full as substitute for the youngest class at Astoria Elementary school (Astor Elementary) in Kindergarten Cop. The film puts an emphasis on the relaxed pace of life in this quiet corner of Oregon, before ending things with a fiery shoot-out in the gym locker room. The school’s exterior is introduced with the Astoria-Megler toll bridge to Washington State in the background — a looming set piece that appears in many Astoria-shot films. In Short Circuit, “alive” robot, Johnny 5 escapes from Nova Labs in Washington and makes his way to Astoria. There, he hides out in the house of an animal lover who teaches the state-of-the-art killing machine a respect for life. Meanwhile, it’s an orca — among nature’s finest aquatic killing machines — who imparts a lesson about whale conservation to a young orphan in Free Willy. The climactic (yes, fake) “jump” over the rock wall takes place at Hammond Mooring Basin. This is an echo of Astoria’s longtime nautical tradition. The city’s wharf areas and large number of Victorian and Queen Anne-style houses have led some locals to market it as the “Little San Francisco of the Northwest.” And yet, if as Mark Twain put it, “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” then the father and son traveling The Road might say Astoria has the coldest beach view to the apocalypse. Parts of this Cormac McCarthy adaptation were filmed along the same stretch of nearby shoreline that spawned the area’s dark reputation as “the Graveyard of the Pacific.” That’s because the area’s treacherous shallows have wrecked hundreds of vessels over the last 200 years. This somber legacy fits well with the plot of The Ring Two, in which a mother and son flee to Astoria from Seattle to escape the malevolent (and soggy) spirit of a not-quite-drowned young girl. But with the number of projects coming through town, good film karma is in the cards for Astoria.