“I know I was there. I know I met these people,” Mason said. “I had a wonderful time.”
A lifelong Springfielder, Mason was among more than two dozen little people cast to fill the roles of munchkins in Disney’s “Wizard of Oz” prequel starring James Franco, which comes out March 8.
“It was flattering to think I was picked from how many hundreds,” she said. “I didn’t take it for granted.”
Mason, a former special education teacher who currently works in customer service at the new casino in Columbus, personally was selected in 2011 from a submitted video to be “Munchkin No. 14” by director Sam Raimi.
Before she knew it, she was whisked off over the rainbow — to Pontiac, Mich., to be exact, for two months of shooting in which she was paid $250 a day.
“I was just in awe,” Mason said.
Growing up, it never really registered that the iconic munchkins in the original, 1939 movie were little people like her. Most of them had a different type of dwarfism, she said.
Rather, she said she related more to the Oompa-Loompas of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”
But, unlike Tim Burton, who cast just one little actor and then replicated him digitally for the director’s 2005 take on Wonka, Raimi decided to uphold tradition by casting a host of little people to play munchkins.
Among other things, Mason’s duties as a munchkin included having to react to the sight of a flying witch, played by Mila Kunis, and — naturally — having to help sing the munchkin song.
She also signed on to do a possible sequel.
For Mason, who graduated from North High School in 1983, her journey to Oz began at a recent Little People of America convention in northern Ohio.
“Everybody’s my size,” she said. “And everybody walks the same way I do.”
While at the convention, attendees made audition videos for the new “Oz” movie. All she had to do was say her name, age and something interesting about her.
“Sam Raimi viewed all the videos and hand-picked us all,” Mason said.
She described the production as the experience of a lifetime — particularly because she’s such a fan of Raimi’s 1981 cult classic “The Evil Dead.”
“I’m OK if this is all I do in my lifetime,” Mason said.
If history proves anything, though, it’s unlikely we’ve seen the last of Mason on the screen.
She played an elf in “A Mom for Christmas,” a 1990 TV movie starring Olivia Newton-John. She even delivered a line.
“And they changed my voice and made it really high pitched,” Mason said, still somewhat mortified.
In 2008, Mason reprised her role as an elf in commercials for Cincinnati Bell opposite Nick Lachey as “St. Nick.”
The first bit of screen work she did, however, didn’t make it onto the screen. In the late 1980s, while attending college in Chicago, where she majored in fashion design, Mason got to stand in for child actress Heather O’Rourke while shots were being set up for “Poltergeist III.”
She and O’Rourke were the same height, she said, and Mason’s work allowed the director to comply with child labor laws.
There have been other offers as well.
“One little person friend of mine wanted me to go on the Howard Stern show,” Mason recalled. “I said no. I’m glad I didn’t.”
Admittedly, Mason would love to do more movie work, but that would mean leaving home — and there’s no place like home.
“Schuler’s is here, Mike and Rosy’s is here, Cassano’s is here,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
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