A century-old Astoria movie palace is about to fill up with sharks, shipwrecks and student-built robots. Oregon Public Broadcasting's Oregon Field Guide is bringing its traveling screening series to the Liberty Theatre in Astoria on August 21 and to the Neptune Movie House in Long Beach, Washington, the following day, pairing short documentary films with live conversations featuring the scientists and students who appear in them.
The Astoria event, detailed in a release from Oregon Public Broadcasting, will screen short films about Columbia River bar pilots, the sharks of Willapa Bay, and the Warrenton students who design underwater robots. Doors open at 6 p.m. with the program starting at 7 p.m. at the Liberty Theatre, 1203 Commercial St., and tickets cost $15. The following morning, Long Beach's screening opens its doors at 10:15 a.m. with the program beginning at 11 a.m. at the Neptune Movie House, 809 Ocean Beach Blvd. S, with tickets free with a suggested donation.
A Century-Old Stage for the Series
The Liberty Theatre itself carries plenty of local history worth noting before the lights go down. Built between 1924 and 1925 as part of Astoria's rebuild after a catastrophic December 1922 fire destroyed more than 200 downtown buildings, the Italian Renaissance-style venue is one of Oregon's few fully restored 1920s motion picture palaces, according to Wikipedia. The 700-seat theater still displays 12 original Venetian canal oil-on-canvas murals painted in the 1920s by local artist Joseph Knowles, and it secured Oregon Cultural Trust grant funding in late 2024 to restore its facade and fix roof leaks ahead of its 2025 centennial, per the Oregon Cultural Trust.
Long Beach's host venue has its own coastal pedigree. The Neptune Movie House is a family-owned, two-screen cinema and the sole operating movie theater on the Long Beach Peninsula, purchased by its current local owners in October 2018, according to Portland Monthly. The theater expanded to offer outdoor drive-in screenings during the COVID-19 pandemic, the outlet reported.
From Shipwrecks to Shark Superhighways
One of the featured short films follows the men and women who guide massive commercial vessels across one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world. The Columbia River Bar near Astoria is known as the “Graveyard of the Pacific” for the severe standing waves and ocean swells that have caused an estimated 2,000 shipwrecks since 1792, per Wikipedia. Columbia River bar pilots work in 15-day shifts, transferring on and off ships using rope ladders or helicopter hoists in open ocean water to guide vessels through the bar, according to Marine-Pilots.com.
The Willapa Bay shark segment turns from shipwrecks to sevengills. Oregon State University's Big Fish Lab, led by Dr. Taylor Chapple and doctoral candidate Jessica Schulte, studies why large numbers of broadnose sevengill sharks gather in the Washington estuary each year, according to the Oregon State University Foundation, which notes that conservation status for the species remains largely unknown due to limited baseline data. Schulte, described in the OPB release as an Oregon State University fisheries scientist, co-authored a June 2024 study documenting the first scientifically confirmed presence of broadnose sevengill sharks in South Puget Sound's Hammersley Inlet, a finding that expanded the apex predator's known range in Washington estuaries, per Frontiers in Marine Science. At the Astoria event, OPB's Jes Burns will converse with Schulte about the lab's research into what organizers are calling the shark superhighway swimming through Willapa Bay every year.
Warrenton's Robot Builders Take the Stage
The evening's third storyline belongs to Warrenton's underwater robotics team, known as The Rays, whose middle and high school members will bring their marine robots to Astoria for audiences to see up close. The team finished 14th out of 37 international teams at the MATE ROV World Championship in Alpena, Michigan, in June 2024, competing at the advanced ranger level after winning regional qualifiers, according to OPB. The program is co-mentored by full-time middle school science teacher Heidi Lent and retired Boeing engineer Craig Battles, who brings 42 years of robotics and automation experience to the club, which has qualified for regional and international competitions for ten consecutive years, OPB reported.
The student-built vehicles rely on custom octagonal frames, waterproof camera enclosures and wireless sensor floats to complete underwater tasks in pools without a direct line of sight, navigating instead through live video feeds and custom telemetry, according to The Daily Astorian. In Astoria, host Noah Thomas will join Lent and the student roboticists for a conversation about building the machines, before the robots are shown off to the crowd.
Why OPB Is Taking the Show on the Road
Oregon Field Guide explores the Pacific Northwest's natural wonders, environmental issues and outdoor recreation, and its On the Road series is returning to bring featured people on stage for these community conversations. Aaron Scott said the series brings featured people on stage and invites community members to join the conversation, per OPB. Jes Burns added that the events share curiosity about the people and places that define the region, according to the same release.
OPB describes itself as funded entirely by its community, and the Astoria and Long Beach stops are billed as a chance for coastal residents to meet the scientists and students behind the stories firsthand. The Astoria screening happens on Friday, August 21, with the Long Beach program following the next morning, on Saturday, August 22.
