Citizen Mason

Few journalists have gained the prestigious awards earned by Eric Mason as an Oregon reporter over his span of 20+ years, now he's going in new directions as a private investigator and aspiring film producer.

Eric Mason

(SALEM) - One can make the argument that Salem’s Eric Mason has conquered the small screen. The former journalist has a cornucopia of hardware to back up the claim with a pair of Emmy Awards and no less than a handful of Edward R. Murrow Awards for his quality reportage in the area of investigative reporting.

He also has a legion of Associated Press Awards for investigative journalism, the number of plaques and certificates rivaling the number of extras in a Cecil B. DeMille film.

To satiate an ongoing urge to uncover things, Mason has reinvented himself as both a private investigator for members of the legal community and is discovering a desire to unveil stories vis-à-vis the big screen by writing, directing and producing film shorts. His first project titled The Question spanning 14 minutes, 50 seconds garnered the Best Narrative Film at the Salem’s Elsinore Film Festival in 2005.

At present, Mason is trying to find temporary residence for his second effort The Red Toothbrush that debuted at the recent Eugene Film Festival to good reviews.

He is also in the process of seeking funding for a far lengthier docudrama chronicling the genesis. A trailer has already been shot with hopes that an arts patron, The History Channel or other network cable program can help jumpstart funding for a 90 minute project that has an estimated What this writer finds impressive in Mason ’s film work and screenwriting is an ability to encapsulate a complete story in a few precious minutes that are still filled with plot twists, but more importantly have you feeling for and rooting for his characters, especially the stuttering gas station who wants to take a customer to a local dance.

Mason ’s first efforts have been shot on location in the Mid Willamette Valley. One was shot entirely in Salem and the house where the action takes place is located a stone’s throw from the Governor ’s Mansion on Fairmont Hill.

If all this weren’t enough, Mason is also teaming up with Portland music producer David Fuller on several music videos including rapper F.D.(Fidel) whose “searing” social commentary Mason suggests is intelligent and hopefully pique one ’s consciousness as well as raise an eyebrow or two.

Commenting on his own writing and directorial journey Mason is all business: “I want to tell stories that have never been told. I want to take people places they have never been. I want to reveal a world they may have not ever known was there.”

On Handel’s Messiah, Mason pays reverence to a man as well as a composer: “…Very few know the real story on how down and out he was when he writes this oratorio in twenty-four days in 1741. Here is August seventeenth, forty-one, he is on his last legs; he ’s fifty-six years old, several years before that he suffered a stroke, his contemporaries thought he was washed up and yet he comes up with perhaps what is the most important piece of music ever written …”

To hear Mason talk about it and his desire to share the story through filmmaking, one realizes he, too, is following some muse.