Ok, so you might remember from a post last year that I have a little bit of Hollywood experience (see blog entry on 10/6/05). I'd like to put this experience to use and offer a location suggestion to the producers of Rocky VI.

Astoria, Oregon

It's got everything you need to make the perfect movie backdrop, from a quaint underappreciated downtown area to a dock along the river that is a resting place for incredibly loud sea lions. Can't you see them cheering (barking) for Rocky Balboa as he runs along the river during a montage scene? If you think about it, the sound of a barking sea lion is very similar to Rocky yelling "Adrian!" in the earlier Rocky movies.

I decided to go to a slightly different part of town this morning on my jog and I had a close encounter with these sea lions. They're considerably larger than I remembered from the zoo. I stopped at the edge of the dock (about 10 feet away from the nearest sea lion) to watch them bark at me and apparently they were a little spooked by my presence, so they slowly (and quite comically) tried to reverse direction and make their way to the water. I shrugged my shoulders and thought, "Well, that's probably the most interesting thing that is going to happen to me today" and then I continued on my run.

Uh oh. I just remembered that Astoria has already served as the backdrop for a movie. Goonies. Man, now there's a funny movie. Scrap the Rocky VI idea.