BACK OVER THE RAINBOW, `OZ' MUNCHKINS REUNITE.

Byline: Todd S. Purdum The New York Times

She steps off the bus in her dirndl dress, flowerpot hat and flame-red fingernail polish, ready to greet her fans. She takes a seat at the end of a long table, the better to pose for the pictures she knows will come. She has a pint-sized place in Hollywood history, and she's proud to say so.

Today, Margaret Pellegrini is a 74-year-old great-grandmother from suburban Phoenix. But 59 years ago this month, as a 3-foot-4-inch teen-ager known as Popcorn, she arrived at the Culver Hotel in Culver City to take a job at the big white MGM Studios just down the street, playing one of the 120 or so Munchkins in ``The Wizard of Oz.''

``It was exciting to be around so many little people,'' said Pellegrini, who played one of the Munchkin sleepyheads (``Rub your eyes/Get out of bed/Let them know the Wicked Witch is dead!'') who greeted Judy Garland's Dorothy. ``I was from a small town in Alabama, and I had never seen so many before.''

Recently, Pellegrini and five of her fellow Munchkins converged once more on the lobby of the Culver Hotel, where many of them stayed during their six weeks of rehearsals and filming in the fall of 1938, for a three-day ``Munchkin Rendezvous'' of fans and collectors sponsored by a St. Louis mail-order memorabilia business called Beyond the Rainbow. The hardiest of 14 surviving Munchkins from around the country, they are the last living links to a beloved movie whose big stars are all dead.

No matter that the old MGM sound stages now belong to Sony, or that David O. Selznick's former studios just across the way no longer rumble with the cannons of ``Gone With the Wind.'' No matter that the Culver Hotel is no longer the kind of place where Joan Crawford once lived but is scrambling to reopen after a string of failed owners and attempts at renovation. No matter that most of these Munchkins are pushing 80. When the old gang gathered again to sign $5 autographs, there was a poignant magic in the air.

``The opportunities are not going to be here much longer,'' said Stephen Cox, who wrote ``The Munchkins of Oz,'' (Cumberland House, 1996) after setting out in 1988 to record the stories of as many of the Munchkins as he could find on the eve of the film's 50th anniversary. ``These people are getting older; it's like Titanic survivors.''

For Mickey Carroll, a 78-year-old former vaudevillian who played a Munchkin soldier and one of the fiddlers who sent Dorothy skipping down the yellow brick road, ``it's a living fantasy.'' Now retired from running his family's tombstone-carving business in St. Louis, he is a regular at Munchkin reunions around the country and would not have missed this one for the world.

``This picture,'' Carroll said, ``is loved by millions.''

The roughly 120 midgets collected for the movie, many of them from the celebrated troupe of Leo Singer, the Austrian impresario billed in the credits, probably amounted to the largest such gathering ever assembled, and one unlikely ever to be equaled, in part because of advances in medical treatment that have made midgets extremely rare.

Unlike dwarfs, whose small stature is often caused by defective cartilage or bone growth and is usually genetically transferred, midgets' bodies are proportionately correct miniatures caused by a malfunction of the pituitary gland during gestation, but this later can be corrected with hormonal treatments.

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Photo: Posing with two fans, Margaret Pellegrini, right, who played one of the 120 or so Munchkins in ``The Wizard of Oz,'' was one of the 1939 film's surviving performers to reunite in Culver City recently.

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