BUGS BUNNY INSPIRED MY HOLLYWOOD CAREER By Christian Benjamin Seaborn © 2024 Christian Benjamin Seaborn

I had wanted to be an actor or some kind of an entertainer ever since I had been nine-years-old and got to sing Hello, Dolly with Louis Armstrong when he had come to my hometown of Portland, Oregon.

A year later, I had made my acting debut, singing one line (in Italian, no less) in the Fall production of the Portland Opera Association’s production of LaBoheme. That, in turn, led to my playing the lead in the City of Portland’s Christmas production of the play The Elves and the Shoemaker.

This acting stuff had taken a hold of me.

I loved the business of entertainment and wanted to do it as a profession. The choices boiled down to one of two: either go to New York to try to work on Broadway in live theater or go to Los Angeles to try to work in film and television in Hollywood. I opted to go south to LA.

I arrived in LA in July of 1976 at the age of nineteen and a solid desire to make this work. Even though I knew very little about how to do it. My only previous adventure to southern California had been when I had come down, alone, at the age of 14 to find out what all of this show business stuff was about.

My mother, an attorney in Portland, had no background in the entertainment business. She was trying to figure out who she might turn to for advice for her son who wanted a career in entertainment.

Decades earlier she had known Mel Blanc when they had both lived in Portland as youngsters. His mother, Eva Blank (Mel changed the last letter of his last name from a “k” to a “c”) and my mother’s mother, Henrietta Hitchman, had been close personal friends. Given the eight-year age difference between them, Mel and my mother were not like close friends as kids. Yet, through the friendship of their mothers, Mel and my mother saw each other semi-frequently. Frequently enough that when she called him some thirty years later he knew exactly who Nora Hitchman (my mother) was.

During those thirty years, Mel Blank (now Mel Blanc) had gone on to become likely the most famous cartoon voice creator who, to this day, has ever lived. Among the most famous of his over 300 creations was the pinnacle voice of his career, Bugs Bunny with the now classic, if not iconic, phrase: “What’s up, doc?”

With my trip to LA in 1971 when I was fourteen, mom had reached out to Mel Blanc. Remembering without a moment of hesitation who this Nora (Hitchman) Seaborn person was, graciously he told my mom he would be happy to meet with me and give me his insights into how Hollywood and the business of show business worked.

I am sure that Mel likely had a wealth of great knowledge to share with me when I met him at his office that summer of 1971. Unfortunately, he had me completely distracted from the moment I had walked into his office on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Ushering me into his Hollywood office on Sunset Boulevard (blocks from 6385 Hollywood Boulevard where Mel has his Star as a part of the Hollywood Walk of Fame), it was immediately impossible not to notice what was behind his desk chair. It was an eight-foot-tall statue of Bug Bunny.

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“Why,” I asked with the wonderment of a fourteen-year-old, “do you have a statue of Bug Bunny behind your desk.”

“Oh, him,” Mel said (saying that I should call him by his first name even though I was a kid and had just met him). “I keep him there to remind me who is paying the bills.”

The master of cartoon voices spent about an hour with me, telling me all about the ins and outs of how Hollywood worked. I am sure he must have had had valuable insights to share with me. After all, he had, by that point, been a Hollywood professional for close to, if not exceeding, forty years.

And yet, I remembered little of it ten minutes after I had walked out his office door.

With every sentence he said, with every other word he spoke, there were tinges of some of his most famous voices. One second it would be a bit of Bugs Bunny (albeit not saying “What’s up, doc?”). Then a bit of Barney Rubble. Then a bit of Porky Pig. To a fourteen-year-old, it was like being in a spell.

I was talking, one-on-one, with all of the great cartoon characters I and millions of kids had grown up on in the 1950 and the 1960s.

No idea what pearls of wisdom he shared with me that I might have found useful to my Hollywood career when I would return five years later at the age of nineteen. And yet, in that hour Mel had not only had me enthralled but inspired by the idea that being a professional entertainer could not only be a good profession, but a fun one at the same time.

Back in southern California in the summer of 1976, I was kind of on my own to pursue my dreams of the previous ten years.

I had, thanks to a letter of advice from movie star Bing Crosby when I had been fifteen-years-old, arrived in LA with a solid resume of theater credits from the Pacific Northwest.

Crosby had originally hailed from Washington State. Along the way, back in the 1920s, he had crossed paths with my paternal grandparents, Charles and Mary Helen Seaborn.

When my grandmother had been moved into a nursing home from her home in Seattle, my dad had sent down to our home in Portland a whole bunch of sheet music that my grandmother had because I was a piano player, since the age of six. A number of these, dating to the 1920s and the 1930s, had been signed, autographed by Bing Crosby to Charles and Mary Helen Seaborn.

My dad had never mentioned this fact that long before Crosby would become the famous move star that he would become, he had come to parties at the home of my grandparents.

My mother was a lawyer by profession. She had no background in the entertainment business. Yet she wanted to help her younger son, me, with his quest to become a professional in the entertainment arena. She wrote Bing Crosby, explaining that decades earlier he had been friends with her father and mother-in-law. She explained about my interests and asked if he could, would provide any advice.

He wrote her a nice letter back in 1972 explaining that he was basically retired. But his advice was that her son (me) should do as much theater (and television and film, if possible) in Oregon to, in essence, put a resume together before I would ever set foot in the LA city limits.
I took Mr. Crosby’s advice to heart.

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I got myself involved in any and every theater production I could get myself involved in. If I could not get an acting part in a production, then I was stage managing. Or directing, or assistant directing. Or doing props or lights. I made myself as well-rounded in theater as I could. By the time I had completed my one year at the Theater Department at the University of Portland (where, as a freshman, I was enrolled in senior and graduate level courses because of my vast theater background and my university counselor did not know what else to do with me), I had compiled a resume of some eighteen theater productions between when I had started at age 10 and when I left Portland for Hollywood at age 19.

Arriving in LA in July of 1976 the only things I knew about professional show biz was (a) I needed headshots; (b) I needed an agent and (c) I needed to be a member of the Screen Actors Guild union.

Through the industry trade paper, Drama-Logue, I found a photographer I could afford. Roger Bare was his name.

“You need an agent,” Roger said to me as he took headshots inside his small studio inside his small home.

This much I already knew.

“If you sign me on as your manager, I will get you an agent,” Roger said, continuing to snap away.

Agents, I had already learned, take 10 percent of what you earn while you are signed with them. Roger was offering me his management skills (of which I knew nothing about) also for 10 percent. I looked at it this way. I knew an agent was mandatory. You do not work in Hollywood without representation. I figured that if Roger could land me an agent this would be a good thing. I also looked at the money this way: without an agent I was making 100 percent of nothing. If I took on Roger and then the agent he was saying he could get me signed with, I might then be making 80 percent of something. Eighty percent of something seemed far better to be than my bumbling around on my own making one hundred percent of nothing. So I signed what appeared to be a standard form management contract with this Roger Bare.

True to his word, less than a week later he and I were walking into the offices of the Granite Agency.

Frieda Granite had been a Hollywood agent for over 35-years. Her Granite Agency had been a small agency. Basically, her, her late husband and their daughter, Susan. When we walked in the office was this large, long room. At the far end sat this older Jewish woman at her desk chomping on a cigar. Lining the two long walls were the headshots of the hundred or so clients that she represented.

We crossed over the 60-year-old cigar chomping, heavy-set, gray-haired woman.

“Frieda,” Roger began as we sat down in the two chairs on the opposite side of her desk, “this is the young man I was telling you about, Christian Seaborn. He’s just moved here from Portland, Oregon.”

Proudly, I handed her my resume of all those shows I had done in Portland.

She did not even look at it. Just put her on her desk, looked at me a second (literally a second) and said: “I’m not interested. Goodbye.”

I was confused. She had not even talked to me. Had not bothered to look at my resume. She was just dismissing me. I stood up. All 4’9” of me and I said:

“How dare you.”

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This immediately caught both her and Roger off-guard. Took them both by surprise.

“I made an appointment in my day to come over and meet you. You have not heard a word from me. You have not even bothered to look at my resume. How dare you.”

Then there was a change in her demeanor. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if she was going to throw me out or what. Instead, then she actually picked up the resume and at least read it.

“Are you always this aggressive?” she asked.

“I can be,” I said.

“Good. I like aggressiveness. It’s a good character trait. Especially in this business.”

She reached in the drawer of her desk and pulled out a document.

“This,” she said, “is a standard agency contract. Sign it, date it and don’t ever talk to me like that again.”

“You’re taking me on as a client?” I asked, taking the contract.

“Anybody with that kind of aggressiveness I would be stupid not to represent. Just sign it and get out. I’ve got a busy day. You are unique. Your size is unique. I’ll see what I can do.”

I figured I’d better sign it, shut up and get out before she might change her mind.

Now I had headshots, an agent and a manager. All within less than a week of being in town. Now all I needed was my Screen Actors Guild membership and jobs. Things were looking good.

A week later, Roger called me.

“Frieda,” he began, “has a job for you. Not an acting job, but a job working for her.”

Roger then explained to me how Hollywood works.

The studio casting directors put out daily notices to the agents, letting them know what roles are being cast. The agencies then submit the headshots and resumes of the talent they think should be auditioned. The agencies made these daily submissions by couriers. In the case of the Granite Agency, it had been Frieda’s late husband who had delivered the submissions.

The job she was offering me was to take her husband’s place. Be the courier for the agency.

“It really won’t be more than gas money for your car,” Roger continued. “But the big part of this is that you, when you are delivering the submissions, will get to meet all the casting directors and their assistants. You will always have your own picture and resume with you. If any of the casting directors ask if you are an actor, you will, of course, say yes and then hand them your picture and resume.”

Roger thought it was a brilliant idea by Frieda. And so did I.

The next day I was running all over LA. Suddenly I had access to Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal, Columbia, CBS, NBC, ABC. I could get on all the studio and network properties (the “lots” as they are referred to in the business). Other actors, I would learn, would dream and connive how to get on the lots. I now could.

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It was, indeed, a stroke of genius by Frieda. She had not been a successful Hollywood agent without putting the pieces together.

One of the first, if not the first, office I walked into was at CBS in Studio City. I was making a delivery to a casting director named Lori Openden who worked for MTM Enterprises. The company founded by famed television actress and producer Mary Tyler Moore and her husband, Grant Tinker.

I have to admit, that first stop I was nervous. I had visions of studio security guards stopping me at the front gate demanding to know why I was trying to get on the lots.

“They will stop you. They will ask you,” Frieda said when I had gone to her office to pick up the day’s submissions. “You just tell them you have deliveries from the Granite Agency for whomever the delivery is for. Simple as that.”

Okay, I thought. Who was I to argue. Two weeks in town and this was all still new to me. New and exciting.

Armed with my Thomas Guide to figure out how to get around town (the studios are spread out all over and I was going all over), I arrived at the CBS Studio Center lot. Parked my car and eyed the security guard in the booth whose job it was to keep people out who didn’t belong.

“Can I help you?” the younger looking security guard asked me with cautious eyes.

“Yes. Hi. Hello,” I said. “My name is Christian Seaborn. I have a delivery for…” I looked at the envelope Frieda had given me with the pictures and resumes for the submissions. “For Lori Openden.”

In my other hand I had another envelope with my picture and resume. Just in case.

“Sign in here,” the guard said. I did and he pointed me to the single-story building adjacent to the security shack where I would find this Lori Openden.

Given that is was the middle of a usual hot summer in LA, the casting office door was wide open at 9 am. So I just walked in. There were a couple of people sitting in waiting chairs. Actors, I assumed. Perhaps waiting to audition. Or whatever.

At the desk was a young woman whom I approached.

“Can I help you?” she asked politely.

“I have submissions. For Lori Openden. From the Granite Agency.”

“Oh, yes,” the woman said. “I can take those.”

I handed the envelope to her. Making sure not to confuse it with the envelope that had my headshot and resume in it. And I started to turn to leave.

“Hello.”

I had been so focused on this, my first delivery and actually being on the lot of the CBS Television Network, I had not even seen the woman leaning down at a filing cabinet behind the woman I had been talking to her.

“Hi,” I said.

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“I’m Lori. Lori Openden.”

Ah. I was meeting my first casting director. A person who had the power to open doors for me.

Lori Openden was a younger woman. About mid-twenties. Tall with short brown hair. Quite attractive actually. She was the casting director for the MTM series Rhoda which starred Valarie Harper and had been a spin-off series from the original Mary Tyler Moore Show.

“I was just wondering if you are an actor,” Lori Openden asked me.

“I am,” I said.

“Do you have a picture and resume? You have a pretty unique look.”

“I do,” I said, holding out the other envelope to her. This was working just like Frieda had hoped it would. And on my very first casting director. Inside, I was excited and thrilled. Outside, I was trying to appear calm, cool and professional. After all, I thought, it is not just about me, but I am also there representing Frieda and the Granite Agency.

Lori opened the envelope and took out my picture and briefly flipped it over to scan my resume. (The procedure in Hollywood is to stable one’s resume to the backside of one’s headshot. That way they are always kept together.)

“I don’t have anything right now that would be right for you,” Lori said. “But I keep a file of people who I think have interesting looks. And you have an interesting look. Thank you. Have a nice day.”

Okay. That was it. Time to leave. But I had made my first contact with a bona-fide casting director. Of course, at that moment I had no idea that, in huge and significant ways, Lori Openden would (almost) single-handedly be responsible for my having the career I would have as a Hollywood actor.

For the next several days I continued to run the agency’s submissions around town. Meeting a few more casting directors along the way.

As I did I felt I needed to do something eye-catching, something memorable to keep me in these people’s minds. The fact that I was 4’9” tall alone would have been doing this. Except I never viewed my short stature as something memorable.

I had always been a huge fan of the Peanuts comics strip. Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Snoopy. A huge fan. (I had once even met the creator, Charles M. Schultz.) Hallmark stores always made special Peanuts greeting cards for all the holidays. Both the well-known ones and the not so major holidays. My marketing PR idea was that for each holiday where there was a Peanuts card, I would send each of the casting directors I was meeting a Peanuts card (wishing them Happy Halloween, Merry Christmas or whatever it was) and inside I would include a little card with my picture on it and that I was represented by the Granite Agency.

In October of 1976 out of the blue I got a call. From Lori Openden. I did not then realize that this, in and of itself, was pretty special. Casting directors normally do not call talent directly. It is always through your agents that contact is made. Nonetheless, here was Lori Openden calling me. Directly.

“Would you be interested,” she began after having identified herself, “in being on an episode of Rhoda?”

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Let’s see. I had been dreaming of being a professional actor on television for a decade. Just about half my life. Would I be interested?

“Absolutely,” I said. Trying to still sound professional.

“We have a unique part. It’s unique in that it is a non-speaking part. It’s like a silent home movie sequence where you would be playing Valarie’s high school prom date. (Valarie Harper. The star of Rhoda.) It’s referred to as a Featured Role meaning it will get you your membership into the Screen Actors Guild.”

I was beyond excited. It was all happening. It was all coming together. Ok. No lines. But a featured role on one of CBS’ hit shows.

Lori told me the day and time I should be at CBS. The same lot in Studio City where her office was Rhoda was filmed at.

“There is one catch, however,” she said.

Suddenly, I felt a pang of anxiety take hold. What could be the catch?

“Your holiday Peanuts cards were a really cute idea,” Lori said. “I’ve never seen someone do something like that before. But I get it. Believe me, you will now, and likely forever, be difficult for me to forget. So please, quit sending them to me. Take me off your list.”

She said it with sort of a laugh. Nonetheless, after finishing the call with her, I instantly crossed her name off my still growing list of casting directors who had been getting my “calling card”.

Beyond excited (this was, after all, going to be my debut performance on national television), I arrived at the CBS Studio Center lot at the appointed time of ten-thirty in the morning. After all the times I had been to this lot delivering the submissions for Frieda, the guard now knew me.

“More submissions?” the guard asked me as I approached.

“Nope,” I said with a smile. “This time I am going to be on one of the shows. Rhoda.”

“Well, it’s about time. After all the times you’ve been over here. Good luck.”

I still had to sign in on the clipboard and did. Then I turned back to the guard.

“I have no idea where I am going.”

“Stage 14,” the guard said, pointing me in the direction.

As I approached the 35-foot-high Stage 14 there was nobody around yet one of the huge doors was open. So, I just walked in.

Except for a single standing light in the middle of the sound stage, the huge stage was completely dark. Still I could make out the sets that I had seen from watching Rhoda on tv.

“Can I help you?” a woman asked from behind me. She was holding a clipboard.

“Yes. Hi,” I said to the professionally dressed woman I was face-to-face with. “I’m here to do a home movie sequence.”

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She looked at the papers on her clipboard.

“Oh, yes. You must be Christian Seaborn.”

“I am.”

“Well, go down this way, behind the sets. You’ll find wardrobe and make-up. And welcome to MTM.”

I had no idea who this person was but right from the get-go, the very first MTM employee I met (besides Lori Openden), they were friendly people. I felt at home without knowing all that was to come.

In the wardrobe area I was fitted with a white tux, white shirt, black pants, red tie and a red cummerbund that was nearly as big as my little chest.

“Yes,” the wardrobe person said with a smile while surveying her work, “that should do nicely. You look…you look…” She started laughing. “Excuse me. But you look ridiculous. Just like you should. Now off to make-up. Next door.”

I started to leave.

“Oh, wait. The last piece.”

I turned back. In her hands she had a large pair of black glasses which she placed on my head.

“Perfect. Now you look beyond ridiculous. Have fun.”

The make-up man was laughing – at me – the moment I walked in.

“Have a seat.”

I did.

He brushed my dark brown hair straight back to totally expose my forehead. He then matted it down with a heavy dose of hairspray. And finished off with some make-up for my face.

“Stand-up”

I did. He looked over the full look before breaking out into laughter.

He then turned me around to face the mirror.

I did look completely and utterly ridiculous.

Back out on the sound stage, which was now lit for the shooting, the woman whom I had originally met was joined by two men, the cinematographer and the director. And then two of the stars of Rhoda joined us. Nancy Walker, who played Rhoda’s mother, and Valarie Harper, who played Rhoda.

“You look utterly ridiculous,” Nancy Walker said to me. “It’s perfect.”

Then putting Valarie and me side-by-side and it became hilarious. They had us dance around. If you could call it that, with Valarie towering above me. Then they had Nancy turn me around, to take my glasses off and clean them, and, kind of spur of the moment (my own idea) I tried dancing with Nancy. I don’t think Nancy liked my ad-lib attempt (she was old school…do what the director tells you). But the director liked it and kept it in.

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In total, it took less than ten minutes to shoot.

“Wait. Please.”

An MTM crew member stopped everything.

“This is hilarious,” the crew member said. “Valarie. Would you mind waiting? Just a second. So, I can grab my camera and get a picture of the two of you together.”

“Of course not,” Valarie said without any hint that it was an imposition on her.

Once again, I was struck by the “family” feel. Here some MTM crew member was asking the big star of the show if she would wait a second so he could grab his camera and take a picture. And she had been more than gracious to do so. No hint of an attitude of “I am the star here”.

The crew member quickly returned with his Polaroid camera, asked Valarie and me to stand side-by-side and shot the picture.

“Take one more,” Valarie said good naturedly. “Just to make sure you get a good one.”

He did and I was done. I went to wardrobe, got into my own clothes and left the lot. I had filmed my first – and hopefully not my last – national television appearance. Even if it was going to be my first and last, it would be an experience I would never forget.

Lori Openden would continue to get me work.

Late in the fall of 1978 Lori again called me directly at home.

After a few quick pleasantries (it had been a year since the Rhoda episode), Lori got down to the point:

“We’ve got a problem,” she said. “We have a new show. It’s called WKRP In Cincinnati. The episode we are shooting next week has a guest star child actor. We had an adult stand-in lined up to work it, but he had to back out due to another commitment. And I thought of you.”
(By law, kids can only work so many hours a day on television and film sets. Rather than waste the valuable time of the kids setting camera angles and such, a short adult is hired to “stand-in” for the child performer.)

On one hand, I had heard of short actors getting a reputation for only doing stand-in work and then never getting acting jobs. That I did not want. On the other hand, Lori had given me my start. Had gotten me my coveted membership into the Screen Actors Guild. I was torn between my future and a sense of loyalty to her.

“I understand,” she said. “But it will pay you eight hundred dollars for what amounts to like three days of work. Plus, if you go in and do the stand-in work like it is your part, you will get exposure to the producers and writers of the show.”

She was desperate. MTM was desperate. Even though I, at twenty-years-old, was never really going to play this part of a ten-year-old, it made sense to me to do it. On a number of fronts.

“It’s you. It’s you,” a voice came down from the rafters on Sound Stage Number Two where WKRP was filmed.

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In a moment an MTM crew member came running up to me with something in his hand that I could not make out.

“You got out of there so fast. I knew that eventually someone like you would come back to us. The special people always do. I’ve been carrying this around with me in my lunch pail. Waiting for you to come back.”

In his hand he was holding the Polaroid picture he had shot of Valarie Harper and me on Rhoda and handed it to me. I was deeply touched.\

Lori’s thought worked.

At the end of my three days of work as the WKRP stand-in a man whom I had not been introduced to came up to me.

“I just want to thank you for coming in and helping us. We were really in a bind. I really liked the way you read the lines. I want to see more of you here at WKRP.”

He started to turn away and then turned back.

“I never introduced myself. My name is Hugh Wilson. I am the Creator and Executive Producer of WKRP.”

True to his word, in Season 2 of WKRP Hugh and WKRP Head Writer, Dan Gunzelman, created a part just for me to play on an episode of the show. WKRP diminutive lawyer, Elgar Neese. The episode originally aired in November of 1979.

Due to family problems back in Portland, my career in the national television industry took a longer than I ever anticipated hiatus of nearly twenty years. But that start with Rhoda, WKRP In Cincinnati and the MTM company are memories I have and always will cherish. It was a special and unique entertainment company to work for and I remain proud of my association with them.

I will never forget the wonderful people at MTM nor my afternoon with Mel Blanc and, staring down at me, 8’ tall Bugs Bunny.